Pulp friction: Irish women’s place in genre writing should be rescued from ignominy

In 1911 a woman named Mary Helena Fortune died in Melbourne, Australia, her death largely unremarked. By then she was an alcoholic, nearly blind and boasted a career criminal for a surviving son, the exotically named Eastbourne Vaudrey Fortune – better known, unsurprisingly, as George. She subsisted on a small pension from the Australian Journal, and was so poor when she died that she was buried in a grave intended for another.

Only in the 1950s was Fortune connected to the pseudonym WW, or “Waif Wander”, under which she wrote hundreds of crime stories, including a pioneering series for the Journal called The Detective’s Album, detailing the cases of an Australian lawman named Mark Sinclair. So convincingly did Fortune inhabit these first-person accounts that readers were convinced they were the work of a serving or recently retired officer of the law. The Journal did nothing to disabuse its subscribers of this notion, probably figuring the myth would sell more copies than the truth, which was that the tales were being written by a clever, gifted woman born in Belfast in 1833, one who had arrived in Australia via Canada in 1855 with her father and infant son, leaving a bad marriage behind her.

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