I came to this expecting a Victorian detective novel and found something unexpected — a colonial city novel wearing a detective novel’s costume.

The murder happens in a hansom cab in Melbourne in 1886. The detective is competent; he works methodically through the evidence. What he uncovers is not a puzzle but a society’s hidden foundations — the suppressed histories that Melbourne’s prosperous families need to stay suppressed in order to remain prosperous.

Hume couldn’t have written this novel about London. London’s social architecture is centuries old; its secrets have had time to settle into the texture of things. Melbourne’s wealth is recent. Its respectability is recent. The gap between what is displayed and what is concealed is thinner and more charged, and the anxiety this produces is the material the mystery excavates. It is a novel that could only have been written from inside that specific place at that specific moment.

He sold the copyright for fifty pounds. It sold half a million copies. He spent the next forty-six years being the author of it.

Down here, some things are also not valued at their correct price.

— G. H. Schreiber

24/05/2026