... and the grandfather of Australian crime fiction

Fergus Hume spent his childhood and early adulthood in New Zealand and then Australia before moving back to his native England. While in Australia, he wrote a crime novel that enjoyed unprecedented success. The surprise is that he published the novel, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, in 1886.

"How strange it seems to Europeans, even to Americans, that the first crime novel to sell over half a million copes was written, set and published on the other side of the world in Melbourne, Australia," writes Stephen Knight in an introduction to a 1985 edition.

Knight discusses the novel in surprisingly modern terms: its analysis of nineteenth-century Melbourne society, its emphasis on confusion of identity, and its less than heroic heroes. The characters have a whiff of Dickens about them -- a fussy, complaining landlady, for example, or "a strikingly aristocratic individual" complete with "drooping straw-colored moustache." But the detective Gorby's investigative techniques seem far more realistic and closer to those of a modern police procedural than those of Sherlock Holmes, whose first appearance he precedes by a year.

A more useful comparison is Émile Gaboriau's Lecoq, whom Hume acknowledged as an inspiration and to whom the story alludes occasionally. These and other references within a detective story to other detective stories are another surprisingly modern touch to a story laid in gaslit rooming houses, horse-drawn cabs and cobble-stone streets.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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