Review of The Tombstone Treasure (1897)

27 Aug 2019 - Courtney Floyd

Published in The Academy Fiction Supplement (21 Aug. 1897)

If anyone ought to write a good detective story, it should be Mr. Fergus Hume. There are, I know, people who shoot out their lips at The Mystery of a Hansom Cab. But it was a mystery; and that’s the point. Mr. Fergus Hume, to be quite frank, has no more style than a bill-broker. But the mystery of that murder in the cab held you from start to finish, if you had any of the elementary emotions left in your nineteenth-century soul––because the author knew how to build a plot. Now you may have noticed that many men, so soon as they have discovered that they can do one thing well, instantly set to work on the attempt to do something quite different. Wherefore Mr. Fergus Hume, having discovered that he can write a story which will float a publishing company on its plot, insists upon writing stories which would sink a syndicate in its style. The Tombstone Treasure is a Georgian story, and is concerned with a sum of money reported to have been hidden by ‘Wild Ralph’ who died in sixteen hundred and something. The clue to the hiding-place lies in Wild Ralph’s epitaph, which runs: ‘Here lyeth one who from hys birth / Numbered yn yeers but VI. of VII., / Monies hee hadd not when on earth, / But layed up al hys spoiles yn aire.’ From this the wicked French Marquis, the melancholy Oswald (who descends from Ralph, and who has no prospect of making a descent living unless he solves the riddle), and the sprightly Lady Sue try to find their way to the treasure. You know who found it. You would yourself find the way from the tombstone in the churchyard to the hidden treasure before you got halfway through the book. And that is my grievance against Mr. Fergus Hume. I know that the man who shouts ‘encore’ is both ungrammatical and unfair, and that the man who writes one good story is not necessarily capable of writing another equally good and entirely different. But if Mr. Fergus Hume will sit down quietly and dovetail another plot as complicated and mysterious as the hansom-cab murder, and make a book of it, I will buy the book and not worry about discount.