Set in ‘Marvellous Melbourne’, The Murder was written in 1887 by Francis Adams, a journalist, poet, novelist and short story writer who travelled to Australia in 1884. As Adams had already gained a respectable reputation as a social and political commentator, his entry into the field of the detective story was probably intended as a quick earner, a means of cashing in on the phenomenal success, the previous year, of Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of the Hansom Cab.

In his introduction to the new edition, Melbourne crime writer Shane Maloney recommends it as ‘both a captivating and instructive insight into the origins of the detective species’. True to some elements of the ‘species’, there is a mysterious death, an ingenious puzzle, a detective and an investigation. And yes there is a murderer who is finally caught and punished. Yet The Murder of Madeline Brown is a highly idiosyncratic example of the genre – even for its time. The investigation keeps veering away toward another more pressing preoccupation. The real search is internal, a male sexual odyssey through uncharted territory of female eroticism. It explores a troubled inner world where the boundaries between guilt and innocence, reality and fantasy, are quite blurred. The narrative has a dreamlike quality which at once furthers and disrupts the investigation. Even the ‘sober’, ‘temperate’ detective is infected. ‘[A]ll the time he had a curious feeling as if he had done all this before, somewhere else, perhaps in a dream.’

In the finely written opening, located in Madeline’s bedroom, the ‘chaste’ Age journalist, Stuart, observes a scene which oozes menace. The red, purple and wrought-gold canopy of the bed, the faint pink light and the strange pungent scent create a cloying atmosphere of sensuality pushed too far. Inextricably linked to it is an image of death. Madeline’s body is tied to the bed and there is a basin ‘into which flows a sluggish stream of blood from the vein in her elbow’. Throughout this scene the theme song from her current theatrical triumph, the ‘Yes, No! Yes, No!’ waltz, tinkles in the distance. Its constant repetition in the narrative is surely the haunting refrain of male sexual ambivalence.

But who is Madeline? Her identity is shrouded in mystery. A dusky-skinned exotic maiden, only recently arrived in Melbourne, her essence is distinctly alien. Does she only exist in the fearful minds of the males whose voices constitute the only viewpoints in the book?

Although detective David Stuart, science educated, ‘bush bred’ and described as’ an archetype of manhood’ is represented as the voice of reason in the book, his investigation, prompted by revenge, turns to obsession, ‘like the possession of Beelzebub’. From the viewpoint of crazed clergyman, Hildyard, his lifelong passion for Madeline has been experienced as an eternal struggle with madness and visions of sin. It is not surprising that the crucial clue is provided by poet/journalist Randal, whose dyed-in-the-wool cynicism and misogyny leave him totally defended against sexual entrapment.

Known for his progressive political views, Francis Adams’ sexual attitudes (according to Shane Maloney) ‘fall well within the range of Victorian orthodoxy’. Madeline’s free-spirited sexuality as one ‘of the tribe of women who drive men mad’ is certainly regarded, as Maloney writes,’ as the prime cause of her own destruction’. Yet the theme strikes a far more universal chord than its elaborate Victorian verbiage might suggest. Even though the femme fatale of contemporary hard-boiled crime fiction fails to destroy the detective, ensuring his ongoing independence and control (the reverse of Madeline’s situation), it is still very much the other side of the same coin – evidence that male fear of the sexual woman is still alive and well.

Although The Murder of Madeline Brown was written for the Victorian mass market and can be regarded as a quaint curio of its time, it is more than that. Adams has posed a question as current for today’s male as it was for his Victorian contemporary. What is a man to do if he is faced with what has been called ‘a mad evil creature too attractive to roam free in the male imagination’?