Cirrus@Austlit

'The gripping story of Australia's first female crime writer and her career-criminal son

'When Mary Fortune arrived in Melbourne with her infant son in 1855, she was determined to reinvent herself. The Victorian goldfields were just the place.

'After a time selling sly-grog and a bigamous marriage to a policeman, Mary became a pioneering journalist and author. The Detective's Album was the first book of detective stories to be published in Australia and the first by a woman to be published anywhere in the world. Her work appeared in magazines and newspapers for over forty years - but none of her readers knew who she was. She wrote using pseudonyms, often adopting the voice of a male narrator to write about 'unladylike' subjects.

'When Mary died in 1911, her identity was nearly lost. In Outrageous Fortunes, Megan Brown and Lucy Sussex retrieve Fortune's astonishing career and discover an equally absorbing story in her illegitimate son, George. While Mary was writing crime, George was committing it, with convictions for theft and bank robbery. In their intertwined stories, crime fiction meets true crime, and Melbourne's literary bohemia consorts with the criminal underworld.'  (Publication summary)

'In popular music a common trope is the “difficult second album”. An act may have honed their songs for a debut, with less time for the equally important follow-up. It applies to literature as well, where novelty has its charms, less so more of the same.' 

'The photographs are tiny, still in their original envelope, never mounted in an album. They show the moment of departure for a traveller on the seas, as recorded by friends and family. Crossing hemispheres and great oceans was not so common in the early twentieth century, and depicted here is a rite of passage, a severing as sure as that of the flimsy paper streamers linking the travellers to shore, which would break as the ship left the quay. The photos track the farewell, the camera following the ship as it steams through the harbour, only ceasing when it vanishes from view.' (Introduction)

'White historian Cassandra Pybus has drawn on her direct links to Truganini, the symbol of indigenous extinction, to make a personal contribution to our conversation about colonial times, writes Lucy Sussex'

'If Australia can be represented in three books, there can be little better a genre than crime fiction. European Australia originated as a penal colony, and crime and its representation have been an obsession ever since. It began with convict ballads, then true crime in newspapers, to the gradually developing form of the crime novel over the nineteenth century. Australia was a significant generic innovator here, with Fergus Hume’s 1886 The Mystery of a Hansom Cab being the first crime international blockbuster. Crime-writing in Australia has form, content, swaggering style—and some of the results are outstanding literature by any criteria.' (Introduction)

'Residents of a hill-top guesthouse observe the first battle of the Martian invasion and the war machines, which easily dispatch the soldiers sent to battle them. But the tripods are unprepared for the dangers of The Australian bush.'

Source: Foreword.