Amazing Stories from the Web
PART 12
THE RIVALS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES
Pre-Reading: Discussion Questions
1. Are you interested in crimes committed a hundred years ago?
2. Do you have any rivals?
It sometimes happens that a person who is better than most of his contemporaries in a chosen sphere of life is the one remembered best as the representative of an epoch. Thus, everybody knows Sherlock Holmes, the most celebrated fictional private detective created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the end of the 19th century. But was he really the one and only literary character working of the time, in the genre? Were there any other authors whom the reading public loved, and whose new stories were as eagerly awaited as those of Arthur Conan Doyle? Of course there were. A magazine or an anthology had to be filled; one writer was definitely not enough. Time had chosen one writer as the best representative of the era. While the era was underway, though, there were many others who helped make it exciting.
It is difficult to determine who the “father” of the mystery genre was. Most researchers would say that Auguste Dupin, an eccentric Frenchman with exceptional powers of deduction, was the first private detective in literature. Actually, his creator Edgar Allan Poe, a well-known American author (1809–1849), wrote only three stories with this hero, but those stories gave birth to a whole new tradition. Poe’s life and his mysterious death inspired many researchers.
Later on, the French writer Emile Gaboriau created his own character, whose adventures became popular throughout the world. He published some novels and miscellaneous writings, but then found his real gift in L’Affaire Lerouge (The Affair of Widow Lerouge) (1866). The book, which was Gaboriau’s first detective novel, introduced an amateur detective. It also introduced a young police officer named Monsieur Lecoq, who was the hero in three of Gaboriau’s later detective novels. Monsieur Lecoq was based on a real-life thief turned police officer, Eugène François Vidocq (1775–1857), whose memoirs, Les Vrais Mémoires de Vidocq, (The True Memoirs of Vidocq) mixed fiction and fact. Gaboriau gained a huge following, but when Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, Monsieur Lecoq’s international fame declined.
Fergusson Wright Hume, known as Fergus Hume (8 July 1859–12 July 1932) was an English novelist. Born in England the same year as the future Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Hume was the second son of Dr. James Hume. When Fergusson was three, his father emigrated with his family to New Zealand. Fergusson attended high school in Dunedin and studied law at the University of Otago. Hume was admitted to the New Zealand bar in 1885. Shortly after graduation he left for Melbourne, Australia where he obtained a post as a barristers’ clerk. He began writing plays, but found it impossible to persuade the managers of the Melbourne theatres to accept or even read them.
After failed attempts to become a playwright, he decided to write a novel instead. Finding that the novels of French writer Émile Gaboriau were then very popular, he read a set of them and determined to write a novel of a similar kind, a story about a crime and the search for the criminal. Not knowing what and how to write at first, he left this note in his diaries:
“I enquired of a leading Melbourne bookseller what style of book he sold most of. He replied that the detective stories of Gaboriau had a large sale; and as, at this time, I had never even heard of this author, I bought all his works – eleven or thereabouts – and read them carefully. The style of these stories attracted me, and I determined to write a book of the same class; containing a mystery, a murder, and a description of low life in Melbourne.”
The result was the self-published novel The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), which became a great success. (The first Sherlock Holmes story was published in 1887.)
Hume did not realize at the time that he could earn a lot of money for his publications, so he sold the English and American rights to the novel for fifty pounds. It eventually became the top selling mystery novel of the Victorian era. One of the story’s attractions was the exotic local colour. Hume spoke about December in Australia, when it was the middle of its very hot summer, with “the vivid green of the trees, and the dazzling colours of the flowers”. For his British readers, those wonderful descriptions must have been like a breath of exciting fresh warm air, they created pictures of a totally alien land. The people who lived in that land, though, were easily recognizable.
After the success of his first novel and the publication of another, Professor Brankel’s Secret, Hume returned to England in 1888. He resided in London for a few years and then he moved to the Essex countryside where he lived for thirty years, eventually producing over 100 novels and short stories. He continued to be anxious for success as a dramatist, and at one time Henry Irving, the famous theater actor, was favourably considering one of his plays, but he died before it could be produced. Hume did not want publicity, and little is known of his personal life. After his death in 1932, just two years after the death of Conan Doyle, The Times stated that he was a deeply religious man who in his last years did much lecturing to young people’s clubs and debating societies.
Hume was a capable writer of mystery stories, and may be looked upon as one of the precursors of the many writers of detective stories whose work was so popular in the twentieth century. It is a curious coincidence that American thriller writer John Grisham, who became very famous at the end of the 20th century, explained in an interview how he first achieved success. He read many bestsellers, and watched many action films; then he worked out a “success formula” and wrote his first thriller, The Firm (1991), which was turned into a very popular film with Tom Cruise playing the leading role. In effect, it is the same kind of story about his beginnings as a writer which Fergus Hume had told.
rival (n.) competitor, opponent
bar (n.) members of the profession of barrister, lawyer
hansom (n.) often hansom cab a two-wheel carriage drawn by a horse, with the driver sitting on a high seat in front, used as a cab (taxi) until early 20th century
precursor (n.) someone or something that comes before a person or thing and helps develop them
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