An inverted sentence is when the predicate (verb) comes before the subject (noun)

Down the street lived the man and his wife without anyone suspecting that they were really spies for a foreign power.

Because there's no object following the verb, the noun phrase after the verb "lived" can be decoded as subject without any problem.

Examples

Inversion

Inversion (linguistics)

In linguistics, grammatical inversion is any of a number of different distinct grammatical constructions in the languages of the world. There are three main uses in the literature which, unfortunately, have little if any overlap either formally or typologically: syntactic inversion, thematic...

 after initial negatives:
I will never do that again

• Rarely have I eaten better food.
• Hardly ever does he come to class on time.
• Not until a frog develops lungs does it leave the water and live on the land.
• Not only was Mary Ann Shadd
  Mary Ann Shadd
  Mary Ann Shadd Cary was born to Abraham and Harriett Shadd, both free-born blacks, in Wilmington, Delaware. She was the oldest in her family of 13 children...
  
   famous for helping escaped slaves, she was also the first African Canadian woman to establish a newspaper.
• Hardly ever have there been so many choices for young people entering the work force as there are today.

Inversion after other structures:

• So high is Mount Everest
  Mount Everest
  Mount Everest is the world's highest mountain, with a peak at above sea level. It is located in the Mahalangur section of the Himalayas. The international boundary runs across the precise summit point...
  
  that climbers can take only a couple of steps per minute as they near the summit.
• Off the coast of North Carolina lie the Barrier Islands, a popular summer resort area.
• Only after the earthquake had taken place did the lack of safety measures become obvious.