The Green Mummy.

From the prolific hand of Fergus Hume, master of the popular sensation mystery, comes a tale where antiquarian passion curdles into crime.

What it's about

The Green Mummy centres on a collector's fixation with a rare Peruvian mummy and the greed, love and secrecy that swirl around it. When the treasured object goes missing and a man is found dead, the tidy relationships of a genteel English community come apart, and an engaged young couple find their future entangled in the effort to untangle the truth. Hume lays out clues, false trails and shifting motives with the practised craft of a writer who knew exactly how to keep readers turning pages.

Themes

The novel plays on the era's fascination with archaeology and exotic relics, and on the way objects of the past can carry a dangerous glamour into the present. Beneath the mystery runs a study of obsession and acquisitiveness, of respectable people whose desires outrun their scruples, and of love tested by suspicion.

Why it still matters

Hume was one of the best-selling mystery writers of his day, and his work helped shape the popular detective story before the golden-age puzzle came into full flower. Reading him now offers both an entertaining whodunit and a window onto late-Victorian appetites, its collecting mania, its fear of the foreign and unknown, and its enduring love of a well-turned clue.

Who it's for

Fans of classic detective fiction and country-house mysteries, readers who enjoy the atmosphere of vintage crime, and anyone curious about the popular thrillers that entertained readers before Agatha Christie.