What a joy.

With ratcheting suspense, bone-chilling atmosphere and a plot as tight as a straightjacket, Michael Cox’s debut novel “The Meaning of Night: A Confession” is fiction writing at its finest. It’s that good.

This story of betrayal, buried secrets and vengeance is a 19th-century thriller written by 21st-century author with an unabashed love for the best of English literature. Like masterful works of the Victorian era, the labor deserves to be printed — and eagerly awaited — in installments.

The page-turner reads like a collaboration between Charles Dickens, Alexander Dumas and Conan Doyle. Wonderfully rich storytelling, memorable characters and the law firm of Tredgold, Tredgold & Orr beg immediate comparison to Dickens’ “Bleak House.” Seven hundred pages devoted to exacting revenge have all the devious intricacies of Dumas’ “The Count of Monte Cristo.” And the atmosphere — London, hansoms, opium dens, boggy moors, an English manor with the “power to bewitch both soul and sense,” a Baron with an “impatient tic in his left eye” — is as vivid as any account of Sherlock Holmes.

Cox, an authority on 19th-century literature and biographer of M. R. James, the Cambridge scholar and ghost-story writer, reportedly spent 30 years crafting his novel — and it shows. “The Meaning of Night” is not a breezy beach read. It’s a murderous confession meant for a cold night and a cozy fire, where the only sounds are the tick of a clock and the beating of your heart.

“After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn’s for an oyster supper.” And thus begins the account of Edward Glyver, narrator and hero, for lack of better terms. Unlike a Dickens protagonist, the lead of Cox’s novel is un-Christian in conscience and character and has no desire to rise above cruel twists of fate. Quite to the contrary, in fact: Glyver is at peace wallowing in the depths of Victorian London — its foggy streets, brothels and opium dens — while he makes his destiny.

Yet Glyver was not born of the gutter. He is a scholar and bibliophile blinded by obsession and ambition. The obsession: the fall of his nemesis, the poet Phoebus Daunt, a school chum whom Glyver believes betrayed, disgraced and denied him. The ambition: to claim a title, a fortune and the love of an upper-class beauty.

Obsession is almost always tragic, and Glyver’s downfall — at least figuratively — is foreshadowed throughout the book. The killing of the red-haired man, chosen at random, was only practice for the killing of Phoebus Daunt. The irony of the story — as in all good tragedies — is that Glyver already has what he seeks — legitimacy, success and someone to love. He betrays himself in obsessing the demise of Daunt.

Throughout the twisted journey, everyone has a secret and nothing is as it seems. The preface presents the book as “one of the lost curiosities of 19th-century literature,” a supposedly nonfiction work found in a university library and edited by a scholar who fact checks in the footnotes. Quoting Glyver (later known as Glapthorn): “Nothing is ever really forgotten, and slowly the vaults of memory open and yield up their dead.”

Even the memorable bit players are clouded in purpose, like the prostitute Dorrie Grainger, “well-dressed, petite, with a dimpled chin and delicate little ears.” She enters from an unpremeditated act of charity, leaves as a colorful diversion, yet returns as a connective strand in the ever-tightening noose that closes around Glyver — and the reader.

“The Meaning of Night” reminds us what good literature can be. Let’s hope it’s not another 30 years before we’re again mesmerized by a Michael Cox novel.