Fergus Hume

Fergus Hume (1859–1932) was an English-born novelist who grew up in New Zealand and qualified as a barrister before moving to Melbourne, where he wrote The Mystery of a Hansom Cab in 1886. Self-published after Australian publishers turned it down, the book became the best-selling detective novel of the nineteenth century, outselling A Study in Scarlet, which appeared the following year. Hume had sold the copyright for fifty pounds and saw little of the profits. He moved to England in 1888 and spent the rest of his life there, producing more than a hundred further novels, among them The Green Mummy, none of which repeated his first success.