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Journalist, suffragist, and best-selling novelist Marie Belloc Lowndes (1868–1947) grew up moving between London and La Celle-St-Cloud, France, the only daughter of French barrister Louis Belloc and British feminist campaigner Bessie Rayner Parkes. At the age of 20, she convinced her mother to settle in London with her so she could pursue a career as a writer. The two met with various potential women mentors for Marie, including Scottish ghost story writer Margaret Oliphant, but all attempted to dissuade her. “Fortunately for me,” she later wrote, “I did not care what the people my mother consulted thought. What made me sad was that I saw she on the whole agreed with them.”

She was, however, introduced to Pall Mall Gazette editor W. T. Stead, who was known for employing women journalists, and became a regular contributor. Her income helped subsidise the education of her younger brother, the writer Hilaire Belloc. After marrying fellow journalist Frederic Lowndes, Belloc Lowndes began writing books. Many of these were crime novels, which combined clever plotting with psychological exploration of their women protagonists, including the book for which she is best known: the first novelisation of Jack the Ripper, The Lodger .

By the time Belloc Lowndes began writing The Lodger in 1910, the unsolved 1888 Whitechapel murders—which took place the year she began working in London—had fuelled 20 years of speculation and written accounts of varying quality, but not a full-length novel. This short story, first published in McClure’s Magazine in 1911, formed the basis for her hugely successful 1913 novel, which was adapted by Hitchcock for his first thriller in 1927. Belloc Lowndes’ decision to tell the story from the perspective of a working-class, middle-aged landlady detective demands that readers look at the case through the eyes of a potential victim, as well as tapping into broader urban fears about the dangers of living too closely with strangers.