Hagar of the Pawn-Shop

Circa 1898 mystery stories by Fergus Hume, an Englishman who grew up in Australia. Hume was the author of THE MYSTERY OF A HANSOM CAB which is said to have been the best selling mystery novel of the Victorian era. The writing of Hagar of the Pawn Shop is good and the stories interesting though some are predictable. The book did not sell as well the hansom cab mystery. Just a little of the 19th century British attitude of superiority is noticeable. The thread linking all of the stories is a Romany Gypsy girl named Hagar who runs a pawn shop. There is some period slang easily understood in context.The free Kindle edition has some formatting problems with words breaking at the end of lines.

The story is quite good. Unfortunately, the translation into Kindle format was quite poor. Many words abruptly truncate at the end of the line and resume on the following line. It took some time to learn how to read this type of text.

Good old book. Enjoyed it.

The stories are good examples of low-end Victorian fiction (Hume is no Conan Doyle), but the big problem is that this book was scanned without ever being edited-- sentences vanish into gibberish, and every time a character says "I'll" it's rendered as "FU." Project Gutenberg has a nice, clean version of the text-- why didn't they just use that one?

Very much a period piece- some decent writing in spots but Hagar Stanley isn't much of a detective. If you can't stand dialect writing avoid this book it's full of it.

I little different, very enjoyable.

The formatting in the Kindle version is the worst that I've seen yet. The type face is Courier like the old typewriters. The lines break in the middle of words. The other problem was the extreme slang which I didn't understand. The stories are good but they are hard to follow because of these issues.

This book evokes wonderful imagery and characters of the Victorian age. Definitely worth reading.

Sadly, I have found the free kindle version of this book so irritating as to make it virtually unreadable. The print and the fact that so many words are split between two lines made me (a real fan of Fergus Hume) put it aside after less than a page. What a shame!