On the Threshold of Detective Fiction: 'The Mystery of a Hansom Cab' by Fergus Hume
On the Threshold of Detective Fiction: 'The Mystery of a Hansom Cab' by Fergus Hume

Author(s): Joanna Kokot
Subject(s): Cultural history, 18th Century, 19th Century
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: detective fiction; crime-adventure novel; Fergus Hume; sensation fiction; The Mystery of a Hansom Cab
Summary/Abstract: Although Fergus Hume’s 'The Mystery of a Hansom Cab' (1886) refers back to the convention of English sensation fiction, popular in the 60s and 70s of the nineteenth century, one can notice there patterns which will later be typical of detective literature. While the reader of a sensation novel was not provoked to solve the detective puzzle (provided there was any) by himself/herself and so to act as a rival of the fictional detective, in Hume’s text the way in which the narrative discourse is carried incites the reader to speculate both on the motive of the murder and on the identity of its perpetrator. Thus, on the one hand the reader is offered an opportunity to “enter” the presented reality and follow the sensational course of events as they “happen”, on the other this reality is revealed as a construction – the tale is a puzzle containing clues necessary to solve it, while the reader is to link the seemingly unconnected elements into one logical whole.

• Details
• Contents