Mystery and Crime Fortune, Mary: Tales of Murder and Mystery. V1. 20 Mar 2011

[crutledge]

Mary Helena Fortune (c. 1833-1910) was born Mary Wilson in Belfast of Scottish ancestry and emigrated to Canada (which she considered her ‘home') as a child. In 1851 she married Joseph Fortune, a surveyor, and they had one son before she travelled to Australia to join her father George Wilson in 1855, who was working on the goldfields. She had another son in 1856 before marrying (possibly bigamously) in 1858 Percy Rollo Brett, a mounted policeman. This marriage quickly broke up and from 1865 she wrote for the popular Australian Journal under the pseudonyms Waif Wanderer and W.W. She began writing crime fiction as part of a collaboration with James Skipp Borlase, who plagiarized her. After he was sacked from the AJ she became the magazine's principal crime writer, contributing over 500 detective stories between 1865-1908. Her one book publication was The Detective's Album (1871), possibly the first collection of detective stories published by a woman. She died in mysterious circumstances c. 1910.

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