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Mysteries abound in this crime novel by Fergus Hume. Mr. Fanks, detective of Scotland Yard, is not all he seems, for when off-duty, he assumes his real identity of Octavius Rixton, well-to-do idler. When the scent of a murder reaches him, he is instantly Mr. Fanks and on the pursuit. A guilty looking innkeeper nicknamed Queen Beelzebub and a suspicious doctor named Renshaw further complicate his beginning investigation, and he finds the body is a man with a tattoo on his arm that has been partially obliterated by a knife. Where no one is as he seems the mystery can only deepen before its solution.
Fergus Hume
Fergus Hume (1859–1932) was born in England and raised in New Zealand. He immigrated to Australia in 1885 and was working as a clerk in a Melbourne barrister’s office when he wrote The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886). The bestselling crime novel of the nineteenth century, it served as inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.
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