Hume continued to crank out novels throughout his life, but his theatrical ambitions bore little fruit. Apart from mystery writing, he had two things in common with the later Kiwi author Ngaio Marsh: both had “mad housekeepers in the family” and both had the theater as their greatest interest. Though Hume was born in England and achieved his first major writing success in Australia, he lived in New Zealand through most of his childhood and early adult life. Sussex’s highly enjoyable biography is exhaustively documented (451 numbered endnotes) and engagingly written in an informal style that allows occasional use of unexplained Australian slang terms, such as furphy (defined in Wikipedia as “an erroneous or improbable story that is claimed to be factual”). Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886) was a worldwide bestseller that made a much bigger initial splash than Conan Doyle’s introduction of Sherlock Holmes.
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