Fortune was certainly present at the creation of crime fiction. On 2 September 1865, the inaugural issue of The Australian Journal appeared in Melbourne. Until March 1869 the magazine was a weekly at which time it changed to a monthly. The earliest issues featured such series as ‘Adventures of an Australian Mounted Trooper’ and it seems likely these were the work of Fortune although the first definite Waif Wander stories were not included until 1866. In these early years she started ‘The Detective’s Album’ as part of a prolific output which included poems and romantic fiction. ‘The Detectives’ Album’, in most cases featuring Melbourne police detective Mark Sinclair, was a regular and popular part of The Australian Journal well into the 1890s. A collected edition, under the title The Detective’s Album: Recollections of an Australian Police Officer, was published in 1871.
The public Waif Wander was well known to Australian readers. The private Mary Fortune was a mysterious figure who had to wait until the Bicentennial year, at least 70 years after her death, to gain recognition. Like much fiction, Fortune’s stories had their basis in fact. Lucy Sussex in her essay ‘Shrouded in Mystery’: Waif Wander (Mary Fortune)’ in Debra Adelaide’s collection A Bright and Fiery Troop (Melbourne, Penguin, 1988) has sifted life from fantasy to create her biography.
Fortune’s autobiographical musings, published in the Australian Journal and dotted through her long career, seem to indicate that she was born in Ireland in the early 1830s, grew up in Canada and emigrated to Victoria in time to witness the gold rush. She worked for the Australian Journal and a few small newspapers; that much is certain. The rest of her life is largely unknown.
A friendship with the wife of a Victorian composer resulted in the only extant letter written by Mrs Fortune (now in Melbourne ’s Latrobe Library). At the time of writing she was tired, ill and near penniless, living in humble surroundings in South Yarra, a fact borne out by the Victorian electoral rolls for 1908. By 1912 she had disappeared and it was with difficulty that John Finmount Moir, who attempted to follow a cold trail in the 1950s, reached an inevitable deadend. It has been said the Australian Journal provided financial assistance for Mrs Fortune in her declining years and also paid for her burial but the rest is a mystery.
Whatever the circumstances of Mrs Mary Fortune, her work remains and it is hoped that in the not too distant future she will assume her rightful prominence both within Australian literature and the international crime fiction genre.
The story which follows is an excellent Mark Sinclair story from Fortune’s early period. By this time Sinclair was fully established as a series character although he was considering, as he was to do for some time, resigning from the police department in order to go into private practice.
The Detectives Album: Hereditary
There wanted but a few days to Christmas, when one morning Archie Hopeton dashed into my office with an open letter in his hand. I say dashed, for scarcely any other word would effectually describe his abrupt and sudden entrance; and, as such a manner was rather unusual with him, I looked up at him in wondering inquiry.
‘I’ve got the invitation for you, Mark. Now, surely you won’t refuse to go with me. My aunt, Mrs Thorne, says she will be very much pleased to see you.’
‘I’m afraid you’ve been putting the screw on the old lady, Archie – threatening not to go yourself unless she invited me, or something of that sort?’
‘ ’Pon my honour, no. I simply said that I was trying hard to induce you to spend your holidays at Puntwater. You will go, won’t you, Mark, out of charity, if for no other reason?’
I looked up from my desk into the young fellow’s anxious and pleading face; it was the face of a fair, handsome youth of twenty-two or three, with a pair of fine, brown eyes lighting it up, and beautiful glossy, fair hair waving above it; but at the moment it looked really haggard and careworn.
‘I might as well go there as anywhere else, Archie,’ I returned, ‘that is to say if I get away at all. I’m so used to applying for leave, having it granted, and then cancelled again in consequence of a “very particular case,” that I quite expect to stop and work hard during holiday time.’
‘Why don’t you start at once? Your leave’s granted now. Will you come on Monday, Mark?’ he asked eagerly.
‘If I get through with this business today, I shall certainly take time by the forelock, and go on Monday, my son. But I can’t make out your great anxiety to have me go with you.’
‘That shows how little attention you’ve been paying to all my egotistical stories,’ he cried, ‘and indeed, Sinclair, it is as simple a piece of selfishness for me to wish you with me, I mean, as ever you accused me of; but I am positively afraid to go back to aunt’s, afraid is the word.’
‘Afraid of your aunt, or cousin? Which?’
‘Of both. Oh, I know I’m a soft fellow, Sinclair, but until you have seen them, and known them, you cannot understand. Aunt Thorne has set her very heart on us marrying, and now that I’ve chosen so differently, she will be wild.’
‘And the young lady? Your cousin Hester, what will she say, or do? Is she so infatuated with you that she will never forgive you? What a lady-killer you must be, young chap. It’s well to be you.’
‘For mercy sake don’t chaff, Mark. I can’t stand it. Wait till you see them, and you will understand better. I was brought up by Aunt Thorne, and until I went to college, I had no idea that they were so peculiar and different from other people. Well, Mark, you will come, eh?’
‘I suppose I must. I suppose, to prove the entire unselfishness of my friendship for a young scatterbrains, I must place myself as a sort of buffer between him and the ladies who are foolish enough to wish to wed him against his will. But I’ve got a new idea, Archie. I’ll pay my addresses to Miss Thorne myself and see if I can’t cut you out. You say she has money?’
‘Yes, her father settled a tidy little fortune on Hester, but God forbid that you should think of spending your life with such a girl.’
‘I wish she heard you – I think she would be disenchanted.’
Archie shook his head with a shadow on his usually bright face that nothing but my faithful promise for Monday served to lighten.
For a wonder nothing intervened, and on the appointed day I found myself and portmanteau in company with Archie Hopeton, being whirled along the line to Puntwater. The weather was delightful, and we had every prospect of splendid holidays for outdoor amusements.
But I was considerably more occupied by thinking curiously of Archie’s relatives than of the fishing and shooting he promised me, and it was no wonder I had known him ever since he had commenced his career as a student of medicine, and considering the difference of our years, we had got on very well together. His fresh ideas of life, and his merry, good-humored freedom of conversation suited me, although what he had taken a fancy to in the hard-worked, cynical Detective Sinclair had often puzzled me.
I suppose it was the professional element ingrained in me that had made me so curious respecting these female relatives he so often spoke about. People with ample means, yet who lived so retired a life as to be almost strangers to their nearest neigbours – must have something peculiar about them; but there were many other things that I had become acquainted with through Archie that seemed at once odd and unaccountable to me.