... 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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Fergus Hume
Australian crime fiction

The father of Australian crime fiction ...

Peter Corris, according to the Australian Crime Fiction Database, "is credited with reviving the fully-fledged Australian crime novel with local settings and reference points and with a series character firmly rooted in Australian culture -- Cliff Hardy." He has also been called the father of Australian crime fiction.

If Corris is the father of Australian crime fiction because of his emphasis on local settings, then Fergus Hume deserves to be called the grandfather for the same reason. Here's Hume from a preface to The Mystery of a Hansom Cab: "Having completed the book, I tried to get it published, but every one to whom I offered it refused even to look at the manuscript on the ground that no Colonial could write anything worth reading."

And here is just one of several similar references from the body of this 1886 novel: "But it is impossible that the body can remain long without being identified by someone, as though Melbourne is a large city, yet it is neither Paris nor London, where a man can disappear in a crowd and never be heard of again."

Seldom can there have been a crime novel more conscious of its setting.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Peter Corris
Cliff Hardy
Fergus Hume
Australian crime fiction