Botany is the first instalment in a new crime series featuring unlikely amateur detective Quintus Huntley; it also marks the return of author Royce Leville. Leville is the pseudonym of Western Australian writer Campbell Jefferys, who brings a diverse background in literature, media, and film to this quirky crime-comedy set in Perth.

Jefferys currently lives in Hamburg, Germany, where he operates Rippple Media, an umbrella company encompassing his creative endeavours in books, film, television, content, and music. Under his own name, Campbell Jefferys is the author of six books, including the thriller Balaclava, which explores themes of climate change, economic inequality, and protest culture. Jefferys has also demonstrated his commitment to the arts community, having managed the Perth Writers Salon during the 2020 Fringe Festival and organised live “words and music” events in Germany during the COVID-19 lockdowns to support Australian artists and raise funds for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation.

Writing as Royce Leville, Jefferys has already garnered acclaim – A Little Leg Work won the Best Fiction category in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards in 2012. Furthermore, his short story collection The Book of Names yielded the short film Mikelis, which starred James Cosmo and successfully toured European film festivals between 2016 and 2017. Jefferys’ extensive experience developing narratives for the screen is also noteworthy: he secured development funding from the Hamburg Film Commission for his screenplay Fadeaway and has already adapted the Quintus Huntley concept into a pitch deck for a limited TV series.

Botany begins, like a chamber work, with a single tremulous note – a young woman found dead in a Peppermint Grove apartment, a fountain pen lodged in her jugular, green ink blooming like algae across her throat. From this image – at once grotesque and strangely aesthetic – Leville constructs a murder mystery that is also a sly anatomy of Perth’s creative class: its faded poets, its compromised politicians, its imported prodigies, its hunger for authenticity in a city that mistrusts it.

Detectives Elenore Everest and Justin Booth, incongruous partners from opposite poles of temperament and class, are our guides through this heat-shimmering labyrinth. Their investigation into the murder of Ekaterina Valoskiya, a Ukrainian violinist newly arrived to the Perth Symphony Orchestra, exposes a network of uneasy intimacies linking art, sex, ambition and provincial self-regard. Each interview – the disillusioned poet Quintus Huntley, the sharp-tongued political speechwriter Aphra Massey, the narcissistic orchestra chief Dr Leiland Taverton – unspools like a short story within the larger symphony. Indeed, the novel’s structure and texture feel orchestrated: recurring motifs of envy, authorship and performance echo from one “movement” to the next, until they resolve in a darkly comic coda that redefines what a whodunit can do.

Leville writes in a style both caustic and lyrical, his dialogue clipped with the rhythms of Perth vernacular yet heightened by a poet’s ear for cadence and irony. As in David Whish-Wilson’s crime novels, the city itself becomes a character – “the world’s most isolated big town,” where heat, money and anxiety ferment together like a tropical wine. One is also reminded of Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore or even Christos Tsiolkas’s Barracuda – but Leville’s Perth is less elegiac than absurdist, closer in spirit to Martin Amis’s London or Bret Easton Ellis’s Los Angeles, places where cynicism passes for sophistication.

What distinguishes Botany from conventional crime fiction is its self-conscious fascination with art’s complicity in crime. The murder weapon is a writer’s pen; the suspects are artists and academics whose self-doubt festers into cruelty. Quintus Huntley, the failed poet, is the book’s tragicomic heart – a man who once believed literature could redeem him but now drinks in a shipping container, haunted by the novel’s title poem, The Green Neck of the Violinist. His weary lucidity recalls Malcolm Lowry’s Consul or Patrick White’s outcasts: figures scorched by their own talent.

Leville’s satire of Perth’s cultural elite – the “fusty and dinosaurial” university dons, the arts bureaucrats who confuse branding with art – cuts close to the bone, but his humour keeps it buoyant. Even as he mocks these circles, he loves them; the novel’s final pages, elegiac and unexpectedly tender, suggest that beauty survives in spite of its custodians.

Botany is, finally, less a mystery to be solved than a mirror held up to a city – and to the fraught idea of creation itself. In exposing how art, envy and desire intertwine, Leville composes a mordant symphony of human frailty: funny, bitter, and, in its closing bars, quietly devastating.