It may not do much for house prices, but Katy Darby’s new book should prove an enjoyable romp for residents of the now posh suburb of Jericho.

Her novel takes us into a seedy world of drunkenness and prostitution. Jericho in the 1880s, writes her narrator, “was notorious as the haunt of drunkards, thieves, beggars, pedlars and the lowest sort of brazen female as ever lifted her petticoats”.

The area has a proud fictional history. It is the working-class suburb where Thomas Hardy’s stonemason hero, Jude the Obscure, can afford a humble lodging as he attempts to penetrate the academic world of the university. Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse has found several dead bodies there, and Philip Pullman re-invented its canal yard as the home of a band of sea gypsies in the His Dark Materials trilogy.

Darby follows in this tradition with a pitch-perfect pastiche of Victorian gothic, crisply edited for modern readers. The author lived in Jericho for five years, first as a student at Somerville College and later working at Oxford University Press, and says the alleyways and pubs proved the perfect setting for her story. It is told by Edward Fraser, an Oxford theology student, and later a don at Hertford College, in the form of a letter to his son, with details added in letters from other characters — notably his friend Stephen Chapman, a medical student who is persuaded to volunteer at a shelter for fallen women in Jericho. Fraser tries to dissuade him, and warns him against the shelter’s organiser, Diana, as Stephen begins to fall in love with her.

The author says the language came naturally, since she has been a fan of Victorian literature since she was at school. “While I was writing it, I was on a diet of Victorian books.” The idea came to her while re-reading Sherlock Holmes, and thinking about his intense friendship with Dr Watson. “Holmes looks at the women in each case as a distraction. They are not as important to him as the interaction with Watson. I wanted to create a love triangle — not the traditional kind, but one where the woman threatens the relationship between two men.”

She agrees that there is a difficult balancing act for a writer who wants to avoid the exaggeration of Victorian melodrama. “I enjoy Sherlock Holmes, Dickens and Wilkie Collins and I wanted to write something for modern readers who enjoy those stories.”

The book is ideal for readers who would relish following characters from a “tumbledown workman’s cottage” in Canal Street to the fictional Ox’s Head, where “the most raddled and disease-racked prostitutes, the most hopeless opium addicts and inebriates, and the most violent, degraded criminals go to drink”.

There are serious points sandwiched between the masked orgies, caged woman, duels and dancing bear.

The police refuse to help our heroine, Diana, a once ‘respectable’ woman, because she runs a shelter for prostitutes, while her monstrous abuser escapes retribution because he is a man, and an aristocrat.

But the author is happy for people to read it as an entertaining romp. “I really enjoyed writing it,” she said. “And I hope people enjoy reading it.”