Nothing But Murders And Bloodshed And Hanging

“Mary Fortune is a revelation! She tells absorbing stories, atmospherically renders the unruly panorama of Australian life in the late nineteenth century, applies sophisticated analyses to the crimes she chronicles or invents, and writes in a lively, opinionated style that overcomes the languor of period prose and casts her in three-dimensional relief–even though she was a woman writing invisibly as a man, and lived on the edge of the law herself. She belongs in any account of the origins of crime fiction.”

Mary Fortune (1833-1911)

A founding mother of crime and mystery fiction, Mary Fortune penned hundreds of detective stories and hard-hitting journalism. Born in Belfast, she married in Canada and emigrated to Australia in 1855 with her young son and an assignment to write about the goldrushes. There she gave birth to a second, illegitimate son, George Fortune, who became a career criminal. In 1858, she made a bigamous marriage to a policeman. Her experiences on the goldfields and in bohemian Melbourne provided ample material for the police procedurals that make up her Detective’s Album, serialized for forty years in the bestselling monthly The Australian Journal. Fortune published under the pseudonyms “Waif Wander” and “W. W.”, shielding her identity and earning a precarious living even when she was jailed for drunkenness or had no fixed address. Her true identity was almost lost forever, but dedicated research has revealed an extraordinary woman and her story.

About the Authors:

Lucy Sussex is a novelist and literary historian. She has written six novels, including The Scarlet Rider, a fictionalized account of her search for Mary Fortune, and over thirty short stories, many of which are collected in Matilda Told Such Dreadful Lies: The Essential Lucy Sussex. She is also the author of Woman Writers and Detectives in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction and Blockbuster! Fergus Hume and The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, and the editor of a collection of Mary Fortune’s journalism and memoirs, The Fortunes of Mary Fortune. She lives in Melbourne.

Megan Brown is an author and teacher. She wrote her doctoral thesis (University of Wollongong) on Mary Fortune and has subsequently contributed chapters to academic books and published scholarly papers on various aspects of Fortune’s work. She has taught science as well as nineteenth-century literature for many years, and drawn on her wide-ranging interests in researching such colonial-era figures as botanist/novelist Louisa Atkinson and surgeon/polymath Thomas Young Cotter. Married with four daughters, she lives on the NSW south coast.

Lucy Sussex and Megan Brown are the authors of Outrageous Fortunes, a biography of Mary Fortune and her son George, forthcoming in early 2025.

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