Books The Detective's Album: Stories of Crime and Mystery from Colonial Australia | ||
Mary Helena Fortune (c. 1833 – 1911) was an Australian writer, under the pseudonyms Waif Wander and W.W. She was one of the earliest female detective writers in the world, one of the earliest women to write detective fiction, and probably the first to write from the viewpoint of the detective.
Contents
Personal life
Mary Fortune was born around 1833 in Belfast, Ireland. She traveled with her father to Canada. In Melbourne, Canada, she married Joseph Fortune on 25 March 1851 and had one son. When her father left Canada for the Australian goldfields, she followed him, leaving her husband behind and traveling to Australia with her son. She arrived in Melbourne, Victoria, on 3 October 1855.
In November 1856, she gave birth to a second son. In January 1858 her elder son died. On 25 October 1858, Mary married Percy Rollo Brett (possibly bigamously) at Dunolly, Victoria.
A prolific storyteller, she wrote in all over 500 detective stories over 40 years, most featuring Detective Mark Sinclair.
During her lifetime, she was popular enough to have a racehorse and greyhound named after her.
She died an alcoholic. Her death passed without public notice, in part because she wrote under pseudonyms. Author Lucy Sussex discovered Fortune's unmarked grave in 2016.
Her horror fiction story "The White Maniac: A Doctor's Tale" (included in James Doig's anthology Australian Ghost Stories (2010)) verges on being a tale of vampirism, but its theme is in fact anthropophagy.
The Detective's Album
She is best known for The Detective's Album, the longest-running early detective serial anywhere in the world. Narrated by detective Mark Sinclair, The Detective's Album was serialized for forty years in the Australian Journal from 1868 to 1908. In 1871, seven of the stories were published as a book, as The Detective's Album: Tales of the Australian Police.