The Mystery of a Hansom Cab by Fergus W. Hume 3.5 stars
The Mystery of a Hansom Cab by Fergus W. Hume
The Mystery of a Hansom Cab

Fergus W. Hume
Melbourne Trilogy #1
  • Category:Crime Fiction
  • Date Read:22 August 2025
  • Published:1886
  • Pages:221
    • 3.5 stars
Toriaz

The Mystery of a Hansom Cab is one of the earliest detective novels published, providing a bridge between the sensation novels that were popular from the 1860s, and later detective novels. In its day, it was incredibly popular. It was the bestselling crime novel of the nineteenth century. It sold 100,000 copies in Australia in its first two print runs, then 300,000 copies were sold in its first six months of publication in London in 1887. In comparison, A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes story, attracted very little interest when it was first published in the Beeton’s Christmas Annual in November 1887. The Holmes stories only became popular when the first short stories were published in 1891. Such are the vagaries of publishing: while very few people today will have heard of Hume’s novel, Holmes is now part of our culture.

Hume’s novel begins with a Melbourne newspaper report of a murder which has occurred in the early hours of a Friday morning. A dead body is discovered by a driver in a hansom cab. The driver gives the police a clear story: two people got into the cab and he was directed to drive to St Kilda. One passenger was very drunk; the other was helping the drunkard home. On route, the sober passenger signalled for the driver to stop and got out, saying that the drunk man did not want his help. Arriving at St Kilda, the cab found the drunk man dead. This newspaper account is extremely detailed and gives us everything we need to know about the murder, including the detail that there are no identity documents on the dead man. At the inquest three days later, the man has still not been identified.

The story then follows Mr Gorby of the detective service for some time as he puzzles out the identity of the victim and slowly unearths a possible suspect, a man called Fitzgerald. At this point, we also start following Brian Fitzgerald, a handsome young man from Ireland who has made a fortune in Australia. We are privy to Brian’s thoughts and he certainly has a guilty secret, one he is determined to keep from his fiancée, Madge Frettlby, daughter of a wealthy grazier. Eventually, Gorby tracks down Brian and arrests him for the murder. Brian stays determinedly silent, denying his guilt but refusing to offer any explanation of where he was that night. But he has a good lawyer who is determined to save his client from himself. The lawyer teams up with another detective, a rival of Gorby, to find out what really happened, before Fitzgerald comes to trial. This is what makes up the main mystery and provides most of the action in this book. I assumed the trial was going to the point of resolution, with the murderer revealed, Perry Mason style, at the most dramatic point. But there is much more to this story than such a simple resolution.

For a mystery that seemed so straightforward, at first, there turns out to be a lot of layers to it. These get revealed gradually over the course of the book. The action moves at a fairly rapid pace in the first half of the book (rapid by 19th century standards at any rate), with both detectives using logical reasoning and clues to find the answers.

And along the way we get a great picture of daily life in Melbourne in the 1880s, especially among the lower classes. We get one scene set in Collins Street, described as the Melbourne equivalent of Bond Street and the Row in London, or the Boulevards of Paris. The wealthy are out, displaying new dresses, bowing to their friends and cutting their enemies dead. Brian and Madge are out in this crowd, part of the privileged gathering. Just a few chapters later our lawyer and detective are deep in the slums of Little Bourke Street, just a few blocks from Collins Street. Within a short walk they travel from a space of privilege to an area “which made the lawyer shudder, as he wondered how human beings could live in such a murky place”. Here they find a dwelling with a “low, dark, ill-smelling passage” with "rotten boards full of holes" where "he could hear the rats squeaking and scampering away on all sides". Here they find Mother Guttersnipe, a wonderful character who is described as “a repulsive-looking old crone; and in truth, her ugliness was, in its very grotesqueness well worthy the pencil of Doré”. These two extremes of wealth and poverty come together in Hume’s plot.

Hume packs his story with lots of classical references, from Shakespeare to Poe and many others. Even Thomas De Quincey’s essay on murder as entertainment gets mentioned a few times. Hume also throws in a cheeky reference to Emile Gaboriau, the French writer he used to get an idea of how to write a detective novel.

The story is a little melodramatic, mixing murder and romance to create what is just a fun book. It deserves to be more widely read, as a well thought out murder mystery. I thought I had figured out who the murderer really was, only to be thrown by a late twist that I didn’t see coming. Recommended.

Fergus W. Hume
Fergus Hume, circa 1886
Fergus Hume, circa 1886. Hume was raised in New Zealand where he studied law and was called to the Bar. He then emigrated to Australia where he worked as a legal clerk while attempting to become a playwright. No one would even look at his plays, so he decided to write a book instead. He consulted a bookseller on “what style of book he sold the most of”, learned that the French writer Emile Gaboriau’s detective novels were popular, and so bought a stack of them to study. He then composed The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, supposedly becoming inspired after a late night journey in a hansom cab where he realised the vehicle was a perfect place for a murder, concealed from the driver by the cab’s design.
No publisher would even look at his manuscript, so Hume published it himself, with an initial print run of 5,000. This sold out within three weeks, leading him to publish more copies. Hume then sold his copyright for £50 to a group of English investors who published the novel in London. Hume then moved to England and produced another 130 novels before his death in 1932.
A Hansom Cab in London
A Hansom Cab, London
A hansom cab is a type of horse-drawn carriage designed and patented in 1834 by Joseph Hansom, an architect from York. They were popular because they were fast, light enough to be pulled by a single horse (making a journey cheaper than travelling in a larger four-wheel coach) and were agile enough to steer around other horse-drawn vehicles. You can see from the position of the driver, standing behind the cab, that he would be completely unaware of what was happening in his cab.
Hansom Cab Shelter for cab drivers, Melbourne, 1903
Hansom Cab Shelter and Hansom Cab, Melbourne, 1903
This photo shows one of around forty hansom cab shelters erected in Melbourne for the benefit of cab drivers awaiting fares. Hansom Cabs were a popular form of transport in Melbourne in the 1800s, but their appeal waned as other forms of public transport were developed. This image was taken in February 1903 for The Weekly Times, in the years prior to the final decline of the Hansom Cab in that city. The introduction of motor cars into the city in 1909, and the introduction of continuous electric tram services in 1906 (trams were first introduced in 1884) led to the decline of the hansom cab service in the city.
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Lady Audley's Secret

Sensation novels were a popular form of fiction that were popular in the second half of the 19th century in Great Britain. They focused on taboo subjects and subjects that would be shocking to their readers. Their popularity grew from the public’s interest in criminal biographies, Gothic fiction and romance.

Three novels are generally held to have signalled the emergence of Sensation Fiction: The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, published in 1860, East Lynne by Mrs Henry Wood, published in 1861, and Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, published in 1862.

The Woman in White combined Gothic horror and psychological realism to produce an early form of the detective novel. East Lynne involved a sad plot around infidelity, a lost child, disguise and double identities. Lady Audley’s Secret was based upon real incidents involving bigamy, murder and arson and was one of the most successful Sensation Novels of the period.

Sensation novels were the precursors to pulp fiction magazines that gained popularity at the end of the 19th century, as well as crime stories like The Mystery of a Hansom Cab.

Gustave Doré
Gustave Doré

Gustave Doré was a French printmaker, illustrator, painter, comics artist, caricaturist, and sculptor. He is best known as an illustrator of literature, including books like Dante’s Divine Comedy, as well as an illustrated edition of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. He also made illustration for the Vulgate Bible.

Doré’s ability to capture supernatural scenes as well as caricatures of grotesque people is possibly the source of Hume’s colourful description of Mother Guttersnipe as “worthy the pencil of Doré.”

‘On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts’ is a trilogy of essays by Thomas De Quincey begun in 1827. The essays are a satirical account of a gentlemans club that celebrates homicide from an aesthetic perspective. The Ratcliff Highway murders of 1811 are a keystone throughout the series.

Source: Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Murder_Considered_as_one_of_the_Fine_Arts

Émile Gaboriau
Émile Gaboriau

Émile Gaboriau was a French writer, novelist, journalist, and a pioneer of detective fiction. His novel L'Affaire Lerouge, published in 1866, is considered to be the first detective story in France. Gaboriau was influenced by Baudelaire’s translations of Edgar Allan Poe into French. His own novel introduced a police officer Monsieur Lecoq, who was based on a real-life thief who became a police officer. He would be revived in later novels as the hero.

Gaboriau’s approach to writing was influenced by developments in the science of this period. Positivism, the belief that science was the best method to develop facts and an understanding of reality, influenced the methods by which his detective stories progressed.

Gaboriau’s fiction would later influence Athur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, as well as Fergus Hume, who bought Gaboriau’s books to study.