Lucy Ribchester didn’t begin by writing Edinburgh as a suspect. She began by writing women inside engines bigger than them—London in 1912 with suffragettes, Fleet Street, spectacle and smoke; wartime Britain with secrets thick enough to choke on. Those books move. They’re built to pull you through, to keep the plot hot. But the cities in them behave like stage flats: evocative, serviceable, there to hold up the action.
Then she comes home and stops being polite about what a city does.
Murder Ballad is where Edinburgh stops being “setting” and starts being an active participant in the harm. Late eighteenth century. “Auld Reekie” not as a nickname you giggle over in a gift shop, but as a warning label. Performing arts, social climbing, women boxed into roles and priced accordingly, and a music world that pretends to be refined while feeding on dirt, gossip, and leverage. Ribchester doesn’t write the capital as a picturesque maze of closes. She writes it as a system that decides who gets heard, who gets used, who gets ruined, and who gets turned into a song.
And that’s the key shift: she takes Edinburgh’s famous cultural self-image—the city of literature, music, civilisation—and shows the blood in the upholstery. An Edinburgh Musical Society isn’t a quaint detail. It’s a gatekeeping machine: who gets on the stage, who gets patronage, who gets protected when appetites turn predatory. Ballads in this world aren’t “folk charm.” They’re mass media. They’re how stories spread fast, cheaply, cruelly. They’re reputation weapons you can hum.
Edinburgh sells culture as virtue, but Ribchester writes culture as a racket: talent is optional, access is everything, and the bill always lands on the women least able to pay.
The earlier novels were already circling power, but at a safer distance. In The Hourglass Factory, London’s big public dramas—suffrage, spectacle, journalism—create a backdrop where a woman can plausibly fight, manoeuvre, vanish. In The Amber Shadows, secrecy is nationalised; the war justifies deceit, and the reader can enjoy the espionage sheen while still telling themselves it’s “for a reason.” Those books show systems. Murder Ballad shows a city enjoying the system.
Edinburgh in Ribchester’s hands isn’t merely harsh; it’s complicit. It consumes performance and punishes performers. It demands entertainment and then moralises the bodies that provide it. It fetishises refinement while being powered by filth and hunger. That’s why the book’s music world matters: not because it’s unusual, but because it’s honest about the social function of “art” in a status-obsessed place. Art is how the powerful flatter themselves. Art is how the powerless try to eat. Art is also how a community tells itself convenient lies about what it is.
Ribchester’s own long-running interest in performance and culture writing sharpens the blade. She knows what it means to be watched. She knows what it means to be judged as “too much” or “not enough.” So she doesn’t write eighteenth-century Edinburgh as an atmospheric costume drama. She writes it as a pressure chamber where class, gender, and desire don’t just simmer—they organise.
And she refuses the tourist glaze by refusing the usual emotional payoffs. No cosy reassurance that “it was a different time.” No sentimental reverence for the old city. No easy villain you can throw off the cliff and then go back to admiring the architecture. The city is the point: the way it feeds on spectacle, the way it sanctifies its own institutions, the way it turns women into stories and then acts innocent when the stories kill.
The genre loves Edinburgh as gothic wallpaper; Ribchester makes it evidence—streets that remember, institutions that protect themselves, and a public that sings along while the damage is done.
That’s the evolution: from cities as containers for plot to Edinburgh as an accomplice with taste, manners, and an appetite. It’s a sharper, riskier move than dressing the capital in fog and calling it noir. Because once the city is guilty, you don’t get to leave the book feeling cultured for visiting it. You leave feeling implicated.
And that’s how it should be. Keep Edinburgh guilty. Keep it loud. Keep it responsible. Don’t let it pose. Insist.
