Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab

By Lucy Sussex

Fergus Hume’s 1886 novel The Mystery of a Hansom Cab was a genuine literary blockbuster, a murder mystery written and first published in Melbourne. When reprinted overseas in 1887 it achieved sales of half a million internationally. The book led to a successful stage play, a copycat murder, and a long career for Hume as a writer of thrillers, over one hundred in total. But he never surpassed the success of his debut, the copyright of which he had unwisely sold for £50.

The Mystery of a Hansom Cab begins with a brilliant device, drawing the reader into the text and creating an unassailable verisimilitude: reportage from Melbourne’s daily newspapers. Most readers of the time would have followed crime via the papers; indeed this popular past-time was referred to as ‘murder-mania’ and was common to all sectors of society. Hume’s fictional report of a murder is followed by the evidence of the inquest, then the announcement of the reward. Only then, the reader neatly hooked, does the novel proper begin, with the appearance of police detective Gorby, ruminating on the case.

Hume had grown up in New Zealand, where he performed in amateur theatricals. In Melbourne, even while working as a lawyer, he wrote theatre criticism for Melbourne’s Table Talk. He claimed to have written his novel with a view to attracting the attention of theatre managers, who would otherwise not look at his plays. Certainly the work has a strong visual and theatrical feel, with much of the action being told via dialogue. Characters tend to the stock figures of popular drama, such as the comic landlady. The work can even be regarded as a series of tableaux or scenes written to be easily staged: the St Kilda mansion of squatter millionaire Mark Frettlby or the descent into the Hell of the Melbourne slums. Indeed in 1888 the book was dramatised by the English dramatist Arthur Law, with a real hansom cab and horse driven onto the stage.

Hume does not have a single detective as hero, as did Poe, and Conan Doyle with his Sherlock Holmes. His detection is divided among police and amateurs, including the lawyer Calton, and even the heroine Madge Frettlby plays a part. Such was a typical model for detective fiction in the nineteenth century, when the genre was still in a process of formation and codification. It would only be (brand) named in the 1880s, something from which Hume benefited: his work was easily labeled and occupied a market niche. In turn the English success of The Mystery of a Hansom Cab created an audience soon to be enjoying the first Sherlock Holmes stories, which appeared in Christmas 1887. Doyle is a direct beneficiary of Hume’s commercially, but looks back to Poe in his use of the short fiction form, and the single detective.

The Mystery of a Hansom Cab novel is an accomplished whodunnit, whose murderer can even now not be easily guessed. Hume in fact rewrote the ending, as he felt his original culprit was too easily discerned. It also possesses a distinct characteristic of the crime genre, a strong sense of place. 1880s ‘Melbourne the Marvellous’ is fully evoked, a boom city encompassing the Block, where the wealthy promenade, and the slums of Little Bourke Street, only a short distance away. Hume had walked the mean streets of old Melbourne for research, collecting vivid local colour. He would even claim some characters, such as his landladies and the villainous Mother Guttersnipe, were based on real people. Hume was not the first skilled writer to apply crime to Melbourne, that being the achievement of Ellen Davitt with her novel Force and Fraud (1865) and Mary Fortune in the longest-running early detective serial known, The Detective’s Album, published in the Australian Journal from 1868–1908. But he was its most successful exponent in novel form.

Among the complexities of his plot, with its red herrings and acute social commentary, Hume finds time to speculate about future Australians:

Some writer has described Melbourne as Glasgow, with the sky of Alexandria; and certainly the beautiful climate of Australia, so Italian in its brightness, must have a great effect on the nature of such an adaptable race as the Anglo-Saxon. 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 to hard work and utilitarian principles. Climatic influence should be taken into account with regard to the future Australian, and our posterity will be no more like us than the luxurious Venetians resembled their hardy forefathers, who first started to build on those lonely sandy islands of the Adriatic.

His Melbourne is an uneasy creation, where the flaunted wealth is built on dubious foundations, and respectability may be snatched away at any moment. Members of high society have seedy pasts, and the common practice of bigamy (known in Australia as ‘poor man’s divorce’) sometimes render an heir portionless, or leave the richest of men open to blackmail. The city seems confident, but anxiety lurks, and here Hume is prophetic, for with the bank closures of the 1890s, Melbourne did indeed crash and dive.

For a first attempt at a crime novel, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab is extremely skilled in its plotting, showing that Hume was a natural at the murder mystery form. The novel has an acute eye for a city and its inhabitants that evokes Dickens in its range. Hume depicts high and low without fear or favour. The Mystery of a Hansom Cab can still be read with enjoyment today, not only as social history, but by detective buffs. Marvellous Melbourne may have been largely lost, but its surviving landmarks—the Scots Church, the Block Arcade—are still signposts to a world that Hume so magnificently depicts.