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 Hitchcock's 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.