Fergus Hume

Fergus Hume was born on 8 July 1859 in England. He grew up in Dunedin, New Zealand, where he was educated at Otago Boys' High School and the University of Otago, where he studied law and literature. Admitted to the New Zealand Bar in 1885, he emigrated to Australia in the same year and found himself a job as the managing clerk for the solicitor E. S. Raphael in Melbourne.

He began writing plays with limited success until, under the influence of the pioneer detective fiction writer Émile Gaboriau, he produced The Mystery of a Hansom Cab in 1886. With this novel, he became one of the first writers to work in the mystery genre. According to Hume, Melbourne publishers refused even to look at his manuscript ‘on the ground that no Colonial could write anything worth reading’. Hume determined to publish it himself and had 5,000 copies printed by Kemp and Boyce. It sold out in three weeks. The novel went on to achieve world-wide success but, having sold the rights to speculators for a meagre fifty pounds, Hume made little financial gain from it. More than half a million copies of the book were sold during his lifetime.

A dramatised version of The Mystery of a Hansom Cab was produced at the Alexandra Theatre in 1888. In that same year Hume left Australia for England and during the voyage wrote Madame Midas, a novel about mining life mixing realistic and sensational modes, set in Ballarat and Melbourne. He went on to write some 140 novels. Apart from The Mystery of a Hansom Cab and Madame Midas, only Miss Mephistopheles (1890), Whom God Hath Joined (1891) and High Water Mark (1911) are set in Australia. Hume died at Thundersley, Essex, on 12 July 1932.

Biographical summary derived from:

E. Morris Miller, Australian Literature from its Beginnings to 1935, Melbourne University Press, 1940.

The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, William H. Wilde, Joy Hooton and Barry Andrews eds, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985.

AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource (www.austlit.edu.au). AustLit is freely available at many libraries, universities and schools. For further details see: www.austlit.edu.au/subscription