Reading Matters’ Southern Cross Crime Month, March 2021

When Kim at Reading Matters announced Southern Cross Crime Month I had a C19th century Australian detective novel at the back of my mind but struggled to bring it into the light. It was not Ellen Davitt’s Force and Fraud (1886) which Lisa and I both reviewed on its publication in book form for the first time in 2017. Nor was it Madame Midas which I found serendipitously in my ‘new books’ TBR pile; it was of course Hume’s much more famous The Mystery of the Hansom Cab (1886), which seeing as it is not on my shelves I must have borrowed, probably as an audiobook.
The cover notes say Hume self-published The Mystery of the Hansom Cab in Melbourne, where it sold 20,000 copies. He then sold the copyright in London, where it was also a success, in fact “the best-selling mystery novel of the Victorian era”, for £50, and never received another penny. He went on to write 140 novels and a small number of plays.
Fergusson Wright Hume (1859-1932) was born in England, raised and educated in New Zealand, came to Melbourne in 1885 or 6 and returned to England in 1888 (ADB). For the short time he was here he shows a remarkably intimate knowledge of Melbourne life and of underground mining at Ballarat. But he betrays himself in the opening chapter when two French convicts escaped from New Caledonia drift in their stolen boat to the coast of Queensland.
A bleak-looking coast, with huge water-worn promontories jutting out into the sea, daring the tempestuous fury of the waves, which dashed furiously in sheets of foam against the iron rocks.. At the back the cliffs rose in a kind of semi-circle, black and precipitous, to the height of about a hundred feet… At the top of these inhospitable-looking cliffs a line of pale green betrayed the presence of vegetation, and from thence it spread inland into vast rolling pastures ending far away at the outskirts of the bush, above which could be seen giant mountains with snow-covered ranges.
The Madame Midas of the title is a real woman, known to the author, Alice Cornwell, who owned and made a fortune from the Midas Mine in Ballarat. Clare Wright devotes her Introduction to her, another Independent Woman to add to my list, though here she has the name Mrs Villiers. As it is an important part of the plot that Villiers defrauds and deserts her, it is no wonder the real husband sued Hume. Unsuccessfully apparently.
Although The Mystery of the Hansom Cab was reputedly the inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887) Madame Midas is not a detective novel. Prior to Sherlock Holmes it was common for the role of detective to be split amongst a number of characters, see Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860) for instance, but even that is not really the case here. About halfway through the novel Villiers attacks his estranged wife and steals from her an enormous gold nugget. Mrs Villiers knocks him down but we know he was still alive later in the night, after which he disappears, and although various people’ including the police, look for him, life goes on.
The two French escapees are a Parisian playboy convicted of poisoning his mistress, who adopts the name Gaston Vandeloup and a big, mute man, unable to read or write, or understand English, whom Vandeloup is constantly worried will reveal his secrets. After we have been introduced to Mrs Villiers and her mine, which is following a promising lead – the bed of a stream buried eons since which contains alluvial gold – the two Frenchmen turn up and are given jobs, Vandeloup as office manager.
Villiers is hanging around Ballarat looking to intimidate his estranged wife into sharing with him her new fortune, after having run through the fortune she inherited from her father. And we get to meet the pretty and innocent Kitty, daughter of a non-conformist minister. There’s also a family of travelling players who pop up as needed, and various others, mostly upper-middle class loafers and socialites.
Vandeloup persuades Kitty to fall in love with him, takes her to Melbourne, but puts off marrying her because the big prize is Mrs Villiers, if Villiers is finally gone. Mrs Villiers makes her fortune and moves to a big house in (Melbourne bayside suburb) St Kilda previously featured in The Mystery of the Hansom Cab. After a year Kitty and Vandeloup break up and Kitty ends up living with Mrs Villiers. Kitty plans to poison Mrs Villiers to stop Vandeloup from marrying her, Vandeloup plans to poison Kitty. Someone puts poison in a glass by Mrs Villiers’ bed. Her companion Selina drinks it and dies.
I won’t tell you any more. It’s an entertaining enough story, with the expected convoluted ending, of general rather than literary fiction quality, but an interesting view of Melbourne after the goldrushes when it was for a while the richest city in the world.
A note for Emma/Book Around the Corner, Fergus Hume’s early novels were apparently inspired by the works of French detective fiction pioneer Émile Gaboriau (1832-1873) who was at that time very popular in Melbourne (in translation).
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Fergus Hume, Madame Midas, self-pub. Melbourne, 1888. My edition Text Classics, Melbourne, 2017.
By chance I borrowed this from Freo library a few weeks ago, but haven’t had a chance to read. I tried Hansom Cab a few years back but never actually finished it. I remember it lacked pace of modern day crime novels. I can’t believe he wrote 140 books! That’s what I call prolific!
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Apparently he went to England to be a writer. He was never successful again so I guess he turned to writing potboilers – hastily written, hastily published, wrapped in paper covers and sold at railway stations etc.(For example, The Bookstall Co. in Australia sold a quarter of million copies of On Our Selection alone in 30 years, and Steele Rudd followed that up with at lest a dozen more books.)
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I’ve added your review to the Mr Linky page…https://www.blenza.com/linkies/links.php?owner=Kimbofo&postid=07Feb2021c&meme=13293
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Thanks. I tried, but it didn’t stick (my incompetence, I’m sure)
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What a dramatic ending with who poisoned whom and who drank the poison. And of course they had to poison the working-class person! We never get a break.
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There’s quite an element of Victorian melodrama running through the novel, and in fact it was probably first conceived as a play. There is also an interesting meta element with the method of poisoning – a hand from outside through the curtain – referencing a play Kitty had been in; the performance and attendance at plays; and a number of references to Hume’s previous and more famous work as well as people and places common to both.
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Sometimes I love when an author’s work references or winks at his/her other works, but sometimes I feel like that person plum ran out of ideas and keeps circling around the same phrases and images.
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I think there is an element of advertising the previous work (it was self-published after all) but also of keeping the ‘universe’ consistent – this crime occurred in a Melbourne where the previous (Hansom Cab) crime had been committed a couple of years earlier.
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Oh good for you Bill for being on the ball. I might have to sneak in a different book to the one I’d planned to read given my reading progress of late… I hope Kim defines crime broadly is all I can say!
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Lisa was was ready on Day 1 (of Southern Cross Crime Month). But I still plan to do one more. Kim, are you listening?, should I leave the new Dave Warner to you and find something else? As it happens, the two books nearest to my desk are Robbery Under Arms and For the Term of His Natural Life.
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Oh that was while I was travelling. I have a lot of Lisa’s to catch up on as she’s been posting posting posting with all those festivals.
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Oh, and I’m interested to read about another Hume novel. I’ve only read the Hansom Cab which I enjoyed mostly for its historical interest – in Australian literature and description of its era.
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I must have seen Madame Midas in Crow Books and decided I must have it. Glad I eventually found an opportunity to read it. Hume writes very descriptively of what he has seen (and what he hasn’t – snow in Queensland!). Vanderloup walks down Elizabeth St to catch the train to St Kilda. I would love to see that on a map – Ok, I can visualise it now, the line goes west from Flinders Street Station diagonally over the river to South Melbourne then parallel with the Bay to St Kilda.
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Haha Bill!
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Of course I’ve never heard of Hume but now I’m curious.
I’ve never heard of Emile Gaboriau either. I’ve looked him up on Wikipedia and wow! I wonder why I’ve never seen his novels anywhere. I’m going to read Le crime d’Orcival or L’affaire Lerouge, one of these days.
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I would like to read The Hansom Cab. Your review of all these tails sounds so much fun . Just too dang many books out there!!🙂🙂🙂🌹🐧
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I remember The Mystery of the Hansom Cab as being a cracking good read – it was after all a world best-seller. It should be pretty easy to come across (and is probably free on Project Gutenberg anyway)
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I might have a look once I read the hundreds of books I have here. 😄😄🐧😄😄
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I know the feeling, how a certain reading plan can flit into your mind, when you hear of a specific themed event but, later, when it comes to the real reading part, you can’t quite reassemble the great plan that you had!
The Woman in White is one I enjoyed, so I probably would like this one too. Now you’ve got me wondering about classic Canadian crime, but I can’t think of anything quite as early as this.Will have to take a peek.
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The other day I was glancing over my central TBR shelf and there was The Mystery of the Hansom Cab bold as brass. I might have to admit that old age is catching up with me. I listened to The Woman in White some years ago but don’t remember it. I see I have Wilke Collins’ The Moonstone on my shelves and I think I might have listened to that too. It has always reassured me that I have enough books to see me through retirement but if I don’t make a start soon I’m not going to get through even half of them.
I looked up Canadian Crime Lover for his 150th Anniversary (of Federation) special but the earliest book in his top 10 was only 1964. I think it’s easy for us in the provinces to have our literature swamped by New York and London and that applies double to our early literature.
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The Collins books would likely make for good listening. The Moonstone I read more recently, but I didn’t enjoy it as much on the page. As a listener, the plotty bits would probably be more engaging, I’m guessing. There’s Margaret Millar in the ’50s and ’60s and, yes, a bunch of ’60s stuff, noirish type stuff, but yes, loyal provincial readers were Doyle and Christie devotees, I’m guessing.
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[…] ‘Madame Midas’ by Fergus Hume reviewed by Bill @ The Australian Legend 19th century murder mystery set in Melbourne […]
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