This much is foreshadowed in the novel’s epigram, published on the original title page: ‘As marine plants floating on the surface of waves appear distinct growths yet spring unseen from a common centre, so individuals apparently strangers to each other are indissolubly connected by many invisible bonds and sympathies which are known only to themselves.’

In adopting this as his major theme, Hume, like Wilkie Collins and others, touches that very sensitive Victorian nerve in his readers: respectability. The discovery of the killer is a fairly straightforward process of elimination; the incidental revelations about identity and the fragility of social position that are thrown up by the investigation are the true sources of sensation.

This kind of sensitivity may have had particular resonance in a colonial society whose institutions were modelled closely on the European parent, but lacked the same sense of rootedness. Hume’s sheep baron Mark Frettlby, pillar of the exclusive Melbourne Club, has acquired immense wealth in the New World while harbouring a secret which, if revealed, would bring instant social disgrace.

The novel’s phenomenal success in Britain is perhaps explained by the fact that the Englishspeaking world was then more closely knit than might seem the case today. The Hansom Cab appeared in England at a time when wealthy squatters were much in the news and had been featured in the work of Dickens and Trollope. The best known instance in literature of the myth of an antipodean transformation from rags to riches is of course Magwitch in Dickens’s Great Expectations.

The depiction of the horrors of urban poverty was the staple of ‘slum sketches’ regularly printed in contemporary newspapers in both Australia and England and is still the stuff of innumerable current affairs stories. Hume’s realism has the journalistic attention to authentic detail found in Dickens and Balzac.

Characters such as the shrewish landladies and Mother Guttersnipe are drawn with memorable grotesquerie. Similarly, the satire involving Dora Featherweight and her piano tutor Signor Thumpanini is a straightforward poke at bourgeois pretension. Hume himself was an accomplished musician which probably explains why he chose to grind this particular axe.

Where Hume shows signs of greater originality is in his use of documentary material. His first three chapters consist of a dossier. The sense that the reader has opened up a case file enhances the novel’s verisimilitude.

Hume’s depiction of legal proceedings is similarly realistic and indeed sits somewhat incongruously with his more melodramatic domestic scenes. Madge Frettlby and Brian Fitzgerald are suitably idealised, she an heiress with a heart of gold and he the passionate Celtic heart-throb.

This is a novel that is conventionally Victorian and yet surprisingly ahead of its time. Like the hard-boiled crime writers of subsequent generations Hume prefers the back lanes to the drawing-room and shows his detectives as flawed and prone to use unorthodox methods in pursuit of their quarry.

There is even a touch of nascent multiculturalism in the book. Sal Rawlins, the unwitting agent of social subversion and saviour of the hero, is not ashamed to admit that she ‘tooked up with a Chinaman’. Later, she becomes part of the Frettlby household with remarkable ease.

Although he likens Melbourne more than once to London, Hume sees his city as already evolving its own character. He offers this rather laconic prediction for its future:

In spite of the dismal prognostications of Marcus Clarke regarding the future Australian, whom he describes as being ‘a tall, coarse, strong-jawed, greedy, pushing, talented man, excelling in swimming and horsemanship,’ it is more likely that he will be a cultured, indolent individual, with an intense appreciation of the arts and sciences, and a dislike for hard work and utilitarian principles.

Hume’s implied scale of values is democratic as well as cosmopolitan. The detective who finally identifies the murderer is rewarded with an annuity that enables him to carry on private practice, a position he gains through merit rather than the kind of privilege bestowed on a Lord Peter Whimsey.

Over one hundred years later, Melbourne continues to be the place Hume knew. The city is still very conservative yet entrepreneurial. Yesteryear’s speculations are today’s ‘major projects’. The public buildings hastily erected in the boom years were never fully executed— Parliament House, the GPO and Flinders Street Station—while newer additions such as the Crown Casino may never be finished.

The Hansom Cab has clearly worn well, though not all of its original readers would have predicted as much. For his part, the creator of Sherlock Holmes dismissed his rival’s work in a private letter as ‘One of the weakest tales I have read, simply sold by puffing’, but Conan Doyle also owes a considerable literary debt to Gaboriau and was not above using devices similar to those employed by Hume.

Some aspects of The Hansom Cab correspond directly with A Study in Scarlet, notably the rivalry between the detectives engaged officially in the investigation and the use of the hansom cab in the modus operandi of the killer. While there is no direct evidence of borrowing on the part of Doyle, these parallels do at the very least demonstrate that the two writers were separated by much less than the distance that lay between their respective cities.

Conan Doyle and Hume spearheaded different directions in crime fiction. Where Conan Doyle concentrates on the establishing the character of his protagonist, Hume’s detectives Gorby and Kilsip are merely two players within an ensemble of actors in the drama. Hume uses the mystery to anatomise the society in which his characters move.

The Mystery of a Hansom Cab stands in contradiction of the notion that best-sellers burn bright and fade fast. A panoramic depiction of a bustling yet uneasy city, the novel has a central place in Australian literary history. It is also a key text in crime fiction’s formative years.

* * *

Apart from minor corrections to spelling and punctuation, this edition for the first time reproduces the text of the original Melbourne edition printed by Kemp and Boyce in 1886. Other reprints have relied on later versions in which local details are omitted and the language is bowdlerised.

THE MYSTERY OF A HANSOM CAB

CHAPTER ONE

WHAT THE ARGUS SAID

The following report appeared in the Argus newspaper of Saturday, the 28th July, 18— :—

‘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 day 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 reason to believe had been murdered.

‘Being taken into the presence of the inspector, the cabman, who gave his name as Malcolm Royston, related the following strange story:—

‘At the hour of one o’clock in the morning, he was driving down Collins Street East, when as he was passing the Burke and Wills monument he was hailed by a gentleman standing at the corner by the Scotch Church. He immediately drove up, and saw that the gentleman who hailed him was supporting the deceased, who appeared to be very intoxicated.