These two authors have studied women in crime fiction writing, specifically Mary Fortune, collaborating to bring this pioneering journalist and mid-19th century author to light.
Irish-born Mary travelled to Canada in the 1840s with her widowed father, where she married and gave birth to her first son. She fled that marriage, taking her son to Australia where her father had gone seeking gold in the 1850s.
From the goldfields to Melbourne, Mary made a life for herself, but she was no angel. She sold sly grog, married again bigamously, started writing for newspapers, and was known to be a big drinker. From 1855 to 1910, she wrote for magazines and newspapers, most famously The Australian Journal, where she used a couple of pseudonyms. She was one of the most published women of her era yet almost totally concealed as a person.
A series of stories from 1868 to 1908, supposedly narrated by a male detective, titled The Detective’s Album, became the first book of detective stories to be published 1871. This is believed to be the first book of detective stories by a woman published anywhere in the world.
The authors found that while her first son had died as a child, a second son had been born. He became a criminal, dying of kidney disease in 1907 during one of his spells in prison. He joins his mother as the subject of the authors’ research, with his criminal career listed from boyhood, hence the plural title for this work.
With its copious notes and index, Outrageous Fortunes brings Mary Fortune’s character to light.
Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Lucy Sussex’s books include Blockbuster! Fergus Hume and The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, which won the 2015 Victorian Community History Award, Women Writers and Detectives in the Nineteenth Century and Saltwater in the Ink: Voices from the Australian Seas.
She has a PhD from the University of Wales and is an honorary fellow at La Trobe University.
Megan Brown completed her PhD at the University of Wollongong, examining the work of Mary Fortune.
She has contributed chapters to The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature and The Unsocial Sociability of Women’s Life Writing.
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