Before there was Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, there was Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab-the biggest- and fastest-selling detective novel of the 1800s, and Australia's first literary blockbuster.
Fergus Hume was an aspiring playwright when he moved from Dunedin to Melbourne in 1885. He wrote The Mystery of a Hansom Cab with the humble hope of bringing his name to the attention of theatre managers. The book sold out its first run almost instantly and it became a runaway word-of-mouth phenomenon-but its author sold the copyright for a mere fifty pounds, missing out on a potential fortune.
Blockbuster! is the engrossing story of a book that would help define the genre of crime fiction, and a portrait of a great city in full bloom. Rigorously researched and full of arresting detail, this captivating book is a must-read for all fans of true crime, history and crime fiction alike.
a very interesting read
“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.
Marianne, 24/06/2015
