A murderer is identified by a team of oxen. A dead man rises from his watery grave to indict his killer. A villain meets justice in a shark's jaws. A phantom hearse driven through Melbourne's slums presages 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 provide a vivid account of life and death in a country in rapid flux, as the huge population increase 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 goldrushes, which she observed firsthand and depicted in many of her stories. A bigamous marriage to a policeman gave her further inside knowledge to write crime and mystery stories, convincingly, from the viewpoint of a male policeman. Over the next forty years she produced more than 500 stories under the title The Detective's Album, serialized in the mass-circulation magazine The Australian Journal. She tackled subjects such as murder, armed robbery, bootlegging, and sexual violence with a frankness unprecedented for a woman in the nineteenth century. This volume collects fifteen of Fortune's finest stories, while also showcasing her range as a writer?from melodrama and gothic horror to social realism and what we now call noir.
For much of that time, Mary Fortune lived a precarious existence?repeatedly jailed for public drunkenness, homeless on occasion, and unable to prevent her illegitimate 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 that a racehorse and a greyhound were both named after Waif Wander.
Fortune's anonymity meant that when she died in 1911, she was almost lost to literary history. Only in recent decades has diligent research established her true identity and her extraordinary life story. This collection, appearing concurrently with a biography, OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNES, restores her to her rightful place as a major crime writer.
