Blockbuster! : Fergus Hume and the Mystery of a Hansom Cab

“Everybody did everything right….from the author who researched his market and plotted his whodunnit carefully, to the publisher who packaged an attractive product and marketed it with real brilliance. As a result, Hansom Cab became a fad, the book everybody had to read, commodity capitalism at work”.

Blockbuster! Fergus Hume and The Mystery of a Hansom Cab is a non-fiction book by New Zealand-born researcher, editor, writer and literary archaeologist (who ever knew there was such a person?), Lucy Sussex. In the late nineteenth century, Dunedin émigré, Fergus Hume wrote a detective novel to try to interest Melbourne theatres in his work as a playwright. That book, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, became the biggest and fastest-selling detective novel of its time, outselling Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes book: a literary blockbuster.

As well as touching on Hume’s own story, Sussex’s meticulous research examines lives, fortunes and ultimate fates of those involved in the writing, publication and marketing of Hanson Cab: readers, reviewers, investors, supporters and publishers, to name a few. The impersonations, scams and fraud that resulted from this publishing phenomenon are also described. Each chapter is prefaced by a relevant quote from one of Hume’s later works, showing how incidents in his life became inspiration for these.

Sussex also provides a selection of reviews of the Hansom Cab, four pages of relevant colour plates, an extensive bibliography and comprehensive end-notes and index. She discusses the likely fate and provenance of the few remaining (and very valuable) copies of early editions. This is a book that will appeal to readers who like to get behind the story.

Sussex tells us just how important this book was: “Above all, the work consolidated detective fiction as a publishing genre, one with a mass readership of avid fans……others had shown that the market existed for tales of crime, but it took the blockbusting success of Hanson Cab, achieved by Trischler’s brilliant marketing, to prove how lucrative crime fiction crime fiction could be. Publishers took note and, over a century later, detective fiction is still a marker leader”. A very interesting read.