Marie Belloc Lowndes

Marie Belloc Lowndes (1868–1947) was an English novelist and journalist, the sister of the writer Hilaire Belloc. Raised partly in France and partly in England, she began as a journalist and wrote more than forty novels, memoirs and biographies. Her best-known book, The Lodger (1913), in which a London landlady comes to suspect that her quiet lodger is a murderer modeled on Jack the Ripper, was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1927. She specialized in crime stories that turn on character and motive rather than detection, among them The Chink in the Armour, Letty Lynton and The Story of Ivy.