Outrageous Fortunes: Writer Mary Fortune and her criminal son

Author Lucy Sussex shares the story of Australia’s first female crime writer, Mary Fortune and her career-criminal son, George.

Mary Fortune (1832-1911) was the most published women in colonial Australia, but unknown to her keen readership, because she used male pseudonyms. She wrote poetry, chronicled life on the goldfields, including Buninyong, and was a pioneer woman writer of detective fiction, writing 40 years of the ‘Detective’s Album’, in a male persona.

The pseudonyms concealed an unconventional woman; independent, a bigamist, and with a career criminal son, George. Mary wrote crime; George committed it – bank robbery and safe-cracking. When Mary and George died, they were largely forgotten, but dedicated research by biographers Lucy Sussex and Megan Brown has unearthed their extraordinary lives.

Lucy Sussex was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, and now lives in Australia. She has worked as a librarian, researcher, academic, and newspaper columnist. She has interests in women’s lives, Australiana, and crime fiction. Her award-winning fiction includes the novel, ‘The Scarlet Rider’ (1996), and her anthology ‘She’s Fantastical’ (1995) was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. She has five short story collections, including ‘Women Writers and Detectives in the Nineteenth Century’ (2012) examining the mothers of the mystery genre. In 2025, with Megan Brown, she published ‘Outrageous Fortunes’, a biography of Mary Fortune; and ‘Nothing But Murders’, a collection of Fortune’s detective fiction.

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Image: Freddie Baer (designer), ‘Outrageous Fortunes’ cover image, 2025 [detail], collage. Image provided by Lucy Sussex and reproduced with permission.