Fergus Hume was a prolific and widely-read late nineteenth and early twentieth century English writer of detective fiction. He isn’t well-known today in large part because the genre of detective fiction produces a huge amount of new material every year so thus all but a very few deceased novelists in the genre are really remembered.
Hume is a writer I’d really recommend to others, because he writes excellent stories that really are extremely entertaining even to the modern reader.
That said I am somewhat partial to Hume, because of his views on the jewish question.
For example in ‘The Opal Serpent’ and ‘Hagar of the Pawn Shop’ Hume styles pawn broking and acting as a fence for criminal goods as being a profession dominated by jews. Based no doubt on his own knowledge of the fact that in the East End of London this was indeed the case and this area was also the biggest area for this kind of trade of in Europe at the time.
Hume also believed that jews could be identified by physical characteristics such as ‘dark hair, dark eyes and dark skin’ which are ‘oriental traits’ and thus likely to be carried by jews as he outlines in ‘The Bishop’s Secret’.
However jews try to cover their jewishness as he explains in ‘The Silent House’ when he introduces a ‘short, beautiful blonde’ female character known as Mrs Lydia Vrain. She is from New York and her father is a short dark man named Jabez Klein; who is perceived as a ‘shrewd business man’ but only with a ‘moderate amount of money’. Her husband Mark Vrain - she being his second wife and him having an adult daughter from his first marriage when he married for the second time - has been murdered and she immediately shows that she is interested only in the insurance pay out for his death and only married him for his money.
Thus, to Hume jews are not only identifiable as a people by their physical characteristics, but also engaged in much that is bad for both individuals and society.
Therefore it is reasonable to suggest that Fergus Hume was indeed anti-Semitic.