by Fergus Hume
‘THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB is a clearing house for the best detective and mystery stories chosen for you by a select committee of experts. Only the most ingenious crime stories will be published under the THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB imprint. A special distinguishing stamp appears on the wrapper and title page of every THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB book—the Man with the Gun. Always look for the Man with the Gun when buying a Crime book.’
Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1929
Now the Man with the Gun is back in this series of COLLINS CRIME CLUB reprints, and with him the chance to experience the classic books that influenced the Golden Age of crime fiction.
Copyright
COLLINS CRIME CLUB
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
This edition 2018
First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus 1901
Published by The Detective Story Club Ltd for Wm Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1930
‘The Greenstone God and the Stockbroker’ and ‘The Rainbow Camellia’ first published in The Dwarf’s Chamber by Ward, Lock & Co. 1896
Introduction excerpted from The Golden Age of Crime Fiction published by Prion Books, copyright © Peter Haining 2002
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1930, 2018
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008137625
Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008137632
Version: 2018-04-13
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
The Greenstone God and the Stockbroker
The Rainbow Camellia
The Detective Story Club
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
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 plot itself, that you will never forget, is the character of Cicero Gramp. In his portrayal of this vagabond elocutionist, the author has rivalled Dickens himself, to whose literary style, incidentally, his bears a marked resemblance.
In reading The Millionaire Mystery you will be convinced that ‘it is impossible not to be thrilled’ by someone whose popularity at the moment may be less than one we can think of, but whose high place in Detective Fiction can never be taken from him.
PETER HAINING
2002
CHAPTER I
A MIDNIGHT SURPRISE
STEERING his course by a tapering spire notched in the eye of the sunset, a tramp slouched along the Heathton Road. From the western sky a flood of crimson light poured over the dusty white highway, which led straightly across the moor. To right and left, acres of sear coarse herbage rolled towards the distant hills, now black against the flaming horizon. In the quivering air gnats danced and flickered; the earth panted with the thirst of a lengthy drought, and the sky arched itself over the heat of a fiery furnace.
For many hours the tramp had held on steadily in the pitiless glare of the mid-June sun, and now that he saw ahead of him the spire and house-roofs and encircling trees of the village whither he was bound, a sigh of relief burst from him.
To ease his aching feet he sat down beside a mouldering millstone and wiped his beaded brow with a red bandana. He did not swear, which was singular in a tramp.
Apparently he had but recently joined the cadging profession, for about him there lingered an air of respectability and the marks of a prosperity not wholly decayed. He was stout, rubicund of countenance, and he wheezed like a sick grampus. Watery grey eyes and a strawberry nose revealed the seasoned toper; thick lips and a slack mouth the sensualist. As a begging friar of mediaeval times he would have been altogether admirable; as a modern tramp he was out of the picture.
Clothed in a broadcloth frock-coat considerably the worse for wear, he wore—oddly enough for a tramp—gaiters over his gouty-looking boots. His black gloves were darned at the finger-tips, and his battered silk hat had been ironed and brushed with sedulous care. This rook-like plumage was now plentifully sprinkled with the white dust of travel. His gait, in spite of his blistered feet, was dignified, and his manners were imposing.
The road was lonely, likewise the heath. There was no one in sight, not even a returning ploughman; but the recumbent wayfarer could hear, mellowed by distance, the bells of homing cows. Beasts as they were, he envied them. They at least had a place to sleep in for the night; he was without a home, without even the necessary money to procure shelter. Luckily it was summer-time, dry and warm. Also the tramp affected the philosopher.
‘This,’ he remarked, eyeing a sixpence extracted from the knotted corner of his handkerchief, ‘is a drink—two drinks if I take beer, which is gouty. But it is not a meal nor a bed. No! one drink, and a morsel of bread-and-cheese. But the bed! Ah!’ He stared at the coin with a sigh, as though he hoped it would swell into a shilling. It did not, and he sighed again. ‘Shall I have good luck in this place?’ cried he. ‘Heads I shall, tails I shan’t.’ The coin spun and fell heads. ‘Ha!’ said the tramp, getting on to his feet, ‘this must be seen to. I fly to good fortune on willing feet,’ and he resumed his trudging.
A quarter of an hour brought him to the encircling wood. He passed beyond pine and larch and elm into a cosy little village with one street. This was broken in the centre by an expanse of green turf surrounded by red-roofed houses, amongst them—as he saw from the swinging sign—a public-house, called, quaintly enough, the Good Samaritan.
‘Scriptural,’ said the stranger—‘possibly charitable. Let us see.’ He strode forward into the taproom.
In the oiliest of tones he inquired for the landlord. But in this case, it appeared, there was no landlord, for a vixenish little woman, lean as a cricket and as shrill, bounced out with the information that she, Mrs Timber, was the landlady. Her husband, she snapped out, was dead. To the tramp this hostess appeared less promising than the seductive sign, and he quailed somewhat at the sight of her. However, with a brazen assurance born of habit, he put
a bold face on it, peremptorily demanding bread, cheese, and ale. The request for a bed he left in abeyance, for besides the vixenish Mrs Timber there hovered around a stalwart pot-boy, whose rolled-up sleeves revealed a biceps both admirable and formidable.
‘Bread, cheese, and ale,’ repeated the landlady, with a sharp glance at her guest’s clerical dress, ‘for this. And who may you be, sir?’ she asked, with a world of sarcasm expended on the ‘sir.’
‘My name is Cicero Gramp. I am a professor of elocution and eloquence.’
‘Ho! A play-actor?’ Mrs Timber became more disdainful than ever.
‘Not at all; I am not on the boards. I recite to the best families. The Bishop of Idlechester has complimented me on my—’
‘Here’s the bread-and-cheese,’ interrupted the landlady, ‘likewise the beer. Sixpence!’
Very reluctantly Mr Gramp produced his last remaining coin. She dropped it into a capacious pocket, and retired without vouchsafing him another word. Cicero, somewhat discouraged by this reception, congratulated himself that the night was fine for out-of-door slumber. He ensconced himself in a corner with his frugal supper, and listened to the chatter going on around him. It appeared to be concerned with the funeral of a local magnate. Despite the prophecy of the coin, now in Mrs Timber’s pocket, Cicero failed to see how he could extract good fortune out of his present position. However, he listened; some chance word might mean money.
‘Ah! ’tis a fine dry airy vault,’ said a lean man who proved to be a stonemason. ‘Never built a finer, I didn’t, nor my mates neither. An’ Muster Marlow’ll have it all to ’isself.’
