Hume, Fergus - The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886)

Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886) greatest importance might be in its ordinariness. It is not a great novel, but it is a real modern style detective story way back when. It probably helped solidify the genre, and pave the way for such modern detective novelists as Agatha Christie. The book was an immense best seller, and probably deeply affected what many people of its era thought of as a paradigmatic detective story.

It is a one volume novel (250 pages), and there are no Gaboriau-Green-Doyle style flashbacks to previous histories taking up the second half of the book. The story is all mystery and detection. Yet it does not focus so relentlessly on the detective and his or her work as do the casebook school and Gaboriau. There is room instead in the book for the development of a series of characters who will serve as suspects, their relationships, and the complex events into which they are drawn, a tangle which forms the substance of the plot. This reminds one very much of the circle of characters who populate a typical Golden Age detective novel, such as Christie, Marsh, or Van Dine. Intermixed with this there is an investigation of the crime itself, shadowings by the detective of various suspects, and such subsequent mystery staples as an inquest and a trial. This is exactly the mix one finds in an average Golden Age book, and it is still the formula of a "typical" whodunit of today.

Hume cites many ancestors in his novel: Poe, Gaboriau (the Preface), Du Boisgobey (the end of Chapter 1, where Hume compares the plot of Hansom Cab to Du Boisgobey's An Omnibus Mystery), Green (Chapter 7), Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Chapter 8). Hansom Cab is full of literary references and quotations, mainly to literary figures like Virgil, Thomas Moore, Thackeray, Disraeli, Dickens, Shakespeare, etc. He also quotes Australian writer Marcus Clarke (Chapter 15). Hume, like Poe and Green, thought that books should be full of quotations. I've always enjoyed this style of writing, but it is not in critical favor today.

His Preface states that he used Gaboriau's novels as his model. Well, this is undoubtedly historically true, and yet... The famous, much reprinted quotation from the Preface to Hansom Cab about Hume being influenced by Gaboriau's popularity is very misleading. Hume and Gaboriau resemble each other little as writers, and it is clear that Hume had read many other late 19th Century mystery writers. His book seems very different from Gaboriau, and from Poe and Green. In one way, the difference is just sheer blandness: Hume lacks the distinguishing traits of these writers. He does not have Gaboriau's brilliant deductions from evidence, or his carefully characterized police. He does not have Green's atmosphere of horror, and crimes based on the extremes of passion, or her relentlessly brilliant detective work. He does not deal in the baroque secrets of the Sensation writers. Hume's work is closest to Du Boisgobey, who concentrated on the personal and romantic lives of his suspects. Hume emphasizes a group of fairly normal people who get involved in a mysterious murder, and in which all of them look fairly suspicious. Hume's ability to make the relations of the characters to each other ambiguous, so that events can be interpreted in a multitude of ways, is at the core of the modern detective novel. It is certainly a staple of Christie, and before her Orczy. It allows characters to look suspicious, without actually being guilty, and it allows the author to spring a surprise solution to the mystery at the end of the tale, one that depends on interpreting the relations in the story in a different fashion than they first appeared. A similar ambiguous set of relations propels Hume's pleasantly done tale, "The Greenstone God and the Stockbroker" (1893). Hume's various twists and turns on the relationships are nowhere as clever as Christie's, but they certainly point in the same direction.

One suspects that both Orczy and Zangwill used Hume as their rough foundation for what a detective story should be. The inquest that opens Hume's novel is a prominent feature in their work too.

Hume is fairly dispassionate. He refers to a murder mystery as a puzzle at one point, one of the earliest comparisons of a mystery to a puzzle that I know of. Hume lacks the emotional intensity of earlier writers in the genre. He mainly maintains an attitude of calm interest in unraveling the crime. This too anticipates the Golden Age, as well as such calm writers as Orczy and Zangwill. Certainly he was vastly less dynamic as a storyteller than Doyle.

One area in which Hume does recall Gaboriau is in his lyrical descriptions. The scenes at night wandering around Melbourne are especially beautiful.

Hume's late story, "The Ghost's Touch", shows his involvement in the supernatural detective movement of the era.

Hume's dialogue and characterization sometimes reminds one of Agatha Christie. Here for example, the good natured, somewhat superficial Society gossip Felix discusses the crime in Hansom Cab (Chapter 7):

"I consider it reflects great credit on the police, discovering it so quickly".

"Puts one in mind of 'The Leavenworth Case', and all that sort of thing," said Felix, whose reading was of the lightest description. "Awfully exciting, like putting a Chinese puzzle together. Gad, I wouldn't mind being a detective myself."

"I'm afraid if that were the case," said Mr. Frettlby with an amused smile, "criminals would be pretty safe."

This sort of light hearted, gently satirical depiction of Bright Young Things seems especially Christie like. Christie often used constructions like "Felix, whose reading was of the lightest description" in her writing. It bounces the speaker's dialogue off facts about the person's background. It helps the story achieve flow, where the characterization moves along with the conversation. Often in Christie, such constructions suggest the speaker is following some well worn social path, limited by convention and/or superficiality, and is mildly satirical of it.

Mike Grost