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Blockbuster!: Fergus Hume and the Mystery of a Hansom Cab Kindle Edition
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.
Lucy Sussex was born in New Zealand. She has edited four anthologies, including She’s Fantastical, shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. Her award-winning fiction includes books for younger readers and the novel The Scarlet Rider. Lucy has five short-story collections, including My Lady Tongue, A Tour Guide in Utopia, Absolute Uncertainty and Matilda Told Such Dreadful Lies. Lucy Sussex's latest book is Blockbuster! Fergus Hume and The Mystery of a Hansom Cab. She lives in Melbourne.
‘[Sussex] provides a rich picture of Victorian life and a revealing account of late 19th-century publishing practices…Fascinating.’ Publishers Weekly
‘An absorbing, at times fascinating companion to The Mystery of a Hansom Cab.’ Age/SMH/Brisbane Times
‘Told with wit and lightly worn scholarship…Sussex has written a fine, thoroughly engaging and multifaceted history. Generously, she has shared her fun with the rest of us.’ Australian
‘The book is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of crime fiction or Australian literature, but is highly recommended even if you’re not: Sussex is a superb story-teller and leavens this fascinating account with dry wit. It deserves to be a blockbuster.’ Tara Sharp
‘This is a fine book about a novel that defined the burgeoning genre of crime fiction, full of wit, important discoveries and fascinating insights – like its subject, a real page-turner.’ Wormwoodiana
‘Sussex skillfully assembles the known information about a very private man and his times, and reveals a Victorian world whose machinations and mysteries are equal to those of his most famous fiction.’ Stuff NZ
‘A very interesting whodunit about a whodunit.’ North and South
‘Blockbuster! is almost too much to take in. It’s a wealth of well researched information, but readable and informative just the same. The book is equipped with bibliography, end notes, epitaphs and reviews, enough to keep the curious occupied for hours.’ Otago Daily Times
‘A wealth of well-researched information, readable, informative and enough to keep the curious occupied for hours.’ Otago Daily Times, 2015’s Must Read Books
‘Blockbuster! makes for highly enjoyable and informative reading.’ Washington Post
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherText Publishing
- Publication date24 Jun. 2015
- File size3175 KB
Product description
Review
"A peculiar read, so well-researched and self-aware it ends up being more interesting for what's in its periphery than what's at its center." --NPR
'Blockbuster! makes for highly enjoyable and informative reading.' --Washington Post
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B00V2GDIIW
- Publisher : Text Publishing (24 Jun. 2015)
- Language : English
- File size : 3175 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 336 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: 1,880,604 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- 808 in Australian & Oceanian History
- 4,496 in Biographies & Memoirs of Authors
- 13,133 in Literary Criticism eBooks
- Customer reviews:
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- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 March 2016Although nominally about Fergus Hume’s blockbuster novel The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, this well researched and interesting book is as much about all aspects of early publishing in Australia, as well as the birth and increasingly popular rise of the detective novel, the literary and artistic scene in early Melbourne and so much more. There’s lots of good stuff here, but I can’t help feeling that the author has been too keen to include every last bit of her research, and sometimes the book becomes a bit too bogged down in detail. A more pertinent criticism is that she relies too much on speculation. Yes, the facts are hard to come by, but the constant reliance on perhaps and maybe, and could have and might have and so on, becomes really quite irritating and has no place in serious non-fiction. Overall I enjoyed discovering the period in literary history, but would have preferred a tighter text and less stretching out of her material.
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 June 2015“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.
As well as touching on Hume’s own story, Sussex’s meticulous research examines lives, fortunes and ultimate fates of those involved in the writing, publication and marketing of Hanson Cab: readers, reviewers, investors, supporters and publishers, to name a few. The impersonations, scams and fraud that resulted from this publishing phenomenon are also described. Each chapter is prefaced by a relevant quote from one of Hume’s later works, showing how incidents in his life became inspiration for these.
Sussex also provides a selection of reviews of the Hansom Cab, four pages of relevant colour plates, an extensive bibliography and comprehensive end-notes and index. She discusses the likely fate and provenance of the few remaining (and very valuable) copies of early editions. This is a book that will appeal to readers who like to get behind the story.
Sussex tells us just how important this book was: “Above all, the work consolidated detective fiction as a publishing genre, one with a mass readership of avid fans……others had shown that the market existed for tales of crime, but it took the blockbusting success of Hanson Cab, achieved by Trischler’s brilliant marketing, to prove how lucrative crime fiction crime fiction could be. Publishers took note and, over a century later, detective fiction is still a marker leader”. A very interesting read.
Top reviews from other countries
- Charles TaylorReviewed in the United States on 24 January 2016
4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating account of late nineteenth century best seller
When I think of literary history, which I admit is rarely, what comes to mind is a carefully researched stodgy catalogue of worthy nineteenth century authors organized into schools and influences, filled with accounts of old manifestos and outdated controversies.
"Blockbuster" is nothing of the sort - it is lively, even gossipy. It brings the milieu to life - a humanely run New Zealand madhouse, the theatre scene in the days of "Marvelous Melbourne", Theosophists, dodgy financiers and the gay scene in Victorian London. Focusing on a single work by a single author allows Lucy Sussex to tie all these together in a vivid and entertaining account of the times.
If, like me, you've had a copy of "The Mystery of a Hansom Cab" on your shelves - and there must be many who do, because it is still in print - this book may inspire you as it did me, to finally get around to reading it!