The Lodger

A serial killer calling himself The Avenger is prowling the streets of London. But Mr. and Mrs. Bunting has things of a more everyday nature to worry about. Facing the prospect of hard times they are happy when a gentleman rents the upstairs rooms in their home. Soon however they find reasons to believe that this stranger with his nightly walks and religious rants is in fact The Avenger whose preys are prostitutes.This crime novel from 1913 a classic of the first water is a retelling of the killing spree conducted by Jack the Ripper. It was the foundation for Alfred Hitchcocks first masterpiece The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) and have been adapted several other times for movies theater TV and radio.The English-French author Marie Belloc Lowndes (1868-1947) became world-famous with her many elegant novels and stories in the genre of psychological thrillers an early queen of crime. She was inspired to write The Lodger by a supposedly real story about a couple owners of a lodging house who believed that one of their guests was Jack the Ripper. It had previously been told by the psychiatrist and amateur detective Dr. L. Forbes Winslow (1844-1913) in an article in New York Herald Tribune 1889 and also by the painter Walter Sickert (1860-1942). Sickert was told by his landlord and landlady an elderly couple that his rooms in Camden had been rented before him by someone they thought was Jack the Ripper. However the stories by Winslow and Sickert are not connected and it is possible that they originated from an urban myth.