The Mystery of a Hansom Cab

Fergus Hume

01/2010 · Sydney University Press

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A timeless narrative of suspense and intrigue, Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886) is the original Australian best-selling crime novel set in pre-Federation Melbourne. From the salons of the city's elite to the slums of Little Bourke St, the exquisitely plotted story follows the investigation, inquest and trial of the murder of a little-known English migrant.

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Born in England in 1859 and educated in Dunedin, New Zealand, Hume
had been working as a solicitor’s clerk in Melbourne since 1885 when he set out to become a writer. The theatres, salons, galleries, literary
societies, bookshops and burgeoning periodical press of ‘Marvellous
Melbourne’ were second-to-none, even by European standards, and
aspiring writers might look to the careers of older contemporaries like
theatre critic James Edward Neild, or literary journalist, playwright and
novelist Marcus Clarke, who had in died Melbourne in 1881. We can
imagine Hume hanging about restaurants and theatres like the famous
Café de Paris at the Theatre Royal in Bourke Street, haunts of the colonial literati evoked by Marcus Clarke in his essays of the 1860s, or cruising Melbourne’s many bookshops where, according to Clarke, one could pick up cheap second-hand editions by fashionable European writers like De Quincy, Hugo and Balzac— or the French crime novelist, Emile Gaboriau (Clarke, 62–82).