Sand on the Gumshoe

WAIF WANDER

It is both encouraging and disheartening to find a talent such as Waif Wander. Encouraging because she is such a fascinating talent, disheartening because so little is known of her. The author of a large number of crime stories written in the latter half of the nineteenth century for the Australian Journal, Waif Wander (together with W.W., another of her pseudonyms) was in reality a Victorian woman by the name of Mary Ellen Fortune. For her output alone, she should be at the forefront of Australian literary history. The quality of her writing also makes her work significant in the evolution of the genre.

The first full-length detective novel written by a woman was The Dead Letter: An American Romance (New York, Beadle & Co, 1867) by Seeley Regester published in 1867. This was the pen-name of Metta Victoria Victor, whose husband, Orville, is amongst the many credited with inventing, in 1867, the ‘dime’ novel or ‘yellowback’, which was the forerunner to the pulps. The next most important novel of its type was The Leavenworth Case: A Lawyer’s Story (New York, Putnam, 1878; London, Routledge, 1884) written by Anna Katherine Green, and published in 1878. Both Victor and Green were Americans.

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.