Fergus Hume’s Mystery of a Hansom Cab – Melbourne, it’s Glory Days and its Chinatown

Australian ABC Radio National’s excellent The Book Show broadcast a fascinating programme on Fergus Hume’s (below) 1886 novel Mystery of a Hansom Cab. I hadn’t thought about the book for years – I read it originally on a trip to Melbourne where the story is set. I was bored, jetlagged, didn’t know anyone and had nothing to do – the book saved me – I was riveted and read it while exploring the city. It’s a great murder thriller that predates Conan Doyle so is one of the first in the genre and clearly influential on the writers who followed. It’s also a fascinating (though I’m not altogether sure how accurate) portrait of Melbourne in the latter half of the nineteenth century and Melbourne’s Chinatown.

The opening paragraph was enough to grip me when I picked it up, never having heard of it before, in a Melbourne bookshop:

Truth is said to be stranger than fiction, and certainly the extraordinary murder which took place in Melbourne on Thursday night, or rather Friday morning, goes a long way towards verifying this saying. A crime has been committed by an unknown assassin, within a short distance of the principal streets of this great city, and is surrounded by an impenetrable mystery. Indeed, from the nature of the crime itself, the place where it was committed, and the fact that the assassin has escaped without leaving a trace behind him, it would seem as though the case itself had been taken bodily out of one of Gaboriau’s novels, and that his famous detective Lecoq only would be able to unravel it. The facts of the case are simply these:-

On the twenty-seventh of July, at the hour of twenty minutes to two o’clock in the morning, a hansom cab drove up to the police station, in Grey Street, St Kilda, and the driver made the startling statement that his cab contained the body of a man whom he had the reason to believe had been murdered.

A couple of things also fascinated me about the book – which is a great sprawling story taking the reader all over Melbourne in its Gold Rush glory days (just before the Australian crash). Firstly, despite all the talk of Australia as a new country at the time we are confronted with a host of characters including Mother Guttersnipe who are clearly the residue of the convicts and who, in their speech and mannerisms, are pure good old time London low life (a species I know pretty well). The book also features a depiction of Melbourne’s Chinatown at the time (again I can’t attest to the accuracy of the depiction) but it’s a thrilling read. The picture opposite is slightly later – 1900 – of kids in Melbourne’s Chinatown. Many of the locations can still be traced around Melbourne which adds something to strolling Bourke and Collins Street at 6am jetlagged (as I ended up doing!!).

There’s any number of editions available though the one pictured has a nice historical shot on the front.