The Lodger

Mr and Mrs Bunting, former servants, are close to ruin in their dreary London lodging house when a polite, nervous gentleman calling himself Mr Sleuth takes their rooms and pays well in advance. He reads the Bible, hates drink, conducts strange experiments with a gas ring and goes out alone late at night. At the same time, a murderer who signs himself 'The Avenger' is killing women in the fog, and Mrs Bunting, reading every newspaper report, begins to fear the truth about her lodger, while her stepdaughter is courted by a young detective working on the case.

Marie Belloc Lowndes (1868–1947), the sister of the writer Hilaire Belloc, based the novel on the Jack the Ripper murders and published it in 1913. Its power lies in suspense and psychology rather than detection, and Alfred Hitchcock made it into his first great thriller in 1927. Compare Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.