Wed 9 Mar 2011
The Tale of Mr. Fergus Hume and Mr. William Freeman, by Curt Evans.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Reviews[16] Comments
or, The Reviewer’s Comeuppance
by Curt J. Evans
Despite having produced over 130 mystery novels between 1886 and 1932, the year of his death, the English born, New Zealand raised author Fergus Hume (1859-1932) is known — to the extent he is known at all today — for one work, his debut murder tale, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab.
Accounts typically claim that over 500,000 copies of Hansom Cab were quickly placed into eager purchasers’ hands (some sources suggest up to as many as a million copies may have been sold), making the novel a landmark financial success within the mystery genre.
After relocating from New Zealand to Australia in the 1880s and finding employment as a barrister’s clerk, Fergus Hume soon manifested marked literary tendencies. He published a few stories and began writing plays, but the latter efforts went nowhere. Determining that what the public really desired was a murder tale, Hume pored over the celebrated mystery novels of the French author Emile Gaboriau (1832-1873). Then he produced his own crime story, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab.
Finding resistance among Australian publishers to this work as well, Hume was forced to the expedient of privately printing it. To everyone’s amazement the novel sold briskly. Hume then made the mistake of his life, for a pittance parting with the book’s copyright to an Australian publisher who soon had it flying off shelves not only in Australia but Great Britain and the United States. Apparently Hume never made a penny off the book again.
Undaunted by his ill turn of economic fortune, Hume determined to make his living as a novelist. By 1888 he had moved to England (where he would live the rest of his life) and had ditched his Australian publisher. The next year saw the publication of Hume’s first mystery novel set in England, The Piccadilly Puzzle.
A fascinating review of The Piccadilly Puzzle appeared in the inaugural issue of Zealandia, a short-lived New Zealand literary journal (it ran for twelve issues). The reviewer of Puzzle, William Freeman, was also the editor of Zealandia and a prominent New Zealand journalist of his day. His review of the tale is acute but also strikingly harsh in tone. However, if Hume was offended by this review, he soon enough had the last laugh on Freeman.
Before I get to the Zealandia review and the bizarre fate of the reviewer, however, some words about The Piccadilly Puzzle are necessary.
Clearly inspired by the recent Jack the Ripper murders (as was another Victorian mystery novel published at this time, Benjamin Farjeon’s Devlin the Barber), The Piccadilly Puzzle revolves around the mysterious murder of a woman on a foggy night in a major London thoroughfare.
The woman, initially thought to be a “streetwalker” (shades of the Whitechapel murders) soon is identified as a certain Miss Sarschine, the mistress of a prominent lord who, it seems, has just eloped to the Azores on his private yacht with another lord’s wife. The dead woman was not strangled or stabbed but, rather, poisoned — the poison apparently being one of those convenient tropical toxins utterly unknown to Western science, the use of which later would be much frowned upon in the Golden Age of the detective novel (roughly 1920 to 1939).
Perhaps not coincidentally, poor defunct Miss Sarschine, that lovely lady of easy virtue, had a pair of Malay kris, complete with fatally poisoned blades, hanging on a wall of her love nest (apparently deadly poisoned kris on the wall add just that right final touch to a romantic evening).
The London police put a private detective named Dowker entirely in charge of the case (something which struck me as rather odd). As a character this Mr. Dowker is not interesting at all, but, worse yet, he has a “colorful” Cockney sidekick, a street urchin named Flip, who speaks like this:
As much as I admire Hume’s perseverance in typing so many apostrophe marks, I have to confess my eye flew past Flip’s speeches as fast as was possible. I have to wonder whether Hume was inspired to create Flip by Arthur Conan Doyle’s ragamuffin assistants to Sherlock Holmes, the Baker Street Irregulars, who had appeared in the premier Holmes tale, A Study in Scarlet (1887). I cannot recall the Irregulars speaking quite so irregularly as our friend Flip, but perhaps my memory is playing me false.
The mystery in The Piccadilly Puzzle is certainly as convoluted as Flip’s speech (in addition to untraceable poisons, Hume for good measure also throws twins — another Golden Age no-no — into the mix as an additional plot complication); but, alas, it is not really fair play, an overheard confession being necessary to accomplish the killer’s exposure.
Hume became known for having a consistent narrative construction in many of his mystery tales, whereby a series of individuals are suspected in turn, only to have Hume pull a “surprise” culprit out of his top hat.
This keeps the story rolling along, but makes the wary reader immediately look for the culprit among the characters whom no one suspects. It’s the least likely suspect gambit famously associated with Agatha Christie, but Hume lacks the Golden Age Crime Queen’s uncanny finesse.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about The Piccadilly Puzzle is the sexual immorality (or amorality) of the characters, which is portrayed with striking casualness by the author.
One would conclude from this tale that the English aristocracy in 1889 was hopelessly debauched. One lord seduces a young woman, sets her up in a London love nest, then commences an affair with a woman married to another lord (in an exceedingly odd twist, this woman turns out to be the identical twin sister of his aforementioned mistress).
Additionally, we learn that the straying wife had already had a sexual affair with another, younger man, before breaking with this man to marry the lord (she was ambitious for a title). After learning of his wife’s wayward ways the lord she married regrets that he impulsively wed the hussy rather than simply make her his mistress, as the other lord did with the other sister.
“Sounds like the second act of a French play,” remarks one character. Indeed!
It is perhaps worth noting that Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray was published a year after The Piccadilly Puzzle. Wilde’s famous short novel incurred some considerable criticism that year as “nauseous,” “unclean,” “effeminate” and “contaminating.”
While Fergus Hume clearly had not attempted a work of literary ambition in The Piccadilly Puzzle, he nevertheless in the tale gave readers a whiff (whether fragrant or foul depending on the individual) of fin de siecle decadence.
Which brings us, finally, to William Freeman’s hostile piece on The Piccadilly Puzzle in the pages of Zealandia. Rarely have I encountered such a scathingly detailed review of a mystery novel. In Freeman’s eyes, the work was a failure on all counts, literary, technical and moral.
At the time Freeman wrote his condemnatory review of Hume’s fifth mystery tale, Hume was a New Zealand national celebrity, author of, as Freeman put it, “the most successful novel of the day.”
To be sure, Hume soon would be overtaken and surpassed by Arthur Conan Doyle (who had already published A Study in Scarlet in 1887 and would produce, in an explosion of creative genius, The Sign of Four and the dozen short stories comprising The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in 1890-1892).
Yet by producing mystery tales at an awesome rate — he was, along with the later Edgar Wallace and John Street, one of the most prolific producers in the history of the mystery genre — Hume managed to maintain a relatively successful writing career over the next quarter century or so.
Only after the outbreak of World War One, when he lost his American publisher, G. W. Dillingham, and the onset of the Golden Age, when his health declined and his books came to seem increasingly antiquated, did Hume find his financial prospects darkening. His last years were spent in a single rented room in a bungalow and he died in near poverty, only a couple years after his onetime rival Conan Doyle.
Yet those dark days were a long way off in 1889, when Hume was still big news and interest in his literary fate was high, especially in New Zealand, where he was the colonial who had astonished the writing world (even if he had not always impressed it: “What a swindle The Mystery of a Hansom Cab is,” wrote Arthur Conan Doyle bluntly in a letter at this time. “One of the weakest tales I have read, and simply sold by puffing.”).
Like Conan Doyle, William Freeman, a noted controversialist in his day, was not one to be intimidated by fame. Freeman himself had authored in 1889 a sensation tale (modeled on Charles Dickens) entitled, with unwitting prescience on his part, He Who Digged a Pit.
In the very opening lines of of his review of The Piccadilly Puzzle, Freeman made his poor opinion of Hume’s latest crime novel brutally plain. The book, he wrote damningly–
In addition to finding The Piccadilly Puzzle poorly written — its prose lacked the “beauties which hid the repulsiveness of the plots in [two of Hume’s earlier tales, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab and Madame Midas]” — Freeman damned the book as well for essentially failing to adhere to what some thirty years later, in the Golden Age of the detective novel, would be called the fair play standard.
In Freeman’s eyes Fergus Hume did not play fair with his readers but, rather, with out-of-bounds mendacity led them down the garden path:
Freeman also takes Hume to task at length for the numerous improbabilities the author scattered throughout his tale, ending by asserting, “to solely construct a whole plot out of nothing else [but improbabilities] is straining the credulity of readers too far.”
Having disposed of Fergus Hume’s writing and plotting to his own evident satisfaction, Freeman then proceeded to blast The Piccadilly Puzzle for sundry moral transgressions. This line of argument was to prove ironic in the face of Freeman’s own subsequent behavior.
“The worst feature of the book,” thundered Freeman righteously, “is its moral tone.” In Freeman’s horrified eyes, the characters of The Piccadilly Puzzle wallowed “in a seething mass of moral corruption which the author cynically disdains to hide behind the slightest shadow of the veil of decency.”
Indeed, Hume seemed “to consider it natural that everybody should be immoral.” He portrayed this immorality “with a coarse fidelity” that Freman found “positively repulsive.”
Freeman closed his resoundingly minatory review article by expressing his “emphatic condemnation” of other New Zealand writers embarking on such a “dangerous” literary course as Fergus Hume had. Hume now represented New Zealand before the eyes of the world, Freeman noted. Sadly, he had shirked his duty as an author to stand with that “which is clean, wholesome and pure-minded.”
I personally would love to know what Fergus Hume made of Freeman’s review of The Piccadilly Puzzle.
Or of the sudden and surprising downward turn in Freeman’s own personal fortunes:
Zealandia soon went defunct and in 1890 Freeman (whose full name was William Freeman Kitchen) had become the editor of the Dunedin Globe. A year later he resigned from the paper, amid great controversy. (The paper under his management made what were later determined by government investigation to be baseless charges against the Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, its offices were subjected to arson and Freeman was found to have lied about the amount of money the paper was losing each month.)
By 1893 Freeman had moved to Australia, where it was announced in a newspaper that he had died, leaving behind his wife and two children in New Zealand. Yet that same year Freeman was discovered in the flesh, very much alive and in the company of a female correspondent. He had, it seems, falsely announced his own death. He was arrested and tried for desertion and bigamy. Ultimately he committed suicide in 1897, at the age of 34.
Truly, a turn of events almost (if not quite) as odd as those in The Piccadilly Puzzle! As far as I know, however, no twins and no tropical poisons unknown to science were involved in the real life William Freeman Kitchen mystery.
Fergus Hume would go on for about another three decades to write an unbroken string of nearly one hundred more mystery tales–though his name tenuously survives in genre history only as the author of The Mystery of a Hansom Cab. While Hume’s The Picadilly Puzzle may be justly forgotten, William Freeman’s review of the novel deserves to be remembered.
March 9th, 2011 at 8:22 am
I briefly discuss The Piccadilly Puzzle in my web site article on Doubles:
http://mikegrost.com/sensatio.htm#Doubles
This article looks at the ways doubles and twins have been used in popular culture. The Piccadilly Puzzle is mentioned in section 3:
“Another tradition involves mystery stories in which identical twins or doubles are mistaken for each other, impersonate each other, and in general complicate the puzzle plots of these stories. The earliest work of this kind known to me is Fergus Hume’s The Piccadilly Puzzle (1889). This novel involves a very thorough working out of the possibilities of this kind of story. It seems ancestral to many Golden Age stories involving doubles, twins, Hollywood stunt doubles and the like. Mentioning the name of these works would spoil their authors’ surprise solutions. However, one can point out such tales seem most common among members of the Van Dine school, such as Ellery Queen, Stuart Palmer and Craig Rice. And Clarence Budington Kelland’s “Ramikin Rubies” (1930) and John Dickson Carr’s “William Wilson’s Profession” (1941) hearken back to Poe. The wonderful 1950’s detective comic book Big Town had many stories involving actors, doubles and impersonation. Hume’s novel has some problems. It is not very excitingly written, and he doesn’t use much fair play in pulling off his plot ideas. It also suffers from racist stereotypes. One wonders if there are other 19th Century works in this tradition, especially among the vast corpus of 19th Century French mystery fiction that is so little known today.”
March 9th, 2011 at 8:25 am
On rereading this old article, I wish I had also mention John Rhode’s “Dead Men at the Folly” (1932). It too has doubles.
March 9th, 2011 at 10:13 am
This was one of the most intriguing articles posted here in a long time. But then again I’m obsessed with Victorian/Edwardian crime and sensation fiction. I even like the Victorian touch in the title of the piece.
Apart from his licentious characters Hume could easily earn the moniker “the Harry Stephen Keeler of the Victorians.” I have read only two of his books (The Green Mummy and one other the title which I thankfully have repressed) and both are as utterly preposterous and mendacious as The Piccidilly Puzzle. But Keeler makes me laugh and Hume only makes me roll my eyes and mutter obscenities with furious impatience.
March 9th, 2011 at 1:12 pm
Having read Hume I have to side with Freeman. I’m not sure Hume ever put two words together in his career without tripping the reader over them.
Doyle was being kind to MYSTERY OF THE HANSOM CAB.
Hume’s entire career only goes to show you how far one best selling book will carry you.
In regard to the detectives assistants I suspect that didn’t come from Doyle, but rather from French popular literature. Such street urchins were common in the works of Eugene Sue, Ponson Du Terraill, and Paul Feval, all pretty widely translated at the time — though they were pretty much borrowing the idea from Dickens and Oliver Twist — which is no doubt where Holmes ‘Irregulars’ originated. The boy assistant was pretty common in literature and theater at the time. Ponson Du Terraill’s Rocambole even started out in that role.
Also in real life such street urchins were one of the hazards of urban life — thieving, begging, and picking pockets in the worse parts of large cities when they weren’t in the workhouse. Holmes uses them because they were so ubicquitous as to be invisible. A fact even Doyle, no Londoner, was aware of.
Much of the overuse of twins and impersonation in mystery plots had to do with one of Victorian England’s greatest scandals the affair of the Tichborne Claiment involving an infamous trial and a peerage. It was the basis for novels by both Robin Maugham (THE LINK) and Ken Follett (A DANGEROUS FORTUNE) more recently and used by so many writers as to comprise a small literature of its own. Ellery Queen even borrows the idea for THE LAMP OF GOD with his own variation.
Of course, as Mike points out the use of twins and doubles is ancient, but the notoriety of the Tichborne case was particularly appealing to mystery writers.
As for the adult nature of Hume’s book and the portrait of the upper classes, about the time that Hume and Doyle both appeared on the scene England was shaken by a number of sexual scandals involving the upper classes from police raids on male and female brothels to the open secret that Lord Randolph Churchill had died of tertiary syphilis. And keep in mind the investigation into Jack the Ripper only a year later would drag even royal names through the mud (not that the Duke of Clarence needed any help from Jack in that regard having been caught by the police in one of those raids on a male brothel).
The prim and proper Victorians thrived on sex scandals.
For that matter randy unscrupulous lords were a staple of the Regency and later in Dickens novels, and the Victorian’s were nowhere near as prudish as we imagine. Look how many of Conan Doyle’s stories revolve around marital infidelity, bedroom intrigue, and even murderous children. Wilde’s trespass was to imply homosexual elements among Dorian Gray’s habits.
That said, you have to wonder if some of the success of Hume might have been titillation of his readers. He may have more in common with James Hadley Chase than Conan Doyle.
March 10th, 2011 at 9:40 pm
I also thought it was interesting that the reviewer, besides being so moralistic, was a fair play advocate (though he did not use those words).
I think a big part of the success of Hansom Cab was its “lowlife” Australian characters. Hume I think tried to replicate that with his Cockney street kid in Puzzle, but it’s not so convincingly done (the lowlife characters are the most interesting thing in Hansom Cab, I think).
I hadn’t realized Hume wrote so much until I looked into him. He was the consummate genre hack, writing mystery I believe solely for money, but his books have some interest to me on social grounds.
March 10th, 2011 at 11:55 pm
Being a Kiwi and writing in Australia Hume may have gotten away with being a bit racier than the publisher and public would allow for a British writer. It’s notable that E.W. Hornung, the creator of the ‘shocking’ Raffles, spent much of his youth in Australia too and much of his work is set there.
I suspect both men were getting a little leeway because they came from the colonies. For that matter another popular crook characer, Smiler Bunn, who came along later, was also by an Australian writer.
You have to wonder if Freeman wasn’t reacting in part to the fear that Hume’s books cast a poor light on New Zealand in general and New Zealand morals in particular?
And I was struck by that fair play remark too. I wonder what the earliest incidence of that term being used in regard to the genre is? I had always thought of it as primarily an aspect of the Golden Age. It’s interesting to see it already in use the year Holmes first appeared.
March 11th, 2011 at 2:31 am
David:
I think fair play only became an aesthetic cult in the Golden Age, but you do see the concept popping up before then.
Another striking bit in Puzzle from the moral aspect is that one of the decadent ladies does not die at the end (as punishment for her sins).
Mike G.:
Benjamin Farjeon slightly anticipated Hume’s Picadilly Puzzle with his own use of twins in Devlin the Barber (also inspired by the Ripper killings). It makes me wonder whether Hume had read Devlin before writing Puzzle, I’m betting he did.
John:
Well, all this discussion here encouraged me to do some more scrutiny Victorian mystery, glad you enjoyed it. I was just reading The Green Mummy, by the way. It rather reminds me of weak (quite weak, say sub-Tommy and Tuppence) Agatha Christie.
If we have an Egyptology trilogy (Green Mummy, Eye of Osiris, Scarab Murder Case), Mummy definitely is the weak sister of the group. The Mummy Case would be a better candidate for inclusion than The Green Mummy.
March 11th, 2011 at 7:34 am
I know I’m in the minority on this, but I really enjoyed Hansom Cab and – I know I’m about to utter blasphemy – much more modern in conception than A Study in Scarlet.
Haven’t read The Piccadilly Murder though, so I can’t comment on it or Freeman’s review.
March 11th, 2011 at 11:42 am
Hume was in many ways a ‘sensation’ writer, a title he lived up to, and perhaps why the moral ambiguity was tolerated where it might not have been in a more mainstream writer.
Still, the idea of the prim and proper Victorians is as historically incorrect as our own myths about the prim and proper Puritans. Amittedly the scandalous aspect tended to be hidden behind closed doors, but not all that well.
For a look at some of their actual behavior read THE OTHER VICTORIANS by Stephen Knight about the underground of Victorian porn (the term pornography is even Victorian, coined in 1867 by an approving minister in a review of Greek art portraying prostitutes)and Peter Gay’a THE BOURGEOIS EXPERIENCE: VICTORIA TO FREUD in two volumes THE EDUCATION OF THE SENSES and TENDER PASSION (both Oxford Uni. Press).
Much of what we see of prudery was an attempt to keep the lower classes from having access to such vulgar material they were not ‘sophisticated’ enough to handle. Admittedly most Victorian pornography was penned anonomously to avoid criminal prosecution and scandal, but it was pretty common among the middle and upper class.
And keep in mind too that they were not quite so prudish as we are today. Lola Montez and others performed nude or semi nude on stage in London and the royals even attended. English music hall performances were bawdy, rude, and not uncommonly ended in a near riot.
Even the stalwart and noble Conan Doyle conducted an affair with the soon to be Jean Conan Doyle (albeit a chaste one) until the death of his wife, and Dickens was pretty open about his mistress. Stevenson was fairly open about having courted and lived with his wife to be before her divorce (though he had the discretion to do it in California).
Brothels and illegal gaming houses were a going concern in London (along with opium dens) with only token attempts to shut them down when a new police commissioner was named or an election was due. Even Victoria herself commented that she didn’t care what people did so long as they didn’t frighten the horses.
Some wags even suggested Jack the Ripper was a social reformer for his war on open prostitution in Whitechapel where it was as common as Las Vegas today.
For that matter there is no small amount of heavy breathing going on in the works of Thomas Hardy, and Thackeray’s Becky Sharp in VANITY FAIR sleeps her way across Napoleonic Europe and into India.
Hypocrisy rather than prudery was the staple of Victorian morality.
March 11th, 2011 at 3:38 pm
David:
oh, I know there was a lot of sin in Victorian times! Compared to a lot of other books I have read from the period, The Piccadilly Puzzle seemed surprisingly blase about it, however! Which rather upset William Freeman (although he proceeded to desert his wife and fake his own death a few years later, to his ruin–thus illustrating the Victorian hypocrisy you mention!).
Xavier:
I don’t hate Hansom Cab. It’s short and to the point, with relatively fewer and shorter melodramatic longueurs on the part its principals than you would find in, say, Anna Katharine Green. I prefer Hansom Cab to anything by Anna Katharine Green, in fact.
My favorite bits in Hansom Cab all deal with the lower class women: Mother Guttersnipe and the two landladies. They are a real breath of–if not fresh, then pungent–air compared with the rather dull lovers mouthing the predictable sentiments lovers usually mouth.
I was struck reading Hansom Cab how much elements of the plot resembled Crofts’ The Groote Park Murder. Somehow it’s easier to accept in 1889 than in 1923!
I’m not a big fan of A Study in Scarlet, though I like The Sign of Four a great deal and the first stories are incomparable, I think.
After reading Hansom Cab I was interested enough in him to want to read some more. He has a nice light tone that rather reminds of Christie in his later books, though he falls short of her in mystery plotting by a great stretch, from what I’ve read.
March 11th, 2011 at 3:41 pm
Xavier, I should have mentioned that one thing in Hume that reminded me of Christie is that the heroines are quite plucky creatures! Just as Tuppence is more interesting than Tommy in Christie, Hume’s heroines usually seem more interesting than his heroes (in fact in one book he takes time to address why his hero is all wet compared to his heroine).
March 11th, 2011 at 4:09 pm
Curt
Even I would rather read Hume than Green That said he still isn’t very good though he has some historical and social significance.
If A STUDY IN SCARLET and SIGN OF THE FOUR hadn’t done well in the United States we might never have had the incomparable short stories and the legendary Sherlock Holmes.
STUDY is mostly of historical interest though if you are familiar with the era Conan Doyle’s voice is fresh. SIGN is much better though largely borrowed from Collins MOONSTONE in terms of plot elements. Again the real import is the presence of Holmes and Doyle’s voice.
Indeed, Doyle gets far too little credit for his innovations in voice. He’s a very modern writer in comparison to many of his contemporaries. Compare how fresh the Holmes stories read compared to Hornung’s Raffles. Indeed Doyle has very few of the mannerisms that trouble too many Victorian writers work.
March 11th, 2011 at 5:28 pm
David, I will certainly never argue against praise of the Holmes stories. I agree there is much less tiresome melodramatic hoo-hah in them than in most stuff from the period and that the voice is striking.
Green is a better plotter than Hume, it’s just that Green’s characters so often speechify like bad stage actors. That gets so tiresome. I can’t believe in characters that talk like that (dry stick figure characters may be dull, but at least they aren’t irritating).
March 11th, 2011 at 5:37 pm
Another thought: I wonder how much credit Hume should get for helping to kill off the triple decker Victorian sensation novel and replacing it with the “shilling shocker”? I know Victorian sensation novels are all the rage right now, but I have to admit I think sometimes they would benefit from a pruning of the verbosity. Not everyone is Wilkie Collins and benefits from saying more.
March 11th, 2011 at 6:30 pm
If you have the time and the patience the triple deckers can be fun to read, but verbosity is the kind way to describe many of them. Sadly for readers not everyone was Collins or le Fanu.
Another thing that changed the triple decker was that more people were reading who didn’t always have the leisure time to spend on a more massive work, and also as the modern world intruded readers were more sophisticated.
Thanks to periodicals, illustrations, and photography writers no longer had to describe everything to their readers. They could take for granted a certain level of knowledge among their readers.
Also writers like Doyle and Stevenson were streamlinging the prose people read. They tended to tell the story straight forward without the editorializing so popular among Victorian writers.
And 1887 is an interesting year historically, because no few historians mark 1888 and the furor surrounding the Ripper crimes as the first event of the modern world, the demarcation line between the comfortable Victorian world and the more complex and less certain era that was to come.
We tend to think of Holmes with a certain nostalgic view, but at the time he was revolutionary, modern, and even a bit ahead of his times. We think too of Conan Doyle as a rather staid figure, and he was anything but. He injected himself into virtually every controversy of his time and often took positions that put him in opposition to the government and the public (his defense of George Edaji, Oscar Slater, and Roger Casement not to mention his later regretable spiritualism).
It is a remarkably volatile time when the Industrial Revolution triggered a social revolution and Social Darwinism came into head on conflict with social conscience. It really was nothing like our imagined version of it.
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