A murderer is identified by a team of oxen. A dead man rises from his watery grave to indict his killer. A policeman on his nighttime beat is haunted by a prisoner serving a life sentence because of his testimony. A phantom hearse gliding through Melbourne’s slums foretells violent death.
Mary Fortune’s dramatic crime stories, set in colonial-era Australia, comprise the first detective fiction series written by a woman. They also offer a vivid account of life and death in a country in rapid flux, as mass immigration following the discovery of gold in 1851 led to great riches for some, poverty and violence for others.
Born in Ireland in 1832, Fortune emigrated to Australia during the gold-rush, which she observed firsthand and depicted in many of her stories. A bigamous marriage to a policeman gave her inside knowledge to write about crime, and in 40 years she produced over 500 stories, many of them serialized under the title “The Detective’s Album” in the mass-circulation Australian Journal. She tackled subjects such as murder, armed robbery, bootlegging, and sexual violence with a frankness unprecedented for a woman in the 19th century. This book collects 18 of Fortune’s finest stories and showcases her range as a writer—from melodrama to social realism, and Gothic horror to what we now call noir.
Mary Fortune lived a precarious existence—repeatedly jailed for public drunkenness, homeless on occasion, unable to prevent her son George drifting into a life of crime. She preserved her privacy by publishing under pseudonyms, most commonly “Waif Wander” (or “W.W.”)—it is a measure of her fame at the time that a racehorse and a greyhound were named after Waif Wander. But her anonymity meant that when she died in 1911, she was almost lost to literary history. Only recently has her true identity and her extraordinary life story emerged. This collection, appearing concurrently with a biography, restores her to her rightful place as a major crime writer.
