MARIA BELLOC LOWNDES – The Lodger.

Methuen, UK, hardcover, 1913. Scribner, US, hc, 1913. Reprinted many times in both hardcover and soft, including: Readers Library, UK, hc, 1927 [1st UK Photoplay edition]; Pocket 43, US, pb, 1940. (Both shown.)

   I like to spend Octobers reading spooky stories and watching old monster movies, and I kicked off a past one with a good’un, Maria Belloc Lowndes’ 1913 novel, The Lodger.

   The mystery of Jack the Ripper was a generation old when this was written, and it’s been done to death ever since, but Lowndes brought a sensitivity and feeling to it I found quite surprising.

   The story is told primarily from the point of view of a landlady in dire straits who lets her upstairs apartment out to a well-paying gentleman. Her lodger seems to spend his days studying the Bible, and his rare evening excursions are invariably followed by news of another ’orrible murder.

   All pretty standard so far, but Lowndes puts some real work into the Landlady’s reaction to all this: the more convinced she becomes that her lodger is a mad killer, the more she pities his torment and remembers the debt she owes him for saving her family from the Poor House.

   Meanwhile, the Police blunder about, her loving husband worries over her nerves, and her step-daughter becomes the innocent cause of … well that might be giving something away. Suffice it to say that The Lodger is old-fashioned in spots but never seems dated, and it has the kind of atmosphere and characterization that reward reading.

   Incidentally, The Lodger has been filmed several times, including once as a silent film by Alfred Hitchcock, considerably changed, and more faithfully by 20th Century-Fox in 1944.

   The Fox film is artfully done, and well-acted, if rather stodgy, but conveys none of the feeling of Lowndes book. Laird Cregar delivers an intense, sotto-voce performance, as opposed to nominal hero George Sanders, who looks as if he might die of Boredom (which he did, years later).

   The same script was re-shot by Fox in 1954 [as Man in the Attic] to no great effect, with flat direction from Hugo Fregonese and a surprisingly listless performance from Jack Palance.