Nothing But Murders and Bloodshed and Hanging

**A murderer is identified by a team of oxen. A dead man rises from a watery grave to indict his killer. A phantom hearse gliding through Melbourne’s slums foretells violent death. A seamstress turns ­detective to avenge her friend’s homicide. A locked-tent mystery.** Such are the themes of Mary Fortune’s ingenious and dramatic crime stories. Between 1865 and 1910 she wrote over 500 of them; they comprise the first ever detective fiction series written by a woman. Set in the outback, on the goldfields, and in the burgeoning metropolis of Melbourne, they offer a vivid account of life and death in colonial-era Australia. Fortune tackled subjects such as murder, armed robbery, bootlegging, and sexual violence with a frankness unprecedented for a woman in the 19th century, in styles ranging from melodrama and Gothic horror to social realism and what is now called noir. This book brings together 17 of her finest stories, edited and introduced by literary historians Lucy Sussex and Megan Brown. Born in Ireland in 1832, Fortune arrived in Australia during the gold-rush, which she observed firsthand and depicted in many of her stories. A brief, bigamous marriage to a policeman gave her ins