Now, more than a century after its original publication in 1887 as Madeline Brown's Murderer , it has been resurrected for a new generation of readers. And even for those whose appetite for murder most horrid has been shaped by the sparse and gritty realism of contemporary crime fiction, it is both a captivating and instructive insight into the origins of the detective species. The Murder of Madeline Brown is at once a gripping narrative of ingenious crime and dogged detection, a sketch of a vanished world, a moral fable and an intellectual puzzle. While its conventions and assumptions are those of the Victorian novel of sensation, it is more than a mere pot-boiler for it foreshadows, both in the emblematic method of the murder and the psychological insight of its solution, the forensic and pathological preoccupations that were to shape the emerging genre of detective fiction. From its horrifying opening scene it promises to be a tantalising tale, raising questions that draw the reader deep into the heady world of sex and drugs and opera bouffe.
Heavy curtains cover the windows, and a strange and pungent odor perfumes the air.
Clothing of exquisite and elaborate cut lies scattered across the floor. On the bed is the contorted body of a beautiful woman, the victim of a murder whose elaborate means suggest the work of an intellect both obsessive and cruel. From somewhere below comes the refrain of a slow waltz, repeating itself over and over as the guttering lamplight pervades and intensifies the scene. The author of this extraordinary work was a man whose aspirations lay not in the tawdry sphere of melodrama and the whodunnit but in the higher reaches of cultural endeavor, the product of a classical education who rebelled against the stultifying conventions of his class, an English aesthete who immersed himself in the hurly-burly of Australian radical politics, a romantic consumptive who carried a revolver, and whose violent death at the age of 30 ended a short but influential literary career. Impoverished, racked by incurable tuberculosis and already infected with the ideas of socialism, Adams travelled to Australia in 1884.