AustLit

'Blockbuster! is a fascinating and engaging read from start to finish. The exhaustive research which informs the book never overwhelms the flow of the narrative, which is expressed in clear, precise prose. The reader is offered here two intriguing subjects. While this is the publishing story of Fergus Hume’s famous detective book, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, and an early example of the detective genre, it is also, side-by-side as it were, the story of Melbourne in the final two decades of the nineteenth century. Indeed Lucy Sussex labels three novels by Hume his “Melbourne Trilogy”: Hansom Cab (1886), Madame Midas (1888) and Miss Mephistopheles (1890), all three novels offering vibrant local colour: “a prospectus, in fiction” (200) as Sussex later puts it. The “trilogy” designation moreover lends a specific gravitas to Hume whose standing in literary terms has never had the prestige it should within the annals of Australian literature. Blockbuster! will considerably amend this situation. That Hume had published seventeen books by the end of 1892 will doubtless come as a surprise to most readers.'  (Introduction)