Fergus Hume
1859–1932 · England, New Zealand and Australia
he wrote the best-selling detective novel of the century and sold it for fifty pounds
Hume was a law clerk in Melbourne who wanted to write for the stage and could not get a theatre manager to read him. Told that the public wanted sensation, he studied the French detective novels of Émile Gaboriau to learn how the thing was built, and wrote The Mystery of a Hansom Cab — a murder in a cab on a gaslit Melbourne street, told through an inquest, a trial and the respectable secrets underneath a colonial city.
No publisher wanted it. He printed it at his own expense in 1886, and it sold some twenty-five thousand copies in Melbourne within weeks. Then he sold the rights outright, for fifty pounds, to a company formed in London to publish it. In Britain it sold in the hundreds of thousands and became the best-selling detective novel of the nineteenth century, outselling A Study in Scarlet, which appeared the following year. Hume received nothing beyond the fifty pounds.
He moved to England and wrote well over a hundred more novels, none of which came close, and died in Essex in 1932. He is the clearest case in this library of a writer whose work everyone read and whose name almost no one remembers.