Murder she wrote: the life of Mary Fortune

She's going to have had a lot of followers. Yeah, not all of them with as good as name as hers. One of the best bylines I've ever heard.

She read it and thought this isn't very good. I could do better.

How did she know much about how they operated? Was she involved some way? And it shows you that there's always been an appetite for what.

We're doing here, nothing but murders and bloodshed and hanging.

Oh, it's a great title.

I'm Andrew Rule. This is life and Crimes. And today we've got something a little bit different. We have Lucy Sussex here. Lucy and I met many years ago at a neck Kellier Woods and we had a chat. And she didn't forget that because recently she got in touch and said, I've now done a book about some people who did naughty things a long time ago. And I said, well, you sound like somebody that should come and talk to us on laughing crimes. Lucy, and she's coming, and she's

Me and Mike co writer Meghan Brown, we're launching two books. One is our biography of Mary Fortune, who was one of the first two women to write detective stories. All right, she lived in Melbourne.

Yeah, great, name was a real name.

Yeah, that was her second marriag name.

Oh, it's gorgeous name.

Yeah, Irish, Irish, beautiful. And so she wrote over five hundred detective stories.

She didn't what short ones for newspapers or periodicals.

Well, she wrote for the Herald. She wrote short ones, but slightly longer ones for a periodical called The Australian Journal, which was founded in the eighteen sixties and lasted until the nineteen fifties.

Ge. That's a good innings.

It was a very good innings for a fiction magazine.

Were they serialized.

It wasn't a series called the Detective's Album. And the idea behind it was a was a police detective who had a photo album and these were all the crimsi'd encountered.

I see.

So she published that under theme w W, and nobody ever realized it was a woman. Her publishers kept its secret. And so the second book where theres a collection of her detective fiction called Nothing but Murders and Bloodshed and Hanging.

Oh, it's a great title.

It's out of one of her actual stories.

Is that you've lifted it from there, And how does the collection go? How does it stand up to modern eyes?

Well, I think it's rollicling good yarns. But I mean, if you're thinking Colin Doyle, well no, but these are these are police, these are police procedurals. So she writes with them, writes about the mounted police that was in the bush and they were based on the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and then the town police was based on the English. So she then goes to writing about detectives.

How did she know much about how they operated? Was she involved some way with.

Yeah, well, she came to Australia for the gold in eighteen fifty five.

She and many others.

Oh yes, many of our ancestors, I suspect, I think so. But she was joining her father and it looks like she ran away from her husband in Canada and her father was running a goldfields store in Cassle, Maine region, right, So she joined him. And she wrote this up on a memoir slightly disguised and fictionalized because she was a bit of a wild lady.

She must have been. So she's abandoned, She's Irish by birth, she's abandoned husband, number one in Canada, or he abandoned her. Then she's come to the goldfields in Australia. Yeah, this is what people don't realize is that gold attracted people.

They crisscrossed the world incredibly mobile.

Mobile.

You just topped on us on a sailing ship.

Where you were and unless it sank, in which case you weren't.

Well exactly. But she goes get to the central goldfields after gaining knowledge of a few things like slie rog selling, which was the only way a goldfield store could really make money. It was illegal and on the goldfield she was. She was only there a month or two and there was a murder and she writes about it, so you know, she got a taste for true crime. But she goes

Because she hadn't she wasn't actually divorced.

Well, a bit difficult those days, expensive.

So but he was in Canada. That's not bad.

I didn't know. He didn't know. So she marries Percy Brett and they lie about their ages. The on the wedding certificate.

She went up a bit in hers down he went.

He's went down a bit, and her state. Hers went down a little bit, and his went down to he was only about twenty oh and she was about twenty four.

Oh, I say, okay, so.

They And now the lie was that she said she was a widow.

Oh well, you know, well she might have been by then, for all she knew. He might have a grizzly bear, might have eaten him in Alaska.

Absolutely. The thing was that my grandfather was a clergyman, and he said, if he was marrying a widow and they looked suspicious widow or widow, and they looked suspiciously young, it may make absolutely certain. They wrote the date of when they were bereaved on the certificate because it cleared him.

Oh I see.

Because people couldn't get divorced. And the most common thing was that she just ran off to another colony married. And yeah, so Daisy Bates who married Brent. She she married, managed about two big of mis marriages.

Oh, Daisy Baits, she was a very interesting book about the passing of the natives. I think she called it something like that.

Yes, and of course Breaker Morant was absolutely.

Not as not the charming chap that perhaps he was presented as. I think he might have made.

A rogue the film. Yeah, well there's a lot of charming chaps who rogues. But anyway, marriage doesn't last still, Oh yeah, yeah, look at all the con men around the place.

Oh yes, there's many of them. Now, so Mary Fortune, where did she pick up the fortune? Name was that from she picked up? That was her first husband, that's the Canadian.

Yeah, and the Brett marriage didn't last. He nicked off to New South Wales and oddly enough ends up being held up by Ned Kelly in the Deildary Bank robbery. Oh magnificent, And he actually behaved using his copper skills. He actually talked down Steve Hart from from shooting somebody. Really Steve Hart was getting a bit excited, and Percy Brett, who was by this stage, you know, a bit of a father figure. And now, no, Ned Kelly, this won't do.

This, won't do. Don't be shooting them.

Yeah exactly, which took guts.

Very good man. And did they have any children?

No, they didn't, but she had an illegitimate child beforehand, and this child whom she called George, grew up to be a He started a thief, and he robbed banks, and he correcked safes, and he spent a lot of his time in jail.

Did he use of the name Fortune? He has various names.

I suppose he's.

Stuck with the name Fortune initially, and then Tortune, and then he had a few aliases. And if you go to Trove and type in George Fortune and you'll sort of find quite a lot of material, including the Herald.

The bank robber. Yes, is magnificent. So we've seen her go from her twenties to her thirties. When did she really take to the writing big time?

She sees that there's a new fiction magazine, and I think that she's in the loop as regards contributors, because when she was on the Castlemone Goldfield, she actually was writing revolutionary poetry. A lah Eureka was she? And so the editor said, it's the Irish course, of course, Well her name was. She used her initials, and there was a request that MHF will call in the offices at his earliest conveniences, And so she walks in a crinoline

But she did get the she got the job.

No, she did not in calcimone. But she did end up working for the Herald in the eighteen seventies. But in the meantime Australian Journal came out. They had a police story in it, and she read it and thought this isn't very good. I could do better, So she sends it in and they sign her up to do us to do a series, which doesn't last terribly long because it's a first attempt. But later on, after a few things, other jobs like being on a governess and

Is that a fact?

Millowa?

Yeah, Miloa yeah, good lord. Small world, small world indeed. But she sees this chance and so a few years so she thinks she's looking for a hook and she's writing for the Australian Journal, all sorts of things, from Gothic novels to poetry, and she thoughts gets the idea of a detective's album, and once she's got that she's got. She can make a series from that because every month it's a new photo and she tells the story of that photo, and that lasts until about nineteen oh nine.

That was a very good idea, and it shows you that there's always been an appetite for what we're doing here, which absolutely we're talking about crime more or less to people who want to listen. But those same people, their great grandparents also had that interest, and she would marry for, among others, would provide the material for them to read.

Yeah, and she could mix both up. You can can trace actual crimes. One of georgie's Burg's was an old bury. They robbed a bank and they wheeled the safer way to the river bank so they can break it open in a wheelbower, which they nicked, of course, laughing all the time, and she puts the detail of the safe and the wheelbower into her story, so she was using him for copy.

Safe cracking was a very big thing until there are still people alive that have Cracksaves went out probably in the eighties and nineties.

I suspect probably the last possible point when they got really too complex.

Complex and also cash started to be less of a yeah thing, the saves got very good and well, he's no longer with us, But had he not been shot dead back twenty five or thirty years ago. Like Graham Kinderbaro known as the Monster, he was extremely good at opening safety and others developed the magnetic duelking technique and a very big one at m Willembar in New South Wales. And they happened to know, interestingly that there was a lot of money in.

The safe that week because he talked.

Somebody suggested that perhaps a local policeman from up there might have heard something and might have had his heat of the ground. It's a two way street, I think so that possibly, possibly, so this might be a wicked rumor and gossip. And if that policeman is alive, clearly it's a rumor and gossip absolutely, But if he's dead, well maybe not.

Just one detail about the fortune.

The fortune fortune, yeah, well, yes.

A George fortune. When he was doing that safe cracking, it was covered when it was retrieved, it was covered in green paint. Work out why, and then I thought composition of paint, and then looking at other cases because I had to read really so much. I had to get educated in this. And paint contained had oil in it, and oil was if you were drilling into the safe you needed lubricants so that it didn't overheat, right, and you know.

Yeah, yeah said everything, And so they oil to keep the Yeah, the drill bit cool and that made everything green.

Yeah, they were covered in green paint.

That fact and staff very very interesting stuff, all the detail. Mary went on, did you say till nineteen oh nine.

Yeah, there was a bit of a break when George.

Big Gap it's a big from the gold rushers from the.

Late fifty fifties, forty years. Yeah, and it's about the longest cereal worldwide of the eighteen hundreds.

Is that a fact?

So nobody else goes on so long?

I mean, this is an unknoble traditional well perhaps not noble, but Charles Dickens of course made his name by writing.

Pretty good copy, pretty fast that hooked.

People into buying every day or every week, she realized stuff, which is why he over wrote so much. That's why those stories are so voluminous. And the sentences are so long and fluffy because he was writing Penny a line. Essentially, there's a.

Difference between him and her, and that she's not got so much education, and so if you look at Victorian novels, they're incredibly heavy, they are and lots and lots of words. She's much more direct, Yes, and she likes doing dialogue, does she? And the first her first crime.

She's a screenwriter.

Oh, she could have been in the right place. I mean, of course, she wrote a pantomime.

She's a screenwriter. She's writing dialogue about crime. If she was here today, she'd be writing under.

I wish that somebody would make TV out of her fiction. I reckon to be good.

It's not so silly, particularly if the plots still work and the stories work, that could be actually modernized. So you haven't got a necessarily a costume drama, because they're very expensive. You know, we've got to have horses and buggies and oh and it's very expensive to do a costume drama. But if the stories lines work at the level of humans doing bad things, probably you could.

I mean, she's got a locked tent mystery, A lot of locked tent mystery.

I locked tent mystery. And how does that's the premise a locked ten? How do you lock a ten?

Well, you open it from the front and then you murder somebody. Then you cut a seam out the back. You make it look as if it's been closed from insight, and you cut a seam and then you sew it open. And that's actually based on a real case.

So it shut.

Yeah, so it shut so that nobody takes and he noticed for a farewell until they smell things.

Well, that's exactly what.

We just get a four day start.

Well, it's the most gruesome story of that era I can find, because the actually describes the stench and the flies, and as they get close to it, the flies buzz up and against the walls of the tent, and it's he thought, she's actually seen that.

She's seen that.

That's a real thing.

Yeah, that is so clever, because when people going past saw a tent all closed, they leave it alone because it's a fellow digger or something. I gave the bad person a many days that they could be getting on a boat in Port Philip, heading off to Sydney or somewhere Adelaide.

It was a lot easier to vanish In those.

Days, it was, wasn't it.

I've been struck that even in our lifetime, and I know we're quite young, you and I, and in our lifetime, the differences. If you got away with something when we were kids in the sixties, you get away with it, no one saw you do it, and you didn't leave any fingerprints. Every chance you're going to get away with

Difficult to get away with because there's there will be clues.

And there will be electronic stuff, and there will be something somewhere. There'll be you know, the footage in cars and the CCTV and all the rest of it. We're in a world that's just full of cameras now.

Well, in those days, I mean, the camera was pretty new and they didn't even have much forensics, and they couldn't distinguish blood from no animals or human. But what they did have, of course, I guess that this is eternal and the police was that they had informers.

Oh yes, and this.

Is a subject which she knows too much about, don't she. Nice middle class lady journalists of the time weren't supposed to know about police informants.

But she'd been married to policeman that was willing to have a bigger mismarriage. Oh.

I don't know if he knew.

He may not have known she had an illegitimate child. She was a nice middle class lady up to a point.

Up to a point. Okay, she was about She was a bohemian.

She wasn't exactly the bishop's daughter. She well, I don't know now what is her background. When we say she's not the bishop's daughter, who was she really? You know?

Well, her father was an engineer, civil engineer, but of course his name's Wilson, so it's really hard to trace.

And she was obviously educated fairly well in Ireland.

And her father I think wrote her poetry, so he was a bit of a man who was interested in literature.

I see Anglo Irish praps.

Yeah, Scott's actually Scott's first North of course. But yeah, you had a degree of education, seems to know French, seems to know Latin, but has this very direct way of talking. And it's like she's a tour gauge from the past and you're going around in Melbourne. But if she takes her on a tour of underbelly Melbourne, she'd be using a word which not even old old style coppers used now, which is fiz gig And that was what they called Did you ever hear that word?

Yeah, I know what it means. And when years ago, old time older coppers would say.

He's a fizz.

So they still the older crooks and the older coppers would refer to an informer as a fizz, but often not in a derogatory way. They an old copper would say, I've got a fizz. There's a bloke in this part. He's a bit of a fizz for me. He's one of my Hysits wasn't a totally derogatory term, whereas you know crooks who hate informers will call them dogs or lag. You know he's a lagger.

Yeah, well she uses that word, and that's among the earliest uses of that word in print. She might have sort of popular well, I don't know. I mean sort of she knew. There's evidence that she knew Thomas O'Callahan, who was a police commissioner, and he was a detective and he was a pretty rough and extremely efficient thief taker. There's another old word. But I put this to a

And because she was running around hearing things in her yeah, and she could. It would buy osmosis the other.

Circles, which yeah, And she describes the process quite well and how it's kind of it's an odd relationship. She was getting story ideas from them and they were giving her and giving information. Yes, I see, So there is evidence that she was working.

Both sides, both sides, which you know, she's a person. If she was here now we'd understand her because it's what a lot of journals do.

Absolutely, they rub shoulders.

With this one and this one and this one, and some of them to a gradual, lesser extent, they trade information. Yeah, and you know some do it too much, probably picking up information from this source to so they can pass it on to someone else. That's what they do.

History a long history. It does.

Indeed, Mary didn't invent it, but she's going to had a lot of followers, Yeah, not all of them with as good as name as hers. One of the best bylines I've ever heard.

It's a really good name. When I first came across it, I thought this can't be real, but it did turn out to be.

Whis as good a name as Elmore Leonard.

Now that's a really good writer too, He's.

A very good writer, and well Leonard.

But I think because her stuff was printed for so long, and it was being reprinted way into the nineteen twenties, and was it and really the Australian Journal used to bind its yearly volumes and these would be passed around and I think, okay, it's possible that, say Arthur Upfield read the stuff very good.

Point. So these were sort of pioneering writers slash entertainers journalists in a pioneer society that's pretty frontier society really, where there was not much else to do once the chooks went to bed, but turned the owl lamp on, which I remember doing as a kid, deal care and read, and that this sort of stuff would when particularly crime.

Staff, it would be popular with all.

Sorts of people undercommon people, shearers and drovers and all, you know.

Yeah, because she was writing about them.

And they'd identify with that and they could read it. Especially she wrote simply.

It's clear and it addresses you directly, and in journalism in particularly you get a real sense of personality. It shines through.

That's good.

We saw that sort of clear, direct writing very modern in a way in the bulletin of the eighties and nineties Henry Lawson and others.

She precedes them, and she was.

Really part of that push to do that, to be direct and not flowery.

Another thing is that the Australian Journal was and this bulletin claimed to be full of Australian themes, but the Australian Journal said, we're not going to print anything there isn't of colonial interest and our writers going to be colonial. There was nothing of the cultural cringe there, and they recognized that people really wanted to read about this surrounding.

About themselves, really their own lives and values, which was smart. These were very entrepreneurial and interesting, but I mean it's just as clever as some people that start up Silicon Valley. They see an opportunity and it's right for the times, and they did it. Yeah.

And I mean the fact that the magazine lasted ninety years, that's a very long time.

In Australia, daggering. And to think that she wrote for that massive change. She starts basically in the gold fields here, which is pre trains really and all that sort of thing in Victoria pretty well, so it's a horse and buggy era and bullicks and she writes right up until there's primitive aircraft and cars around and telephones, early telephones, telegraph, yeah, or a lot of the things that the modern world was predicated on. She saw that inside her working life.

And she could even vote towards the end, Yes.

Could vote good honor.

What are the titles?

Well, given that George, given that the pair of them were such wild characters, we caught it outrageous fortunes. I love it, Yes, And we took a line out of her own story for the collection of detective fiction, and that's called nothing but Murders and Bloodshed and hanging.

Oh, it's a wonderful line. I really want to steal it myself. Just hanging. It's wonderful.

I've told this story before.

John, our producer, will be throwing things at me. But I can recall I'm so old, and I can recall sitting in what was in the VFL football rooms down in Jollymont when players would be reported and they'd have

Dickens was all in favor of hangings until he actually witnessed a public hanging and he was really put off for the way people behaved. Yes, and after that he wasn't in favor. And so they put the hangings, made them more private, and in a way that coincides with the rise of detective fiction, because you'd have the public spectacle of someone being hanged, and you can't do that anymore. So what do you do? Yeah, you read stories.

You've read stories instead. Well, that's true.

It was part of the creeping gentility of society was to read about this stuff rather than just go out and throw tomatoes at people in the stocks and watch them absolute they breathe their last on the gibbet, which would be a very awful thing.

Unless if you've got an inexperienced hangman who didn't know how to do it proper. Lea, oh not good. Oh you're slightly strength, slowly strall.

At one end you're slowly strangled, and the others sometimes their head would be pulled off, So not good either way.

No, because especially for the people who had to clean up all the.

Blood and blood and other bodily fluids.

I think that they made them wear rubber nickers.

Yes, it was a very savage business, and I think anybody that witnessed them didn't really love it unless they unless they were, you know, a little bit weird.

Well, let's not get into capital punishment. But it doesn't really work.

No, it doesn't.

That's a good point.

Capital punishment is a story for another day. So thanks Lucy for coming in and filling us in on Outrageous Fortunes.

It's a great title, but of course, really.

It's the name you had to give it because it's about Mary and the wonderful Mary Fortune and a scoundrel of a son, George.

So we're indeed outrangers.

Now, Liscy. Both books will be in bookshops by the time this broadcast goes to air. It so if you want it, go in and ask for Outrageous Fortunes and.

Nothing but murders and bloodshed and hanging. It's a long day. I've like, can't here remember my own title. Thank you for having.

Me, thank you, thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for true crime Australia. Our producer is Johnty Burton. For my columns, features and more, go to harold'sun dot com dot au forward slash Andrew rule one word. For advertising inquiries, go to news Podcasts sold at news dot com dot au. That is all one word news podcasts sold And if you want further information about this episode, links are in the description.