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A hansom cab driver in Melbourne, Australia takes a gentleman passenger on board but unfortunately the passenger is discovered to be dead on arrival! How could a person travelling on his own in the back of a cab have been chloroformed to death? That is the mystery that will hold you, the reader, from the first page right through to the very end. It is this puzzle, too, that has made this book one of the most famous crime stories ever to have been published. It has been described in one reference book as the most successful crime story of all time, has sold well over a million copies and has appeared in at least a dozen different language versions. The Sunday Times describes this book as one of the best 100 crime stories of all time , while The Bookseller said that this was a broodingly atmospheric and impossibly well-plotted whodunnit …I was stunned by the time I had finished it . In this new edition, the entire text has been reset in easy-to-read type and noted writer H. R.F. Keating, who has published 60 novels (many of which feature Inspector Ghote of the Bombay CID), provides a scintillating introduction to this brilliant mystery novel. Fergus Hume (1859-1932) wrote this book at the age of 27 when he was a barristers’ clerk in Australia. In part the enduring charm of the novel is in the descriptions of low life around Little Bourke Street. He went on to write a further 140 novels but none of them achieved any lasting success, and indeed he benefitted little from his greatest work since he sold the English and American rights for just fifty pounds.
