The Dead Witness (1866) Mary Fortune (1833-1910)

Mary Fortune's Three Murder Mysteries

by Lucy Sussex

Mary Helena Fortune (1833-1909) was a pioneer Australian woman crime author.

• At a time when the colonial fiction market was tiny,dominated by British imports, she published in periodicals for over forty years. Her production was eclectic不拘一格 : crime, poetry, lively journalism, the Gothic, and a memoir of goldfields life.

• She is best known for the longestrunning early detective serial known, a police procedural called "The Detective's Album" (1867-1908), for which she wrote over 500 stories.

• Given this rate of production, hackwork 平庸作品 was inevitable, yet modem reprints have shown Fortune stands the test of literary time.

She is a key pioneer of the detective genre.

• When she began to write, Edgar Allan Poe's short stories were just beginning to be influential, and Wilkie Collins was a bestseller with his novels The Woman in White (1860) (mystery novel) and The Moonstone (1868).

• She wrote of colonial crimes for decades, something of which Fergus Hume would have been aware when he wrote The Mystery of the Hansom Cab (1886), the first detective million-seller, which took Melbourne's lowlife international, and just preceded Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories.

• Collins, Hume and Doyle achieved renown in their lifetimes. Fortune has waited nearly a century for the acclaim she deserves.

It must be wondered whether her pseudonym of "Waif Wander" was art into life.

• Fortune could be self-referential: her second husband Percy Brett makes recognizable and not always flattering appearances in her fiction.

• Certainly Waif Wander was an odd nom-de-plume ( 法语：笔名 )for a woman in an era where femininity comprised domesticity. Perhaps it was precisely this separation from the home that she denoted.

• Additionally, Waif is a legal tenm, signifying among other things lack of ownership - and a woman without a legal owner in the Victorian era was single, beyond the control of husband or father.

• And to delve into the dictionary even further, waif also has the meaning of outcast, which for a woman in Victorian society usually meant loss of virtue.

• In the pseudonym, does Fortune hint at her errant status? Most probably yes.

This account is the only image of Fortune known. Because she wasnever formally convicted, no photograph apparently survives.

• In 1874 the Police Gazette of Victoria advertised:• Infonnation is required by the Russell-street police r

especting Mary Fortune, who is a reluctant witness in a case of rape.

• Description: 40 years of age, tall, pale complexion, thin build; wore dark jacket and skirt, black hat, and old elastic-side boots.

• Is much given to drink and has been locked up several times for drunkenness.

• Is a literary subscriber to several of the Melbourne newspapers.

• Stated she resided with a mannamed Rutherford, in Easy [Easey] Street, Collingwood. (10 Feb. 1874)

The same year the teenage George was arrested as a 'neglected child'

• In 1871 Fortune's one book was published, a reprint collection also called The Detective's Album, and the first book of detective stories published in Australia.

• The same year the teenage George was arrested as a 'neglected child' - which at least meant he was on the streets unsupervised. He was committed to the Industrial School (Reform School) in Sunbury, usual for children considered at risk. It set him on a course of crime, absconding 潜逃 , petty thievery, further arrests.

• In 1879 he received his first sentence as an adult, for feloniously receiving. His last sentence, ten years hard labour, occurred in 1890, for burglary.

Indeed a case can be made that she was the :first woman to make a speciality of detective writing.

• What do we have here?

• Angel? Devil? Sinister or Shady Lady? Scarlet Woman? Drunk? Mother of a jailbird? Mother of Australian detective fiction?

• All of these perhaps, or simply just human ... who despite her name was a singularly unfortunate one.

• Yet she leaves us a positive legacy in her writing.

• Firstly she was unusual as a woman crime writer as having genuine, firsthand, experience of the lowlife, and of the police.

• She could write of detective procedures with authenticity, and is the first woman to write from the viewpoint of the police.

The Mulini Press has published three stories, from her favourite locales of the goldfields, the bush, and marvellous Melbourne.

• "In the Cellar" (1867) has a true crime basis, deriving from the 1858 goldfields murder of two Jewish hawkers, Raphael Caro and Solomon Levy. It begins in Maryborough, whose paper, the Maryborough and Dunolly Advertiser, covered the real-life original.

• The Hart Murder (1870) is one of Fortune's few depictions of a female detective, who though an amateur, proves smarter than the police.

• The final story, The Phantom Hearse (1889) is set among the urban poor and has a gritty (showing courage and resolve) realism offset by a supernatural mystery, showing Fortune as adept at the ghost story as at crime.

• Though told ostensibly 表面上的 by policemen, these stories articulate common issues - women and property, women as property-that still have resonance today, 150 years since Mary Fortune found herself outside the nineteenth-century marital system, a waif and wanderer, but independent, proudly earning her own bread from writing detective stories.