Mary Fortune

Nothing But Murders and Bloodshed and Hanging (eBook, ePUB)

Tales of mystery and detection from a trailblazing woman crime writer

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

A murderer is identified by a team of oxen. A dead man rises from a watery grave to indict his killer. A phantom hearse gliding through Melbourne's slums foretells violent death. A seamstress turns detective to avenge her friend's homicide. A locked-tent mystery. Such are the themes of Mary Fortune's ingenious and dramatic crime stories. Between 1865 and 1910 she wrote over 500 of them; they comprise the first ever detective fiction series written by a woman. Set in the outback, on the goldfields, and in the burgeoning metropolis of Melbourne, they offer a vivid account of life and death in colonial-era Australia. Fortune tackled subjects such as murder, armed robbery, bootlegging, and sexual violence with a frankness unprecedented for a woman in the 19th century, in styles ranging from melodrama and Gothic horror to social realism and what is now called noir. This book brings together 17 of her finest stories, edited and introduced by literary historians Lucy Sussex and Megan Brown. Born in Ireland in 1832, Fortune arrived in Australia during the gold-rush, which she observed firsthand and depicted in many of her stories. A brief, bigamous marriage to a policeman gave her inside knowledge to write about crime, and over the next 40 years her prolific output was serialized under the title The Detective's Album in the mass-circulation Australian Journal. She often lived precariouslystruggling with alcohol, unable to prevent her son drifting into a life of crimeand preserved her privacy by publishing under pseudonyms. Her anonymity meant that when she died in 1911 she was almost lost to literary history. Only recently have Mary Fortune's true identity and her extraordinary life story emerged. This collection, together with a simultaneously published biography, will confirm Mary Fortune's status as a trailblazing crime writer. The themes of marriage, murder, and gendered violence resonate with contemporary concerns. The writing is beautiful, complex, and thrilling . . . From the small towns of the goldfields to the arid yet lush landscape of the outback, and back to society living in Melbourne, these stories will enthral you.Candice Fox

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Verse Chorus Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 4. März 2025
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781959163107
• Artikelnr.: 72351287

Autorenporträt

Mary Fortune (1833-1911) was a founding mother of crime and mystery fiction, the author of hundreds of detective stories as well as 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, from whom (together with her own experience of the goldfields and bohemian Melbourne life) she acquired source 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.", thus 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.

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 from LaTrobe University Press.