The Mystery of a Hansom Cab
A man is found dead in a hansom cab in Melbourne, and the investigation moves between the city, the suburbs and the goldfields. Fergus Hume published it himself after several publishers refused it, and it went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies.
It is a detective novel written before the rules of the genre were fixed, and it is therefore more experimental than it looks: the solution depends on documents, disguise and a court case rather than on a brilliant amateur. The Melbourne setting is unusually specific for the period, and the book is a useful record of the city in the 1880s.
Public-domain status
First published in 1886. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Fergus Hume died in 1932, so this work has been free to republish there since 2003.
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Keep reading
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