Talking Location With Michael G Colburn – from CAPE TOWN to MELBOURNE

16th December 2025

#TalkingLocationWith …. Michael G Colburn, author of Stolen Brilliance and Asylum Murders:

From London to Cape Town to Melbourne: Locations in the Lady Black Mystery Series

In book one of the Lady Black Mystery series, Stolen Brilliance, Edie Black escapes the capture of the stolen ship Ferret (which has been renamed India) in Melbourne, Australia. Edie returns to England to find and save her lover Benji Diamond from organized crime. All are in pursuit of Benji to claim the massive cache of diamonds stolen in Cape Town when the Ferret was in dock and Benji disappeared. All the evidence points to him as the thief. The resolution of this conflict is shocking and surprising.

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As the sequel, Asylum Murders, opens, Edie is happily married to Benji, living in Melbourne. Benji and Edie have both abandoned their life of crime, and Edie’s alter-ego Lady Edith Black is pursuing a vocation as an investigator. The challenge becomes personal when her best friend is framed for murder in Australia’s Kew Lunatic Asylum.

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While visiting Glasgow, Scotland in 2021, my wife and I heard the story of the stolen ship S.S. Ferret. The ship was taken from Scotland and reappeared in Australia several months later under a new name. This was the spark that began my research for the Lady Black Mystery series.

The ship S.S. Ferret becomes the primary location. After extensive research, my first task was developing the main characters and creating their story. The ship had its name changed and appearance altered during its nearly eight-month disappearance, but it is the setting for visiting many ports, leading to conflicts between Edith Black (Edie) and her antagonist James Henderson. It is also the location where Edie is reunited with her lover, Benji Diamond.

Prior to arriving in Melbourne, when the ship was in Cape Town, a major diamond heist occurred (this is true). Benji Diamond leaves the Ferret to follow the suspected courier of the stolen diamonds and signs on as crew of the sailing ship Scott. This allowed an entirely different shipboard location, providing opportunities for action and intrigue (possibly even murder). The ships in the story become like characters, each with its own personality.

I’ve spent time in most of the countries and cities I write about in the Lady Black Mysteries, but a lot of detail has to come from research too, since I’m writing about the nineteenth century. One of my favorite restaurants in London, Rules Restaurant, appears as a chapter location in the first book. Rules dates back to 1798, the oldest restaurant in London. It provided excellent 19th-century material (including one meal I had).

In Australia, I spent my time in Sydney. I did not make it to Melbourne, so I had to rely primarily on research for details. That said, my content editor was born and grew up in Kew (a suburb of Melbourne) which helped, as the primary setting in Asylum Murders is Kew. I did extensive research on the history of the Kew Asylum, which closed its doors for good in the 1980s.

With my Melbourne research, News of the Day gave me the stolen mace of the Victorian Parliament. The newspapers gave me my first reference to Little Lon, the brothel, opium den and grog house center of Melbourne, ripe with stories, rich in location expectations. The news of the day also gave me severed body parts floating in the Yara River, where they came from was never revealed. This provided an opportunity as a writer. The Kew Asylum overlooked the city from its hilltop location and offered the location for much of the second story. I spent several weeks on literature and articles that involved nineteenth-century asylums. The mere mention of a “lunatic” asylum, as it was referred to, creates an atmosphere for the reader stronger than many.

For the forthcoming third book in the series, I’ll revisit another true event (the sinking of the R.M.S. Quetta) and build the book around it. The route the Quetta sailed to England gave me an entirely different world of locations and experiences to research along the East Coast of Australia, which is unlike any other location I’ve researched. The Fate of Precious Things (2027) takes advantage of the unique and varied cultures of Queensland and the Torres Strait islands, as varied as the British Navy to the headhunters of the West Indies to the pearl harvesters of various nations and even sea cucumber processors to serve a delicacy to the Asian nations.

I have a fair number of locations in my books, each demanding its own series of research efforts. One reviewer of my first book, Stolen Brilliance, wrote that “Colburn is a master world builder.” I don’t know about that, but I know that detailed research on location and the use of its opportunities, constraints and culture is an important part of any fictional writing. Location is a living, breathing character in every story.

What will the next location be? Well, Jack Cramer is heading back to Boston in the United States, so perhaps the primary characters should visit him there.

Travel invites learning, and now, through my writing, I can travel back in time to locations as they were then, and bring my readers with me.

Michael G Colborn

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