The Millionaire Mystery. Peter Haining

      The growth of the railways in Britain, from the 1850s on, gave rise to the success of Victorian books of sensation. Coinciding with a shift from handmade books to machine-made paper and mass-produced bookbindings which dramatically reduced the costs, books became attractive with their two-, three- or four-colour illustrations—principally yellow but sometimes replaced by green, blue or grey—and their handy, pocket-sized format made them ideal for travellers, just like their descendants: today’s paperbacks. Railway bookstalls were springing up at all the big stations, and those of W. H. Smith & Son in the south and John Menzies in the north were soon piled high with books and posters declaring, ‘YELLOW-BACKS—High Quality Reading Only Two Shillings’. The books varied in length from 256 to 420 pages and offered customers a full-length novel or numerous short stories to while away their hours of travel. Although naturally enough the early titles from the publishers were cheap editions of the classic authors such as Jane Austen, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Captain Marryat, Samuel Richardson and Sir Walter Scott, the ‘yellow-backs’ were not slow to include crime, mystery and detection stories. Among the early successes were the Chatto & Windus reprints of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860) and A Rogues’ Life (1870), and The Masked Venus (1866) by the American soldier-turned-storyteller Richard Henry Savage. The rights for Savage’s book were purchased from America by Routledge, whose ‘Railway Library’, claiming to be ‘The Cheapest Books Ever Published’, began in 1848 and published some 1,200 titles over more than 50 years, making the company’s fortune. The cover illustration for this and many other Routledge titles was by Walter Crane, who later provided the artwork for another popular title, Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery & Imagination, in 1919.

      A typical example of the publishing phenomenon of cheap fiction that took the British reading public by storm in the 1860s were the books featuring Mary Paschal, ‘one of the much-dreaded, but little-known people called Female Detectives’. A dark-haired beauty with arching eyebrows and ever-alert eyes, she made her debut as the first lady crime fighter in Britain in the pages of Experiences of a Lady Detective published in 1861. The book, with its predominantly yellow illustration on strawboard covered by glazed paper, epitomized the ‘yellow-back era’, named after the unmistakable characteristic of the books (also dubbed ‘mustard-plaster novels’), and tales of crime and mystery now became major elements of this incredible success story.

      The author of Experiences of a Lady Detective was given as ‘Anonyma’ and the publisher, George Vickers of London, implied in the book and advertising that the ‘experiences’ had been written by the heroine herself. Just as the yellow covers were used to identify these inexpensive works, so the idea that the texts were written by real detectives was used to enhance their appeal. Whether Mary Paschal had any basis in fact or not, she is undoubtedly a worthy pioneer of crime fiction, and sold so well that in 1864 Vickers issued a second volume, Revelations of a Lady Detective, in which the intrepid heroine described tackling a further cross-section of rogues and villains, not to mention bringing about the downfall of a prominent Member of Parliament who had been using his position to pervert the course of justice and amass a fortune.

      The picture of the criminal fraternity that Anonyma’s titles offered readers was very different from the subject of the two books credited with starting the ‘yellow-back era’. These were a culinary guide, Letters Left at the Pastry Cooks by Horace Mayhew, and Money: How To Get, How To Keep, and How To Use It, both issued in April 1853 by a London firm, Ingram, Cooke & Co. The two books with their eye-catching, illustrated covers were in stark contrast to the plain cloth or leather-bound volumes of the time. They were aimed unashamedly at providing inexpensive reading for the masses, and it was the pioneer ‘self-help’ title, Money, with its vivid yellow covers, that gave the entire series its name and established the format that other publishers were soon following. The major players in this area of publishing would soon prove to be Vickers, George Routledge & Sons, Chatto & Windus and Ward Lock; the latter would become even more famous for publishing the first Sherlock Holmes case, ‘A Study in Scarlet’, in 1887.

      Far and away the single most popular crime ‘yellow-back’ was The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, a novel originally published in Melbourne, Australia, by the author, Fergus Hume (1859–1932), at his own expense. There is, in fact, probably no more unlikely success story in the history of crime fiction publishing than this tale of a brutal crime in which the identity of the killer is actually given away in the preface! Hume had been born in England to Glaswegian parents, but emigrated with his family to Dunedin in New Zealand, and Fergus was educated at the High School there. He afterwards passed through the university of Otago with distinction and qualified as a barrister in 1885. Rather than go into legal practice, he sailed to Victoria, finding work for three years as a law clerk in Melbourne while attempting to further his ambitions as a playwright. In an attempt to augment his income, he asked a local bookseller what kind of book sold best. Hume wrote later, ‘He replied that the detective sales of Émile Gaboriau had a large sale; and as, at this time, I had never heard of this author, I bought all his works and determined to write a book of the same class containing a mystery, murder and a description of the low life of Melbourne.’

      Unable to find a publisher for The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, Hume decided to publish the book himself and just about covered his costs on the first printing. One purchaser of the book, however, was an Englishman who evidently had an eye for a commercial prospect. He promptly bought the rights from the author for just £50, set up ‘The Hansom Cab Publishing Company’ in London, and launched the book on to the nation’s railway bookstalls. With its simple yellow cover and illustration of a hansom cab, it rapidly sold 350,000 copies, a figure which was doubled when the story was reprinted in America. By the end of the century, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab had also been translated into twelve foreign languages.

      Hume, who was still in Australia while all this was happening, scraped together enough money for a fare to England and arrived in London to find his book everywhere and his name on everyone’s lips. It should have made him wealthy, but having sold the copyright he was not entitled to another penny. Disappointed but not downhearted, Hume settled in Essex and in the years that followed tried desperately to repeat his success, writing over 100 more novels—including Madame Midas (1888), For the Defense (aka The Devil-Stick, 1898) and the optimistically entitled The Mystery of a Motor Cab (1908)—but none achieved anything like the popularity of the first book. Today, in most histories of crime fiction, Hume is dismissed as a hack whose books are unreadable and whose most famous story was ‘tedious from start to finish’. Yet The Mystery of a Hansom Cab outsold the works of Poe, Collins and even Conan Doyle for years, and more copies were bought in its ‘yellow-back’ format than any other title. Furthermore, the original 1886 Melbourne edition printed by Kemp & Boyce has the distinction today of being one of the rarest books in the world—only two copies are known to exist.

      Given Hume’s renown, it was probably inevitable that the publishers of William Collins’ Detective Story Club should include him in their classic crime series, choosing to license The Millionaire Mystery, originally published in 1901 when yellow-backs were taking their last bow. This was how their Editor introduced the reissue in 1930:

      Since the publication of The Mystery of the Hansom Cab in 1887 [sic] Fergus Hume has written steadily and today he has to his credit a list of books which even in its length has few equals and certainly is unique so far as maintenance of literary standard is concerned. He is one of the pioneers of the present group of detective writers of the thriller variety and he will remain one of the best if only for such tales as The Harlequin Opal [1893], The Dwarf’s Chamber [1896], The Bishop’s Secret [1900], and the present book—The Millionaire Mystery.

      This story is very typical of the author and for that reason alone it cannot afford to be neglected by the connoisseur of crime fiction. But as a mystery tale, its entertainment value alone makes it a book to be read. Fergus Hume has woven throughout the murder-plot a delightful love story which he introduces amid the thrills much in the way that Shakespeare introduces the hall-porter in Macbeth—to ‘heighten’ the tragedy. Perhaps the one thing about the novel, other than the actual