The Mystery of a Hansom Cab Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE MYSTERY OF A HANSOM CAB

  ‘The novel was a phenomenal success when it was first published in Melbourne in 1886 and it became an international bestseller…It’s easy to see why. The plot sweeps through unexpected twists and turns…and the suspense is maintained to the end…Most appealing…is the wonderful flavour of the 1880s Melbourne, from the gaslit glamour of the Collins Street “block” to the hideous squalor of the slum alleys off Little Bourke Street…A splendidly romantic melodrama, full of period charm, and victorian sentiment…The Mystery of a Hansom Cab is not only a classic but thugely enjoyable as well.’

  West Australian

  ‘Australia’s original blockbuster is back in print. Written more than 100 years ago, this murder mystery sold hundreds of thousands of copies around the world…It will give you a wonderful sense of Melbourne’s history—you’ll hear the hansoms rattling down Collins Street for weeks afterwards.’

  Herald Sun

  ‘Full credit to Text Publishing for rescuing Hume’s first and best known book from obscurity, for this is more than just an historical curiosity; it’s a well written and immensely readable detective story.’

  Daily Telegraph

  ‘It’s an absolute ripper…there’s a grisly murder by an unknown assassin, a plot full of astonishing twists and turns, and a brilliant evocation of 19th-century Melbourne that captures its charm, bustle and rawness.’

  Inside Melbourne

  ‘In charmingly genteel, high-society Melbourne, murder 1880s-style is stealthily plotted. No phone-tapping or planted bombs, just hand-delivered notes, horse-drawn carts and a deadly dose of chloroform…More readable than ever.’

  Examiner

  FERGUS HUME was born in England in 1859. His family soon immigrated to New Zealand, where Hume qualified as a lawyer. He was admitted to the bar in 1885 and moved to Melbourne in the same year.

  Desperate to become a playwright but having no success, Hume decided to write a murder novel instead. When he couldn’t find a publisher for The Mystery of a Hansom Cab he published it himself. It was a sensation and sold over twenty thousand copies in Melbourne.

  With a hit on his hands, Hume sold his copyright to the Hansom Cab Publishing Company in London for fifty pounds. The book was a phenomenal success but Hume never saw another penny from his bestseller. It may have influenced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes adventure.

  Hume moved back to England in 1888 after the publication of his second novel, Madame Midas. He embarked on a career that produced over 130 novels. He never became a famous playwright but he did co-write the theatrical adaptation of The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, which played in London for five hundred nights. The story was also filmed three times in the silent era.

  Fergus Hume died in 1932.

  SIMON CATERSON is a Melbourne-based freelance writer and the author of Hoax Nation: Australian Fakes and Frauds from Plato to Norma Khouri.

  ALSO BY FERGUS HUME

  Madame Midas

  The Silent House

  The Moth-Woman

  The Whispering Lane

  The Caravan Mystery

  The Last Straw

  EDITOR'S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks are due to Dr Alan Dilnot of the Department of English at Monash University and to the Rare Books staff at the Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne.

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Introduction copyright © Simon Caterson 1999

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published 1886

  First edition published by The Text Publishing Company 1999

  This edition published 2012

  Page design by WH Chong

  Cover art courtesy of ABC TV.

  Ebook Production by Midland Typesetters Australia

  Primary print ISBN: 9781922079534

  Ebook ISBN: 9781921961816

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Fergus Hume’s Startling Story by Simon Caterson

  The Mystery of a Hansom Cab

  FERGUS HUME’S STARTLING STORY

  SIMON CATERSON

  The best-selling crime novel of the nineteenth century was not written by Arthur Conan Doyle or Wilkie Collins. That distinction belongs to Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, which appeared in the year before Sherlock Holmes made what was, by comparison, a rather unspectacular debut in A Study in Scarlet.

  The Hansom Cab was an overnight sensation when published in Melbourne in 1886, and it rapidly found readers around the world, especially in Britain. As many as 750,000 copies were sold during Hume’s lifetime, nearly half that number within the first six months of publication in London in 1887.

  Advertised in its first English edition as ‘a startling and realistic story of Melbourne social life’, The Hansom Cab was a first novel which had been written almost by accident and was self-published. Despite these modest beginnings the book became a huge international success and was translated into eleven languages. In its obituary for Hume in 1932, The Times was to note that ‘everybody read it eagerly and in fact it went all over the world’.

  Over the past hundred years Hume’s remarkable achievement has been outshone by the work of his contemporaries and, like other pioneering works, his novel has been eclipsed by subsequent developments in the genre. The Hansom Cab is nevertheless significant historically and, more importantly, it remains highly readable.

  Fergusson Wright Hume was an outsider in the city he anatomised. He was born in England to Scottish parents in 1859 and taken in his infancy to New Zealand. He studied law at the University of Otago and was called to the New Zealand Bar in 1885. Rather than go into legal practice, he emigrated to Melbourne and found work as a law clerk while attempting to further his theatrical ambitions.

  By his own account, published as the preface to the revised 1896 edition of The Hansom Cab, Hume wanted to make his living writing plays but could find no theatre manager who would even look at his work. Hoping to make his name in another branch of writing, he asked a local bookseller ‘what style of book he sold most of’. The reply was the detective novels of the French writer Emile Gaboriau (1833–73) which feature Monsieur Lecoq, whose murky past, eccentric habits and genius for deduction make him a forerunner of Holmes and countless other fictional sleuths.

  Hume set about buying up Gaboriau’s books, studied their method and became ‘determined to write a book of the same class; containing a mystery, a murder, and a description of low life in Melbourne’. His plotting, however, is much tighter than Gaboriau’s somewhat digressive narratives. Hume follows his exemplar mainly in his approach to realistic detail. Diligent in his research, Hume claimed to have ‘passed a great many nights’ in the city’s slums, ‘gathering material’.

  The setting for the murder was inspired by a late-night journey taken in a hansom cab, a horse-drawn two-wheeled cabriolet for two passengers with the driver mounted behind and the reins going over the roof. Hume r
ealised that this vehicle was perfectly designed for murder, since the crime could be concealed from the driver, the only potential witness.

  Despite his ingenuity Hume found that ‘every one to whom I offered it refused to even look at the manuscript on the ground that no Colonial could write anything worth reading’. Ever practical, he decided to publish the book himself and sold 5000 copies within three weeks in October 1886. By the end of the year a total of 20,000 copies had been printed in a city whose population was at the time less than half a million. Virtually every literate adult in Melbourne must have read the book.

  Flushed with the provincial success he had hoped for, Hume decided to accept an offer to sell his copyright by a group of English investors who had formed themselves into The Hansom Cab Publishing Company in order to publish his novel in London. He was paid the paltry sum of £50. As he later explained: ‘The story was written only to attract local attention and no one was more astonished than I when it passed beyond the narrow circles for which it had originally been intended.’

  Despite massive sales in Britain, The Hansom Cab Publishing Company went bankrupt in 1889. Rights in the novel eventually passed to the large London publisher Jarrolds, who persuaded Hume to revise the text, which meant cutting out some of the local detail and watering down language considered strong for the time.

  Hume’s hero Brian Fitzgerald and heroine Madge Frettlby are by the end of The Hansom Cab keen to leave Melbourne, as was the author himself. After living in the city for barely two years, Hume sailed for Europe in 1888 and never returned. He settled in England and embarked on a prodigious writing career that produced over 130 further novels, as well as many stories and articles before his death in 1932 at his home in the town of Thundersley, Essex.

  None of these books approached the popularity and enduring appeal of his first novel and are now all but forgotten. Hume wrote several novels with Australian settings and references but only two made any impression. The most substantial of these is Madame Midas, A Realistic and Sensational Story of Melbourne Mining Life (1888), set mainly in Melbourne and on the Ballarat goldfields. In some ways a more accomplished work than his first novel, it recounts a poisoning case which interests two of the characters who appear in The Hansom Cab, the lawyer Calton and the detective Kilsip. Hume’s other major Australian novel is the underrated Miss Mephistopheles (1890), whose milieu is Melbourne’s theatrical and literary circles and which features a diamond robbery and the murder of a pawnbroker.

  The Hansom Cab meanwhile established itself as a classic of its kind. It was so famous that many claimed authorship and Hume was forced to assert the truth of his identity in the 1896 preface. In 1888 a parody by ‘W. Humer Ferguson’ appeared, billed as a ‘bloodcurdling romance’ and entitled The Mystery of a Wheelbarrow, or Gaboriau Gaborooed, an Idealistic Story of a Great and Rising Colony. The identity of the parodist is unknown and the context of the humour largely lost, but, if nothing else, the book is a gauge of the success of Hume’s original.

  Hume described himself as a ‘storyteller’ rather than ‘novelist’ in his Who’s Who entry. Although his writing career benefited from the book’s runaway success, he was also in a sense trapped by it. Hume never fulfilled his ambition to write plays, complaining that publishers would not hear of him writing anything but detective stories.

  Oddly enough, an adaptation of The Hansom Cab was produced in theatres in Australia and London in the late 1880s. The London production, which Hume co-authored with Arthur Law, ran for five hundred nights. The story was filmed three times in the silent era and a radio version by Michael Hardwick was broadcast by the BBC in 1950 and 1960. In 1961 Barry Pree mounted a new stage adaptation in Melbourne.

  The novel’s fame endured until well into this century. In 1954 the Sunday Times listed it as one of the hundred best crime novels of all time. Six years later Everyman’s Dictionary of Literary Biography declared that The Hansom Cab ‘ranks as the most successful detective story of all time’.

  In its day The Hansom Cab put Australia on the literary map. The novelist Miles Franklin, writing in 1956, commented that the novel was all many people overseas seemed to know about Australian literature. ‘This old vehicle has renown beyond these shores,’ she wrote, ‘and it still serves visitors caught beyond these shores, who point their ignorance facetiously by confessing that it was the extent of their knowledge that an Australian literature existed till some hazard brought them hither.’

  Though never long out of print, The Hansom Cab, with the notable exception of Stephen Knight, has been disregarded by critics. There is no biography of Hume and commentators tend to see the novel as a statistical freak or bibliographical curiosity rather than as one of the pioneering works in its genre.

  Of particular interest now is Hume’s vivid evocation of a thriving yet deeply divided Victorian metropolis. The kind of cross-sectional representation of urban reality applied to late 1980s New York by Tom Wolfe in The Bonfire of the Vanities was anticipated by Hume a century earler in the Australian city which in its heyday was known as ‘Marvellous Melbourne’.

  Like the New York of Wolfe’s ‘Masters of the Universe’, Melbourne in the 1880s was in the grip of an immense economic boom, fuelled by dubious financial speculation and soon to end in disaster. It was a laissez faire prosperity in which fortunes could be made and lost almost instantaneously and defalcation was rife. The Hansom Cab itself became a footnote to the shady dealings of the time when a banker named George Nicholson Taylor, later jailed for fraud, spread the story that his ill-gotten gains were partly the result of a share of profits made from backing its publication.

  Hume’s extremes of rich and poor are represented by the Collins Street ‘Block’ and the slums of Little Bourke Street. The streets themselves are a stone’s throw from each other and Hume contrives a plot that brings their separate worlds into collision. This much is foreshadowed in the novel’s epigram, published on the original title page: ‘As marine plants floating on the surface of waves appear distinct growths yet spring unseen from a common centre, so individuals apparently strangers to each other are indissolubly connected by many invisible bonds and sympathies which are known only to themselves.’

  In adopting this as his major theme, Hume, like Wilkie Collins and others, touches that very sensitive Victorian nerve in his readers: respectability. The discovery of the killer is a fairly straightforward process of elimination; the incidental revelations about identity and the fragility of social position that are thrown up by the investigation are the true sources of sensation.

  This kind of sensitivity may have had particular resonance in a colonial society whose institutions were modelled closely on the European parent, but lacked the same sense of rootedness. Hume’s sheep baron Mark Frettlby, pillar of the exclusive Melbourne Club, has acquired immense wealth in the New World while harbouring a secret which, if revealed, would bring instant social disgrace.

  The novel’s phenomenal success in Britain is perhaps explained by the fact that the Englishspeaking world was then more closely knit than might seem the case today. The Hansom Cab appeared in England at a time when wealthy squatters were much in the news and had been featured in the work of Dickens and Trollope. The best known instance in literature of the myth of an antipodean transformation from rags to riches is of course Magwitch in Dickens’s Great Expectations.

  The depiction of the horrors of urban poverty was the staple of ‘slum sketches’ regularly printed in contemporary newspapers in both Australia and England and is still the stuff of innumerable current affairs stories. Hume’s realism has the journalistic attention to authentic detail found in Dickens and Balzac.

  Characters such as the shrewish landladies and Mother Guttersnipe are drawn with memorable grotesquerie. Similarly, the satire involving Dora Featherweight and her piano tutor Signor Thumpanini is a straightforward poke at bourgeois pretension. Hume himself was an accomplished musician which probably explains why he chose to grind this particular axe.
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br />   Where Hume shows signs of greater originality is in his use of documentary material. His first three chapters consist of a dossier. The sense that the reader has opened up a case file enhances the novel’s verisimilitude.

  Hume’s depiction of legal proceedings is similarly realistic and indeed sits somewhat incongruously with his more melodramatic domestic scenes. Madge Frettlby and Brian Fitzgerald are suitably idealised, she an heiress with a heart of gold and he the passionate Celtic heart-throb.

  This is a novel that is conventionally Victorian and yet surprisingly ahead of its time. Like the hard-boiled crime writers of subsequent generations Hume prefers the back lanes to the drawing-room and shows his detectives as flawed and prone to use unorthodox methods in pursuit of their quarry.

  There is even a touch of nascent multiculturalism in the book. Sal Rawlins, the unwitting agent of social subversion and saviour of the hero, is not ashamed to admit that she ‘tooked up with a Chinaman’. Later, she becomes part of the Frettlby household with remarkable ease.

  Although he likens Melbourne more than once to London, Hume sees his city as already evolving its own character. He offers this rather laconic prediction for its future:

  In spite of the dismal prognostications of Marcus Clarke regarding the future Australian, whom he describes as being ‘a tall, coarse, strong-jawed, greedy, pushing, talented man, excelling in swimming and horsemanship,’ it is more likely that he will be a cultured, indolent individual, with an intense appreciation of the arts and sciences, and a dislike for hard work and utilitarian principles.

  Hume’s implied scale of values is democratic as well as cosmopolitan. The detective who finally identifies the murderer is rewarded with an annuity that enables him to carry on private practice, a position he gains through merit rather than the kind of privilege bestowed on a Lord Peter Whimsey.