Sand on the Gumshoe

FERGUS HUME

The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, the first of some 140 novels written by Fergus Hume, is also the only one he is remembered for. Hume was born in England in 1859 and travelled with his family to New Zealand where his father, Dr James Hume, assisted in the foundation of Ashburn Hall, Dunedin. He made a career in law, was admitted to the Bar in 1885 but soon after travelled to Melbourne.

It was literary, not legal, fame that Fergus Hume lusted after and in 1886 he privately published The Mystery of a Hansom Cab. The first print run, comprising 5,000 copies, sold quickly and another soon followed. Despite the success, Hume sold all rights for £50 and he did not share in the wealth that spilled from the novel both in Australia and overseas.

As business moves go, it wasn’t a particularly smart one. He published another novel, Professor Brankel’s Secret (Melbourne, W.M. Baird, 1886), then returned to Britain where his output exceeded the prolific. The rest of his novels were merely Victorian pot-boilers with hardly any mitigating interest. A few, including Madam Midas (London, Hansom Cab Publishing Company and New York, Munro, 1888) and Miss Mephistopheles (London, F.V. White, 1890; New York, Lovell, 1890), had Australian settings. Although ‘The Green-stone God and the Stock broker’ from The Dwarf’s Chamber (London, Ward Lock & Bowden 1896), is set firmly in England, it shows what Hume could do with the detective genre on a good day.