Madame Midas (1888) is a mystery novel by Fergus Hume. Although not as successful as The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), an immediate bestseller for Hume, Madame Midas is a gripping novel with forbidden romance and a tightly wound mystery worthy of the best of Victorian fiction. From an author whose work inspired Arthur Conan Doyle, Madame Midas is a story of fortune and loss set in the shadow of Australia’s nineteenth century gold rush.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Robert Curtis—along with countless other desperate and adventurous men—journeyed to Australia in search of fortune. Having established a successful mine in Ballarat, Curtis settled in Melbourne, where he married and had a daughter. In her youth, Miss Curtis was the talk of the town, and though she could have chosen any man for her husband, she found herself attracted to Mr. Villiers, a charming-yet-suspicious gentleman. Not long after their wedding, his intentions become all too clear, and soon his gambling threatens to erase the Curtis fortune. Outraged and disgraced, Mrs. Villiers flees to Ballarat, where she turns her attention to managing her father’s mine. Known to the local people as Madame Midas, she maintains a hard exterior in order not only to hide the truth of her past, but to guard herself from the cruelty of men. When a pair of escaped prisoners lands on the nearby shore, however, her newfound security faces a formidable threat. Madame Midas is a tale of love lost and found, of violence and greed in a country built on shallow, unstable foundations.
This edition of Fergus Hume’s Madame Midas is a classic of Australian mystery and detective fiction reimagined for modern readers.
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With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.
O autorze
Fergus Hume (1859-1932) was an English novelist. Born in Worcestershire, Hume was the son of a civil servant of Scottish descent. At the age of three, he moved with his family to Dunedin, New Zealand, where he attended Otago Boy’s High School. In 1885, after graduating from the University of Otago with a degree in law, Hume was admitted to the New Zealand bar. He moved to Melbourne, Australia, where he worked as a clerk and embarked on his career as a writer with a series of plays. After struggling in vain to find success as a playwright, Hume turned to novels with The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), a story of mystery and urban poverty that eventually became one of the most successful works of fiction of the Victorian era. Hume, who returned to England in 1888, would go on to publish over 100 novels and stories, earning a reputation as a leading writer of popular fiction and inspiring such figures as Arthur Conan Doyle, whose early detective novels were modeled after Hume’s. Despite the resounding success of his debut work of fiction, Hume died in relative obscurity at a modest cottage in Thundersley.
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