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History’s wild forces

Two Australian lives
by
June 2025, no. 476

Outrageous Fortunes: The adventures of Mary Fortune, crime-writer, and her criminal son by Megan Brown and Lucy Sussex

La Trobe University Press, $36.99 pb, 341 pp

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ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.

History’s wild forces

Two Australian lives
by
June 2025, no. 476

To begin, a reviewer’s disclosure: I have known Lucy Sussex since we worked together in the mid-1990s on a research project about nineteenth-century Australian women’s writing. Lucy had already been following the various trails and clues left by crime writer Mary Fortune (1832–1911) along the winding, dimly lit corridors of pre-digital cultural history, as she reports at the end of this book: ‘In 1987 I moved from librarianship to working as a researcher for Professor Stephen Knight … I got the delightful job of largely reading old and vintage crime texts and reporting back … Stephen asked me to look into “Mrs Fortune” [and later] told me that Mary Fortune was no longer his research project, but mine. “You have that gleam in your eye! he said.’

Outrageous Fortunes: The adventures of Mary Fortune, crime-writer, and her criminal son

Outrageous Fortunes: The adventures of Mary Fortune, crime-writer, and her criminal son

by Megan Brown and Lucy Sussex

La Trobe University Press, $36.99 pb, 341 pp

Buy this book

ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.

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