Ever practical, he decided to publish the book himself and sold 5000 copies within three weeks in October 1886. By the end of the year a total of 20,000 copies had been printed in a city whose population was at the time less than half a million. Virtually every literate adult in Melbourne must have read the book.

Flushed with the provincial success he had hoped for, Hume decided to accept an offer to sell his copyright by a group of English investors who had formed themselves into The Hansom Cab Publishing Company in order to publish his novel in London. He was paid the paltry sum of £50. As he later explained: ‘The story was written only to attract local attention and no one was more astonished than I when it passed beyond the narrow circles for which it had originally been intended.’

Despite massive sales in Britain, The Hansom Cab Publishing Company went bankrupt in 1889. Rights in the novel eventually passed to the large London publisher Jarrolds, who persuaded Hume to revise the text, which meant cutting out some of the local detail and watering down language considered strong for the time.

Hume’s hero Brian Fitzgerald and heroine Madge Frettlby are by the end of The Hansom Cab keen to leave Melbourne, as was the author himself. After living in the city for barely two years, Hume sailed for Europe in 1888 and never returned. He settled in England and embarked on a prodigious writing career that produced over 130 further novels, as well as many stories and articles before his death in 1932 at his home in the town of Thundersley, Essex.

None of these books approached the popularity and enduring appeal of his first novel and are now all but forgotten. Hume wrote several novels with Australian settings and references but only two made any impression. The most substantial of these is Madame Midas, A Realistic and Sensational Story of Melbourne Mining Life (1888), set mainly in Melbourne and on the Ballarat goldfields. In some ways a more accomplished work than his first novel, it recounts a poisoning case which interests two of the characters who appear in The Hansom Cab, the lawyer Calton and the detective Kilsip. Hume’s other major Australian novel is the underrated Miss Mephistopheles (1890), whose milieu is Melbourne’s theatrical and literary circles and which features a diamond robbery and the murder of a pawnbroker.

The Hansom Cab meanwhile established itself as a classic of its kind. It was so famous that many claimed authorship and Hume was forced to assert the truth of his identity in the 1896 preface. In 1888 a parody by ‘W. Humer Ferguson’ appeared, billed as a ‘bloodcurdling romance’ and entitled The Mystery of a Wheelbarrow, or Gaboriau Gaborooed, an Idealistic Story of a Great and Rising Colony. The identity of the parodist is unknown and the context of the humour largely lost, but, if nothing else, the book is a gauge of the success of Hume’s original.

Hume described himself as a ‘storyteller’ rather than ‘novelist’ in his Who’s Who entry. Although his writing career benefited from the book’s runaway success, he was also in a sense trapped by it. Hume never fulfilled his ambition to write plays, complaining that publishers would not hear of him writing anything but detective stories.

Oddly enough, an adaptation of The Hansom Cab was produced in theatres in Australia and London in the late 1880s. The London production, which Hume co-authored with Arthur Law, ran for five hundred nights. The story was filmed three times in the silent era and a radio version by Michael Hardwick was broadcast by the BBC in 1950 and 1960. In 1961 Barry Pree mounted a new stage adaptation in Melbourne.

The novel’s fame endured until well into this century. In 1954 the Sunday Times listed it as one of the hundred best crime novels of all time. Six years later Everyman’s Dictionary of Literary Biography declared that The Hansom Cab ‘ranks as the most successful detective story of all time’.

In its day The Hansom Cab put Australia on the literary map. The novelist Miles Franklin, writing in 1956, commented that the novel was all many people overseas seemed to know about Australian literature. ‘This old vehicle has renown beyond these shores,’ she wrote, ‘and it still serves visitors caught beyond these shores, who point their ignorance facetiously by confessing that it was the extent of their knowledge that an Australian literature existed till some hazard brought them hither.’

Though never long out of print, The Hansom Cab, with the notable exception of Stephen Knight, has been disregarded by critics. There is no biography of Hume and commentators tend to see the novel as a statistical freak or bibliographical curiosity rather than as one of the pioneering works in its genre.

Of particular interest now is Hume’s vivid evocation of a thriving yet deeply divided Victorian metropolis. The kind of cross-sectional representation of urban reality applied to late 1980s New York by Tom Wolfe in The Bonfire of the Vanities was anticipated by Hume a century earler in the Australian city which in its heyday was known as ‘Marvellous Melbourne’.

Like the New York of Wolfe’s ‘Masters of the Universe’, Melbourne in the 1880s was in the grip of an immense economic boom, fuelled by dubious financial speculation and soon to end in disaster. It was a laissez faire prosperity in which fortunes could be made and lost almost instantaneously and defalcation was rife. The Hansom Cab itself became a footnote to the shady dealings of the time when a banker named George Nicholson Taylor, later jailed for fraud, spread the story that his ill-gotten gains were partly the result of a share of profits made from backing its publication.

Hume’s extremes of rich and poor are represented by the Collins Street ‘Block’ and the slums of Little Bourke Street. The streets themselves are a stone’s throw from each other and Hume contrives a plot that brings their separate worlds into collision.