Before You Begin

Before you begin.

It begins with a green corpse. A crate is carried up from the Thames marshes to the museum of a mummy-mad professor, who has paid a thousand pounds for a rare Peruvian mummy swathed in emerald-green bindings. But when the lid is prised open, the mummy is gone — and in its place lies the strangled body of the young man who was bringing it home. So opens one of the most ingenious murder puzzles of its age.

Fergus Hume was the best-selling mystery writer of the late Victorian world; his Mystery of a Hansom Cab outsold every detective novel of its day. In The Green Mummy (1908) he sets his snare in a fog-bound English village on the tide-flats, and springs it with the cold machinery of the classic whodunit: a locked window, a fortune in hidden emeralds, a blackmailing widow, a Kanaka servant, a Yankee sea-captain, and a Peruvian gentleman with an old, old score. Everyone has a motive; almost everyone has a secret; and the truth, when it comes, reaches back thirty years and half a world away.

What keeps the pages turning is the pleasure of the pursuit — the manuscript, the perfume that betrays a letter, the confession written in a dying hand, and the mummy itself, passing sinister and green from one hiding-place to the next, its dead hands closed over two colossal jewels.

This illustrated edition opens with a gallery of the cast, the marsh-country map, and the great scenes of the mystery; and as you read, the story unfolds in six visual movements — recap plates you unlock along the way, each gathering together the case so far, with never a glimpse of what lies ahead. Turn the page, and step down into the fog of Gartley.