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A Woman of Mystery: Mary Fortune
The following is an article called "A Woman of Mystery: Mary
Fortune" written by Lucy which in its original form was on the
Crime Factory website (which no longer exists).
A Woman of Mystery: Mary Fortune
By Lucy Sussex
Between the years
1865–1908 a woman of mystery, in art as well as life, published
over 500 detective stories in the popular Australian Journal
(AJ). Her ‘The Detective’s Album’, a series of
self-contained crime tales—the form later used by Conan Doyle
with Sherlock Holmes—was published for over forty years, making
it the longest running series in the early history of crime
fiction. She also wrote poetry, serialized novels, lively
journalism and an (unreliable) memoir. Seven of her stories were
reprinted in book form, as The Detective’s Album: Tales of
the Australian Police (1871), the first book of detective
fiction published in Australia. Yet nobody knew who she was…
During her
lifetime and afterwards, this woman was, said the writer Henry
W. Mitchell, ‘shrouded in mystery […] no one knows who she is or
where she lives’. She wrote under the ambiguous pseudonyms
‘Waif Wander’ and ‘W. W.’, with her real name, identity, even
(with the latter pseudonym) her gender concealed. Occasionally
in her autobiographical writing clues emerge, such as that her
initials were ‘M. H. F’.
The AJ
guarded her privacy, which was so total that her death passed
without public notice, the exact date remaining even now
unknown. But for the lucky chance of a book collector, J. K.
Moir, who embarked on a detective search for ‘Waif Wander’ in
the 1950s, at a time when people who had known her were still
living, her real name might never have been revealed. He found some
manuscript poems by his quarry, and also a letter, c. 1909,
signed M. H. Fortune.
In
1987 Stephen Knight assigned me ‘Waif Wander’ as a research
puzzle, at a time when
the
boom in family history had meant that newspapers and other
documents from colonial Australia had been microfilmed and
indexed. Therefore, when reading her memoirs and journalism, if
something checkable was mentioned, it was possible to follow a
hunch through a maze of microfilm. Fragmentary as the
autobiographical writing was, it could be read as a detective
story, the object being to ‘chercher la femme’, the unknown
woman writer.
In her memoir, Fortune revealed that she and her
little son George arrived in Australia from Canada in 1855. She
gave no indication of her marital status, something odd given
the Victorian obsession with feminine virtue, and the likelihood
was that she had been widowed young. Had she remarried, then? An
archival search revealed record of a goldfields marriage in 1858
between Percy Rollo Brett and Mary Helena Fortune, nee Wilson.
For the first time Waif Wander’s full name was revealed. She had
showed in her writing knowledge
of
police procedures, something explained by Brett’s occupation of
mounted policemen.
However this marriage soon broke up, and in 1866 Brett made a
second marriage without benefit of divorce, then costly and
difficult. Bigamy was not uncommon in such situations, but in
fact Mary, not Percy, was at fault. Recent research has shown
that Mary Fortune’s first husband Joseph died in Canada in 1861.
There is no evidence that he came to Australia, despite Mary
giving birth, in 1856, to a second son (Eastbourne Vawdrey
Fortune), and naming Joseph Fortune as the father. Most likely
E. V. Fortune was illegitimate—and he grew up to be a notorious
jailbird. Such potentially scandalous (in Victorian terms)
material provides an explanation as to why Waif Wander was so
determinedly anonymous: she had secrets that could threaten her
reputation and her livelihood as a female author.
By 1865 she was living on the remote goldfield of
Jericho (now Wehla), when the Australian Journal came her
way. This magazine had a strong interest in crime fiction from
its first issue, which featured ‘The Shepherd’s Hut’, described
as the memoirs of an ‘Australian Police Officer’, although its
author was a former lawyer, James Skipp Borlase. Within a month
Fortune had sent the AJ a fictional response. Her ‘The
Stolen Specimens’ was published as the work of ‘An Australian
Mounted Trooper’, which is what Brett had been.
The AJ made use of Fortune and their staff
writer Borlase to inaugurate the first detective series in
Australia. It ran to nine stories before Borlase left the AJ,
sacked for plagiarism. Subsequently Fortune wrote mostly
non-crime novel serials, including an exquisitely excessive
Gothic melodrama, ‘Clyzia the Dwarf’. It was not until 1867
that the AJ announced that “The Police stories’ which at
one time formed so attractive a feature, will be resumed [...]
as the leisure of the writer permits’. The stories, appearing
under the heading ‘The Detective’s Album’, were ascribed to W.
W., apparently an editorial decision to distinguish them from
the established Waif Wander (and feminine) pseudonym.
The notion behind the ‘Detective’s Album’ is a
collection of mug-shots, which prompts recollections from their
compiler, detective Mark Sinclair. They follow the format she
used with Borlase, a short (although often extending to
novelette-length) story, narrated by the viewpoint sleuth, in
each monthly issue of the magazine. She was to continue in this
vein, twelve stories a year, for the next forty years. The
format was varied in 1871–2 by a serial novel ‘edited’ by
Sinclair, ‘The Bushranger’s Autobiography’; and The
Detective’s Album collection was printed by the AJ in
1871. It is now one of the rarest and most valuable items in
Australian crime collecting.
Her
major achievement in detective writing was as a pioneer of the
‘police procedural’, with Sinclair developing into a likable
character, not over-scrupulous in his pursuit of criminals.
Mitchell noted that W. W.: ‘exposes all the nefarious arts,
tricks and dodges’ of detectives, ‘undoubtedly the authors of
more crime than they prevent’. Sinclair’s voice, though, is
remarkably similar to that of Fortune in her journalism, being
lively and colloquial, addressing the reader directly. Their
personal histories also intersect to some degree. He might be
regarded as Fortune in drag, a game of performative gender for
her.
Very little is
known of Fortune’s later life, although it would seem that the
treadmill of production took its toll. In the last of her
journalism, the 1876 ‘My Friends and Aquaintances’, an article
about dogs, she wrote that: ‘I am what my friends—ahem!—
two-legged acquaintances call a ‘very eccentric person’, and a ‘rather
peculiar creature”. In her writing she is scathing about women
drunkards—yet that is what she became. Ron Campbell, editor of
the AJ, wrote to Moir in 1952 of Fortune’s ‘bibulous
habits, for which, God knows, she probably had every reason, as
she wrote more, and doubtless got less for it, than any other
Australian writer of the time.’
The
Police Gazette of Victoria noted in 1874:
Information is required by the
Russell-street police respecting 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 man named Rutherford, in Easy [Easey]
Street, Collingwood. (10 Feb. 1874 10)
The
above is the only surviving visual description of Fortune known.
By 1909, as a surviving letter attests, she was
impoverished and nearly blind. Failing eyesight would appear to
have stilled her busy pen. Her original magazine contributions
ceased in 1913, although her earlier stories in the ‘Detective’s
Album’ series continued to be reprinted in the AJ until
1919. After this date the series was continued until 1933 by
other writers. The AJ granted her an annuity, as she was
unable to work any more, even paying ‘for her burial in another
person’s grave’—a chilling detail recorded by Moir that, like so
much in her life, evades explanation. Yet when she died and
where this grave is remain unknown despite concerted search—in
death as in life ‘W. W.’ remaining a mystery.
When Fortune began writing her detectives, Arthur
Conan Doyle was still in short petticoats and Wilkie Collins was
three years from penning The Moonstone. Detective fiction
was so young a literary genre that it lacked a name. She was
therefore a significant trailblazer. We can regard her as the
first woman in Australia to write detective fiction, precursive
of Marele Day, Kerry Greenwood and so many others. However, she
was probably the first woman worldwide to specialize in
the genre. In England and the US she had been preceded by Mary
Braddon, Ellen (Mrs Henry) Wood, Louisa May Alcott and Harriet
Prescott Spofford—yet none of these authors wrote from the
viewpoint of the police detective, nor with her authenticity.
Moreover, no other woman, Anna Katharine Green apart, who began
her career in 1878, wrote so much crime fiction in the
nineteenth century. For all these reasons we should celebrate
Fortune as a significant mother of the detective writing genre.
In 1989 I edited Fortune’s autobiographical writing as
The Fortunes of Mary Fortune (Penguin; still available
from Spinifex Press, www.spinifexpress.com.au). Her memoir of
goldfields life was termed by modern reviewers the most ‘vital
account of those exciting days’, and deserving ‘to be regarded
as the first instance of Australian, as opposed to colonial,
prose’. It took longer to collect her detective fiction, given
that I had over 500 examples to read and select from. The
Detectives’ Album was published in 2003, by Broken Silicon
Dispatch Box (only available in the US and Canada, PO Box 204,
Shelburne Ontario Canada LON 1SO; PO Box 122 Sauk City,
Wisconsin, USA 53583-0122). Samples of her crime, journalism,
and an exquisitely over-the-top vampire story ‘The White Maniac’
(eerily precursive of Angela Carter), can be found on the
Gaslight website, http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/)
As she herself said of her writing:
I have been told by some that
I tell horrible stories, and by others that I am not sensational
enough; and I have personally come to the conclusion that I
shall tell just such stories as I please…
(from ‘A Woman’s Revenge;
Or, Almost Lost’)
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