The Mystery of a Hansom Cab by Fergus Hume, Fiction, Classics, Mystery & Detective, Action & Adventure de Fergus Hume

The Mystery of a Hansom Cab by Fergus Hume, Fiction, Classics, Mystery & Detective, Action & Adventure: Science, Metaphor, Story

Fergus Hume

A splash of chloroform . . .

The drunken man was staggering -- but he was quite alive, when the thoughtful gentleman stumbled upon him in the thick Melbourne night, and hailed a cab to take him home.

By the time the cabdriver was in the proper neighborhood and was turning around to ask directions, the cabbie discovered he was driving around an unconscious man . . . slumped forward with a chemical-soaked handkerchief tied around his mouth Unconscious -- or dead

New Zealand lawyer and writer Fergus Hume achieved immediate, widespread attention for his first novel, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, when it first appeared in 1886. This remarkable novel, when published in England, became more the talk of London than even Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet, issued soon thereafter. Hume's other detective novels included The Opal Serpent and The Silent House.

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Fergusson Wright Hume (1859 - 1932), known as Fergus Hume, was a prolific English novelist. Finding that the novels of Émile Gaboriau were then very popular in Melbourne, Hume obtained and read a set of them and determined to write a novel of the same kind. The result was The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, set in Melbourne, with descriptions of poor urban life based on his knowledge of Little Bourke Street. It was self-published in 1886 and became a great success. Because he sold the British and American rights for 50 pounds, however, he reaped little of the potential financial benefit. It became the best-selling mystery novel of the Victorian era; in 1990 John Sutherland called it the "most sensationally popular crime and detective novel of the century". This novel inspired Arthur Conan Doyle to write A Study in Scarlet, which introduced the fictional consulting detective Sherlock Holmes. Doyle remarked, "Hansom Cab was a slight tale, mostly sold by 'puffing'." After the success of his first novel and the publication of another, Professor Brankel's Secret (c.?1886), Hume returned to England in 1888. His third novel was titled Madame Midas and it was based on the life of the mine and newspaper owner Alice Ann Cornwell. This book became a play and her estranged husband, John Whiteman, sued over its content. Hume resided in London for a few years and then moved to the Essex countryside where he lived in Thundersley for 30 years. Eventually he produced more than 100 novels and short stories.