Catching a cab

Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab is the story of an illegitimate child, a fear of family scandal and a homicide. Promoted as a startling and realistic story of Melbourne social life, the novel exemplifies the idea of a sensational mystery: a man murdered in a cab with no witnesses and no immediate motive. It offers a thrilling detective story as well as commentary on various aspects of Australia during the late 1800s.

Its author was born Fergusson Wright Hume in England on 8 July 1859. Migrating with his family to New Zealand as a young child, he was educated in Dunedin on the South Island. Hume went on to study law and, shortly after being admitted to the Bar, he migrated again — this time to Melbourne, Australia. Taking up a position with a local solicitor, Hume used one of the world’s great cities to set about establishing his literary career. The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, his first book, gave that career an incredible start.

Among the fascinating aspects of this pioneering crime novel is Hume’s engagement with ideas of punishment. In a chapter titled The Hands of Justice, Dr Chinston predicts that the man responsible for the murder will commit suicide. The prisoner politely obliges, on the very next page, when he 'hang[s] himself in his cell during the night'. Despite having trained for the legal profession, Hume preferred, in this instance at least, a far neater and quicker ending than a trial and subsequent sentencing could provide.

'I tried to get it published,' Hume complained after completing the novel, 'but everyone to whom I offered it refused even to look at the manuscript on the ground that no Colonial could write anything worth reading.' A determined and entrepreneurial Hume would set about the task of self-publishing and, in 1886, the printers Kemp and Boyce produced 5000 copies (with Hume claiming that all copies were sold within three weeks).

Today, the Library holds two copies of the first edition. Of four known to have survived, these are the only complete copies.

The book’s immediate and stunning success generated a vast array of editions. By some estimates 25,000 copies were sold in the first major Australian print runs alone. Having so many versions in print prompted one auction house to note that the bibliography of the book is confused and imperfect. Contributing to this confusion is the work of Frederick Trischler who, managing The Hansom Cab Publishing Company, went on to sell over 500,000 copies of the book. This made The Mystery of a Hansom Cab the biggest-selling detective novel of the nineteenth century. Hume did not profit financially from such unprecedented sales figures, having sold the rights to the book for £50. Yet this novel changed the landscape of popular fiction, and readers (as well as authors) from around the world benefited from his efforts.

As Dr Lucy Sussex, an authority on Australian colonial crime fiction, explains:

The book helped define the new publishing genre of detective fiction, alerting publishers to a new, and huge popular market — although the real beneficiary, it might be argued, was not Hume but Conan Doyle, whose first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, was not published until after The Mystery of a Hansom Cab.