Cirrus@Austlit

A story of English settlers in Australia, bushrangers, felons, and escaped convicts. The novel follows the fortunes of George Caldecott who has come to Australia for an adventure. He meets up with an infamous local bushranger, Captain Stormalong, deals with several unsavoury characters, and solves a mystery surrounding the fate of a man to whom his mother was once engaged. He also meets and falls in love with a young woman, Lucy Walton.

'The Forger’s Wife (1856) is a lively adventure novel, set in an unruly colonial Sydney where everyone is on the make. The forger’s wife is a young woman who follows her rakish husband out to Australia and struggles to survive as her marriage falls apart. She soon meets Detective George Flower, a powerful man with a cavalier sense of justice and retribution. Flower literally controls the fortunes of the colony: taking on the local bushrangers, inspecting colonial authorities, and helping himself to the spoils along the way.

'First serialised in Fraser’s Magazine in 1852, The Forger’s Wife was popular in its time and was reprinted many times over. It is Australia’s first detective novel – and most likely, the first detective novel in the Anglophone world.' (From 2017 edition)