“So you liked the book, you’re saying?”
The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (2012) is a tidy little murder mystery set in Australia. It’s almost a primer on how to write such mysteries: motivations, the awkward and sometimes unjust machinations of society and how they interact with the crime du jour; egos and their place; societal attitudes and their place; methods of murder and detection; and karma. In this mystery of a body is found in a hansom cab, who could have committed the crime and why, and then digging through layers of other crimes and the accompanying avarice, it’s all nicely done.
But there’s no standout characteristic. Audiences being human, we like to curl our fingers around some salient story feature, whether it’s Holmes, Dr Watson, Father Brown, Dexter, or any number of other characters, the bumbling upper class of Agatha Christie, seemingly impossible crimes yet committed, impossible-to-solve crimes solved, sometimes even something even as simple as Mrs. Murphy or Koko the Cat, those salient features make the stories memorable – something worth discussing.
And, in this respect, while the movie dates from 2012, the source material, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, by Fergus Hume, dates from 1886, and is, presumably, based on Hume’s experiences of his three years spent in Melbourne. While poverty is no fun for anyone experiencing it, today’s poverty does not compare to that of the late 1800s, and the Wikipedia page does mention that Hume’s novel served to underline the grinding, oft-fatal nature of the poverty of the time, sparking conversation of same.
In this way, our progress in reducing poverty has also reduced the impact of a generally well-made movie. Rather than be upset by the poverty, for audiences it simply becomes part of the expected background of the movie. That’s too bad, as Hume did the public a service with a novel that illustrated the fate of the unfortunate; and, yet, it also implicitly illustrates the progress it helped promote.
So, see The Mystery of a Hansom Cab? If you like complex murder mysteries, sure. It won’t knock your socks off, not like the novel affect audiences in 1886. But it’s still well done and makes one think.
