Mary Fortune (1833-1911) was the author of hundreds of ­detective stories as well as hard-hitting journalism. Born in ­Belfast, she married in Canada and emigrated to Australia in 1855 with her young son and an assignment to write about the gold rushes. There she gave birth to a second, illegitimate son, George Fortune, who became a career criminal. In 1858 she made a bigamous marriage to a policeman, and what she learned from him, along with her own experience of life in the goldfields and in ­bohemian Melbourne, provided source material for the police procedurals she began writing in the 1860s. These stories make up The ­Detective’s Album, serialized for forty years in the mass-circulation Australian Journal.

Mary Fortune published under pseudo­nyms, thereby shielding her identity and earning a precarious living even when she was jailed for drunkenness, or had no fixed address. Her true identity was almost lost forever, but dedicated research has revealed an extraordinary woman and her story, as detailed in the 2025 biography of Fortune and her son George, Outrageous Fortunes, by Lucy Sussex and Megan Brown, who also compiled and introduced this collection of her finest stories.