Mary Fortune's dramatic crime stories, set in colonial-era Australia, comprise the first detective fiction series written by a woman; they also provide a vivid account of life and death in a country in rapid flux, as the huge population increase following the discovery of gold in 1851 led to great riches for some, poverty and violence for others.

Born in Ireland in 1832, Fortune emigrated to Australia during the goldrush, which she observed first-hand and depicted in many of her stories. A bigamous marriage to a policeman gave her inside knowledge to write about crime, and over the next 40 years she produced more than 500 stories, serialized under the title The Detective's Album in the mass-circulation magazine The Australian Journal. She tackled subjects such as murder, armed robbery, bootlegging, and sexual violence with a frankness unprecedented for a woman in the 19th century.

This book collects 18 of Fortune's finest stories, while also showcasing her range as a writer-from melodrama and Gothic horror to social realism and what we now call noir. Mary Fortune lived a precarious existence-repeatedly jailed for public drunkenness, homeless on occasion, unable to prevent her illegitimate son George drifting into a life of crime. She preserved her privacy by publishing under pseudonyms, most commonly 'Waif Wander' (or 'W.W.')-it is a measure of her fame at the time that a racehorse and a greyhound were both named after Waif Wander. But her anonymity meant that when she died in 1911, she was almost lost to literary history. Only recently has her true identity and her extraordinary life story emerged.

Edited by Lucy Sussex and Megan Brown.