Nothing But Murders And Bloodshed And Hanging

“Mary Fortune is a revelation! She tells absorbing stories, atmospherically renders the unruly panorama of Australian life in the late nineteenth century, applies sophisticated analyses to the crimes she chronicles or invents, and writes in a lively, opinionated style that overcomes the languor of period prose and casts her in three-dimensional relief–even though she was a woman writing invisibly as a man, and lived on the edge of the law herself. She belongs in any account of the origins of crime fiction.”

–Lucy Sante“Mary Fortune was the first authentically Australian female voice in published fiction. In her own words: ‘I have been told by some that I tell horrible stories, and by others that I am not sensational enough; and I have personally come to the conclusion that I shall tell just such stories as I please.’ And she did.”–Kerry Greenwood