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Marie Belloc Lowndes’ The Lodger has been on my TBR list for a long time, but I tend to avoid horror fiction, and all I really knew about The Lodger was a basic synopsis, that it was based on the story of Jack the Ripper, and that it had been made into a Hitchcock movie.

I don’t feel like I know a lot more about it now.

The central character is Ellen Bunting, a former maid married to a former butler. The Buntings live in a poor but quiet neighborhood in East London, and rent out rooms. Only no one’s wanted to rent their rooms for a while, so they’re on he verge of starvation when the story opens. Then a gentleman arrives, eccentric but respectable-looking, with no luggage and a pile of money, and rents — well, basically all the rooms, so that he will remain the Buntings’ only lodger. He seems weird, but he’s also quiet and well-spoken, and they do desperately need money.

Meanwhile, someone calling himself “The Avenger” has been murdering drunk women (for “drunk women” I read “prostitutes”) all over the East End. As Ellen notes her lodger’s nocturnal trips out of the house, his fixation on all the most misogynist bits of the Bible, and the disappearance of the leather bag he brought to the house with him, she begins to suspect that he’s the Avenger. But she doesn’t know for sure, and she’s also just gone from being too poor to buy food to relative financial security. So while on one hand you want her to go to the police with her suspicions, on the other hand it’s hard to fault her to not being sure, and not wanting to be sure.

And that’s it, really. That’s the book. I mean, there’s also Mr. Bunting, and the suspicions he eventually forms. And there’s the unromantic background romance of their policeman friend Joe Chandler and Daisy, Mr. Bunting’s daughter from his first marriage. And there’s the complete letdown of the ending. But mostly The Lodger is Ellen having lots of suspicions she can’t quite voice and stuff happening to cause her to have more of them.

It’s perfectly serviceable psychological suspense, I guess. I mean, I felt uneasy and slightly apprehensive for most of the time that I was reading, which I think is how you’re supposed to feel when you read about someone possibly being a serial killer. It’s only now that I’ve finished it that I’m feeling kind of meh about it, and I’m inclined to blame the ending. When you’re waiting on some kind of impending awfulness, and then nothing in particular happens, the looming fear seems silly in retrospect. So, it’s hard to tell now, but I think the rest of the book was pretty solid, and I almost recommend it.

There have been a lot of articles and blog posts floating around lately about what to read if you’re into Downton Abbey. One in particular, which talked about Elizabeth von Arnim apropos of one character giving a copy of Elizabeth and Her German Garden to another, made Evangeline at Edwardian Promenade say, “hey, what about Elinor Glyn?” Which, obviously, is the correct response to everything. And then I read it, and thought, “yeah, Elizabeth and her German Garden was popular when it came out in 1898, but would people really be trying to get each other to read a fifteen rear-old(ish) novel by a German author during World War I?” And then we decided that we could probably come up with an excellent list of Edwardian and World War I-era fiction that tied in the Downton Abbey. And so we did.

It’s a pretty casual list, mostly composed of things we came up with off the tops of out heads, a bit of research on Evangeline’s part and a bit of flipping through advertisements on mine, so we’re making no claims to be exhaustive. If you have suggestions for additions to the list, leave a comment.

Marie Belloc Lowndes’ Good Old Anna is a hard book to describe. It’s not exactly a wartime romance, except then it is, and it’s sort of a portrait of growing xenophobia in a cathedral town at the beginning of World War I, except then it’s not. And I don’t know that it ever really becomes a full-fledged spy novel. Basically, there are a lot of different threads, and Lowndes is only mostly successful at deploying them. And I’m okay with that, I think, because all those threads are pretty interesting. Good Old Anna was published in 1915, and it’s very much part of a moment.

Maybe it’s like this: most novels have plots. Some other books have themes. Good Old Anna looks like it has a plot, but really it has a theme, and the theme is Things That Happen to People When World War I Starts.

The person that the most of these things happen to is Mary Otway a widow living in the cathedral town of Witanbury with her barely-grown daughter Rose and her servant Anna, and the first thing that happens to her when war is declared is that her friend and neighbor Miss Forsyth calls her attention the the fact that, in spite of her twenty years in England, Anna is very German, and that maybe Mrs. Otway ought to think about sending her back to the Fatherland. But Mrs. Otway is pretty dependent on Anna, and, being a Germanophile, she’s unconvinced when Miss Forsyth says that xenophobia will soon be on the rise.

Miss Forsyth is right, of course. That’s why naturalized German grocer Manfred Hegner immediately changes his name to Alfred Head. Not that anyone ever forgets that he’s German, or that he bears a strong resemblance to the Kaiser, but perhaps it’s helpful to him when he’s spying on England for Germany. Meanwhile, we get to know Anna a little better and learn that, yeah, she’s very German, and considerably less attached to England than Mrs. Otway believes. Not so much that she’d spy for Germany on purpose, but enough that she’ll happily spy for Germany by accident.

And then there’s the romance. Or rather, romances. The two Otway women have eerily similar ones with friends-turned-lovers who are among the first soldiers to go to Belgium, both of whom are wounded within the first few weeks of the war. The romances also show up the looseness of the plot — what there is of it. The same things are happening to both the mother and the daughter and yet somehow those things seem entirely unrelated. We keep being told how devoted Anna is to Rose, but mostly it hardly feels like they know each other, and that goes double for Rose and her mother. I think Rose and Mrs. Otway having more page time together would have made the entire book a lot more solid. On the other hand, it might also have made it clear that they’re having the exact same romance with different people, so. There’s that.

In a way, though, the scattered feeling works out well, because we get to see how the war affects a bunch of different people, and it makes sense that the war is the only thing they have in common besides living in the same town — or the same book. Usually the characters make or break a book for me,  but here they were forgettable, and it was the play by play of the early days of the war as seen in England that wasn’t. In the end, I think this is a really good book, but not for any of the usual reasons.