DAN LYONS' DOOM

by Mary Fortune

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 Tales of the Australian Police. In the early 1880s she collected her notes from the Goldfield days, and wrote a serial that was part memoir, part travelogue under the title Twenty-Six Years Ago; or, the Diggings from '55. It was later republished as a book, The Fortunes of Mary Fortune in 1989.

192 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 5, 2023

About the author

Born Mary Helena Wilson in Belfast, Ireland, (circa 1832) the daughter of Scots-Irish Protestant parents, civil engineer George Wilson and his wife Eleanor (nee Atkinson). Mary Fortune was an Australian writer who wrote under the pseudonyms Waif Wander, W.W. and her initials, ‘M. H. F.’, in newspapers and popular magazines. She contributed work in a variety of genres: poetry; memoirs; journalism; serialized novels, ranging from tales of Australian life to the gothic historical romance ‘Clyzia the Dwarf; and, most importantly, over 500 crime stories. Her only book publication during her lifetime was The Detective’s Album by ‘W. W.’ (1871), a collection of her crime writing. It is now a rare item, with only one copy known to exist, held at the Mitchell Library. 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. There is some mystery as to the place and date of her death, but has been reported to be (circa 1911).