(Note: As previously indicated, the Lowndes books I have read are mostly available on Gutenberg and/or Amazon. In past reviews of early 20th century books, I have not made any effort to offer content warnings, on the assumption that anybody reading these reviews knows better than to expect present-day attitudes on certain topics from books of this timeframe. I am continuing with that assumption here.)

The second-most famous thing Lowndes did, (the most famous being her novel The Lodger), was to write a novel called The Lonely House, in which a sheltered, financially prosperous young Englishwoman fetches up in Monaco, only to be caught up in a love triangle and menaced by people who are after her money, although she has trouble grasping their bad intentions.

Here’s the thing: Lowndes also wrote a somewhat similar book called A Chink in the Armor, in which a sheltered, financially prosperous young Englishwoman fetches up in a French casino town, only to be caught up in a love triangle and menaced by people who are after her money, although she has trouble grasping their bad intentions.

Broadly speaking, Armor seems to me to be the better of the two books on all points. The bad guys are marginally less obvious, partly because there are a couple of other characters who could conceivably be the baddies, and partly because (unlike The Lonely House) the baddies aren’t living cheek and jowl with the heroine in a relatively small house out in the sticks(1). The heroine, in turn, seems like less of an idiot and more of a personality. Unlike her counterpart in Lonely House, she rebels in mild ways against people trying to tell her what to do. Her moment of pluckiness at the climax (bluffing the bad guys long enough to get rescued) is smaller than the one in Lonely House but feels earned rather than accidental.(1.5)

The love triangle is more fleshed out in Armor and the men involved are flawed in more interesting ways than their counterparts in Lonely House. Both books involve quasi-hauntings, along the lines of that moment in Agatha Christie’s Mystery of the Blue Train, where the sheltered, prosperous Englishwoman senses the presence of the murder victim who seems to be trying to tell her something. But even the ghost(s) are more sympathetic in Armor than in Lonely House. If you would like an old-timey romantic suspense novel along the lines of the “human interest” parts of Blue Train(2), Chink in the Armor is pretty decent as these things go, and The Lonely House is barely adequate.

So, why is the The Lonely House the famous one? Two words: Hercule Popeau. He’s an older Frenchman, comically rotund, particular about his food and his comfort, prone to noticing people’s footwear, and very gallant in a platonic way to pretty young women, whom he asks to call him “Papa Popeau.” Need I add that The Lonely House was published in 1920, the same year as Hercule Poirot’s debut in The Mysterious Affair at Styles?

Lowndes apparently accused Christie of plagiarism, but without knowing the full developmental history of The Lonely House and the short stories featuring Popeau, it’s hard to tell whether she had any justification for this. It is comparatively easy to find out online that Styles was composed in 1916 and serialized in February-March 1920 before being published later that year in book form, but equivalent composition/serialization information for The Lonely House is not so easy to find.

So far as I can tell, no one has ever seriously suggested that Lowndes plagiarized Christie, so we are left with one of those weird cases of two people spontaneously coming up with similar concepts and proceeding to execute them differently because of their skill sets: Popeau being a vague character “sketch” like many of Lowndes’s creations, and Poirot being much more vivid and highly detailed because that was one of Christie’s strengths. Possibly fussy but gallant older French-speaking men were a “trope” so to speak at the time and only Poirot and Popeau have survived of all their fictional tribe. Oddly enough, there are moments that almost look like Christie homaging Popeau after the initial conflict had died down. The 1940 novel One, Two Buckle My Shoe requires Poirot to notice people’s footwear in a way that had come up at least once with Popeau in The Lonely House, and in at least one of the other novels (3), Poirot asks a young woman to come to “Papa Poirot” when she is in trouble.

There are a few more Lowndes works that ought to be considered alongside Chink in the Armor and The Lonely House. The End of Her Honeymoon deals with a sheltered young Englishwoman (yes, I know) whose husband vanishes overnight without a trace from a Parisian hotel. It’s arguably a better mystery than the two Lowndes novels we’ve just been discussing, in the sense that the first part of the book continuously lays down well-disguised clues to the husband’s fate, but it’s a bad detective story, in the sense that the investigation by the heroine and her wealthy American allies peters out and they only find out the truth by accident a year or more after the main events. Contains fairly vivid descriptions of the Paris morgue and the Paris police (who were seen in this era as a ruthless but efficient lot), but weak on characterization.

Also interesting for the Paris setting and ruthless Parisian police is To the Last Farthing, an otherwise idiotic short story about an American diplomat trying (for reasons of “honor”) to conceal the fact that the (married) woman he was in love with died of natural causes on a train when the two of them were en route to finally consummate their relationship. A Citizen of Calais is another short story, which portrays a French “coverup” similar to the ones going on in Honeymoon and Farthing, with some very starchy, old-fashioned French people similar to the ones in Armor or John Dickson Carr’s Murder at the Waxworks. The Red Cross Barge, which isn’t a full novel but feels longer than the two stories discussed above, is set during WWI, and features the world’s most oblivious and idealistic German surgeon slowly discovering the horrors of war in a French town occupied by the Germans. This is mostly interesting for the French setting and a genuinely powerful portrayal of how the town unravels in process of being repeatedly captured by both sides. In another weird naming coincidence, the surgeon is named Max Keller, which, to people my age, tends to invoke mental images of Timothy Van Patten driving around in a panel van with Lee Van Cleef riding shotgun.

(1) In both books, the shady people are living cheaply on the outskirts of the casino town.

(1.5) The one in Lonely House basically has the heroine playing Lassie to her boyfriend’s Timmy-in-the-well situation, with a French detective doing the actual rescuing of Timmy/the boyfriend.

(2) *not* the mystery itself, which is one of those time-shifted alibi things Christie specialized in, and very few writers could execute at all well.

(3) I think, specifically, the 1941 novel Evil Under the Sun has this going on.