Miss Mephistopheles (1890) is a mystery novel by Fergus Hume. Although not as successful as The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), an immediate bestseller for Hume, Miss Mephistopheles is a gripping novel with forbidden romance and a tightly wound mystery worthy of the best of Victorian fiction. A sequel to Madame Midas (1888), a story of fortune and loss set in the shadow of Australia’s nineteenth century gold rush, Miss Mephistopheles examines the solidarity between women abused and abandoned by men.
Having lost her family fortune to a deceitful husband, 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. There, she rescues a young girl named Kitty Marchurst, a preacher’s daughter misled by a wicked ex-convict. Raising her daughter Meg, Marchurst becomes a star in the Melbourne burlesque scene, acquiring wealth and fame beyond her wildest dreams. When her beloved diamonds are stolen, however, her world—and the city itself—threaten to come crashing down. Enmeshed in this mystery are an American insurance agent and Mrs. Villiers’ estranged husband, shadowy figures who move in and out of respectable society looking for vulnerable marks. Miss Mephistopheles is a tale of violence and greed set in a country built on wealth gathered too quickly to last.
This edition of Fergus Hume’s Miss Mephistopheles 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.
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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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