The Paying Guests, and The Lodger

I lost most of the weekend to Sarah Waters' The Paying Guests. I'd been dying to dive in since I read the first chapter online. I think it is so difficult to do historical fiction well, but Waters always pulls it off. But WHO assigned the subject heading for this one? They are really far from the mark here.

I've often worried that we as librarians are too consumed with the new-new, without realizing that, for our patrons, more *is* new. The Paying Guests reminded me a lot of something on a similar theme, but in the public domain I'd read earlier, Marie Belloc Lowndes' The Lodger, about a couple of older people trying to hold body and soul together in the midst of a crime wave.

For something a century old, The Lodger more than holds up. The suspense keeps ratcheting, until the resolution,  if it can termed that, in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussand's wax museum. Two books on one theme, written a century apart, but both are terrific.