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Notes
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First published anonymously.
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This story is described by Lucy Sussex as 'an uncredited - and badly edited - extract from John Lang's 1855 novel The Forger's Wife' ( 'Whodunit? Literary Forensics and the Crime Writing of James Skipp Borlase and Mary Fortune').
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Related Works
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y
The Forger's Wife, or, Emily Orford
1853
single work
novel
crime
'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)
