Character guide

Mrs. Bunting

major

Also known as Bunting, Mr. and Mrs. Bunting, Staid Mrs. Bunting, Ellen, Ellen Bunting, poor Bunting, Ellen Green, Miss Ellen Green

Mrs. Bunting runs the Marylebone lodging house where she and her husband scrape by on dwindling savings, her neat black dress and plain cuffs betraying years of careful servitude. When a generous, eccentric lodger takes her spare rooms, his strange hours and stranger habits both relieve her finances and unsettle her nights, until she finds herself lying to her husband and dreading the visits of a young detective. Her divided loyalty—to respectability, to her lodger, to her own peace of mind—makes her the anxious center of the novel's tightening coil.

Mr. Sleuth

major

Also known as Sleuth, Poor kindly, solitary Mr. Sleuth, Odd Mr. Sleuth, Poor Mr. Sleuth, distraught Mr. Sleuth

Mr. Sleuth arrives at the Buntings' door as an ideal tenant: punctual, generous with his sovereigns, undemanding, and content to spend his days poring over Cruden's Concordance and the Old Testament. Yet he creeps out into the fog when the city sleeps, dislikes women with a hissing intensity, and reads aloud passages uncomplimentary to her sex that Mrs. Bunting overhears on the stairs. His oddities are the engine of the novel's dread: every courtesy he offers feels like a door left ajar onto something the reader can't quite see.

Daisy

supporting

Also known as Miss Daisy, little Daisy, Daisy Bunting, Daisy's

Daisy works away as a servant but returns to her parents' lodging house with girlish energy, pestering her stepmother for a peep at the mysterious lodger and drawing the attentions of Joe Chandler, the young detective who haunts the Buntings' sitting-room whenever she is near. Her wide-awake curiosity and easy sociability make her a foil to Mrs. Bunting's guarded anxiety, and her presence—or convenient absence—shifts the household's delicate balance. She matters because she is the one person in the house who has nothing to hide and everything to notice.

Joe Chandler

supporting

Also known as Joe, young Chandler, Chandler, young Joe Chandler, Mr. Chandler

Joe Chandler is a slow, sure young man from the Yard who takes his work seriously and his courtship of Daisy Bunting even more so, haunting the Buntings' sitting-room with a mix of professional curiosity and hopeful devotion. Newly put on the Avenger murders, he brings the outside world's panic into the house—and, unwittingly, brings the investigation uncomfortably close to the lodger upstairs. His earnestness and his sharpening instincts make him both a suitor and a threat, and Mrs. Bunting cannot decide which she fears more.

Mr. Bunting

supporting

Also known as Bunting, XVI Bunting

Robert Bunting once kept a gentleman's wardrobe and now keeps a dwindling fire, his clean-shaven respectability a thin shield against the hunger and cold creeping into the Marylebone house. He reads the Avenger murders aloud with relish, sells his beloved armchair only when pressed, and remains largely blind to the fear tightening around his wife. His cheerful obliviousness is the counterweight to Mrs. Bunting's vigilance, and his fondness for a good crime story makes the real one unfolding under his roof all the more chilling.

The Avenger

supporting

Also known as Avenger

The Avenger is less a person than a pressure—a name scrawled on grey paper and pinned to the dead, a series of murders that have all of London reading columns and locking doors. The killer's victims haunt Mrs. Bunting's imagination even as she walks home to her own narrow house, which looks as if it could keep any secret closely hidden. The Avenger's faceless menace is what makes the lodger's odd hours and quiet habits unbearable, and what turns an ordinary lodging house into a place where every creak on the stairs might mean something.

Aunt Margaret

minor

Also known as Margaret, Aunt Margaret—Daisy

Daisy's aunt, who occasionally appears in family discussions.

Charles Peace

minor

Also known as Peace

A historical murderer mentioned as a comparison to the Avenger.

Sir John Burney

minor

Also known as Sir John, John Burney

A police official involved in the Avenger investigation.

Mr. Hopkins

minor

Also known as Hopkins

A local tradesman or acquaintance of the Buntings.

Dr. Gaunt

minor

A doctor consulted by Mrs. Bunting about her lodger.

Mrs. Crowley

minor

A neighbor or acquaintance of the Bunting family.

Lizzie Cole

minor

A former servant or acquaintance mentioned in passing.

Madame Tussaud

minor

Referenced in relation to the wax museum and the Avenger.