House hunting, pt. 2001, a specious odyssey

We have a winner! And the winner is us! You’ll have noticed that on the real estate websites a certain property is listed as “pending.” That would be due to Karin & me.

Actually, I am more of a winner than Karin, because her commute will lengthen by approximately ten minutes each way. But we’re both winners in terms of price – and in terms of the house itself, which we like.

We’re winners, that is, if the sale goes through.

Samuel also likes the house, but he is less discriminating. Our other friend Sam, Sam the architect, saw the house and said its construction was sound.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I finished reading The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, which was pretty lightweight despite its frequent allusions to classical literature. It had many funny scenes with loquacious landladies and back-alley women, and a truly horrifying deathbed scene. Marco Denevi, who wrote the excellent Rosaura a las diez, is said to have been influenced by Wilkie Collins; but I shouldn’t be surprised if he also studied The Mystery of a Hansom Cab.

The mystery of a hansom cab

Since War and Peace is proving too difficult to read at this time, I am aiming much lower. The book I am trying out is Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab – “the original blockbuster crime novel,” according to the back cover of the Text Classics edition.

Arthur Conan Doyle did not admire the writing of Fergus Hume. I’m not sure I admire it, but I do like it.

“Well,” said Mr Gorby, addressing his reflection in the looking glass, “I’ve been finding out things these last twenty years, but this is a puzzler and no mistake.”

Mr Gorby is the detective. Other important characters – socialites in Victorian Melbourne – spend lots of time drinking tea, casually discussing the murder (which the newspapers have turned into a sensation), and trying to arrange marriages for themselves. The book reminds me of nothing else so much as Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters, which she wrote when she was nine.

The murder is done with poison (chloroform) late at night in a hansom cab. This method has the virtue of noiselessness. Writers of the genre’s later “golden” age would have opted for air-bubble injection – also ludicrous – or strangulation.