Mary Fortune, Three Murder Mysteries

The acclaimed Australian writer/researcher, Lucy Sussex, has edited and introduced a collection of three Mary Fortune crime stories for the Canberra-based Mulini Press. Fortune, who wrote under the pseudonym Waif Wander or WW, is a fascinating figure, best known as the author of the longest-running early detective serial known, the Detective's Album, which appeared in the Australian Journal between 1867-1908.

In the introduction, Sussex traces the life of this extraordinary woman who was described in an 1898 article as "probably the only truly Bohemian lady writer who has ever earned a living by her pen in Australia."

Born in Belfast in around 1833 she came to Australia in 1855 via Canada, leaving her husband behind in Quebec. Of her two sons, one died aged 5 on the Victorian goldfields, while the other, George, became a real-life criminal, spending 20 years in Victorian prisons.

Apart from the Detective's Album, Fortune also wrote Gothic serials for the Australian Journal such as "Clyzia the Dwarf" and several supernatural tales, one of which, "The Phantom Hearse" is included in this collection. Such was the obscurity into which she fell that the year of her death remained uncertain until recently.

At 74 pages Three Murder Mysteries offers a sampler of Fortune's work and an authoritative introduction - my copy cost a meagre $10 at the National Library of Australia's bookshop.

The Wind in the Rose Bush

Ever since having read the collection of ghost stories by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman published by Arkham House in 1974, entitled Collected Ghost Stories, with an introduction by none other than Edward Wagenknecht, I have cherished fond memories of her strange and wonderful tales.

So it is with a certain nostalgia that I share this review published on 18 March 1903 in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of her most famous collection The Wind in the Rose Bush here, and I heartily agree with the reviewer who wrote more than a century ago that "The Wind in the Rose Bush' is a collection of ghost stories of a peculiarly creepy sort... they are nerve chilling in their originality."

That title alone, the wind in the rose bush, it evokes a deep yearning to a different time and place, where one could sit outside ones house at night when all the world was at rest, and one could hear the soft rustling of the wind in a rose bush nearby... It reads almost like a Haiku. Now who has the luxury of such a simple, but oh so beautiful thing these days? I know I don't.

Erle Cox, Out of the Silence

The best known Australian lost race novel is Erle Cox's Out of the Silence, serialised in The Argus in 1919 before being published in book form by Edward A. Vidler in 1925. It's been reprinted many times since, and even appeared as a comic strip in 1934. The typescript of the novel was sent to the Patent Office in 1919 along with Cox's copyright application, and has been digitised by The National Archives of Australia - go to www.naa.gov.au , click on RecordSearch, select Search Now as a guest user, and do a keyword search for Out of the Silence. A superior example of early SF/fantasy.

A "Lost" Lost Race serial

The lost race novel set in Australia had a particular vogue in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Probably the best known example is Erle Cox's science fiction classic, Out of the Silence (1919), but well known authors of weird and fantasy fiction like Rosa Praed and Ernest Favenc also dabbled in the genre. A particularly bizarre example is Austyn Granville's The Fallen Race (1892), about a strange spheroidal race evidently descended from kangaroo-human hybrids.

The Australian author of colonial adventures, William Sylvester Walker (1846-1926), wrote a lost race novel called The Silver Queen (1908), which has attracted some academic attention in recent years. Walker, who often wrote under the pen name "Coo-ee", was the nephew of the great colonial writer, "Rolf Boldrewood", who wrote Robbery Under Arms (1888). Late in life Walker moved to Scotland and died at Oban in Argyllshire in 1926.

His last work appears to have been a lost race novel that was published in The Queenslander in 1924-25 with the unlikely title of Koi; or, The Thing Without any Bones. It traces the efforts of an Australian adventurer and bushman, Mark Payton, and his love interest, the rich, beautiful and ambitious Brenda Sardrou, to foil the machinations of the evil German Jew named Solomons, an international spy, self-made millionaire and dabbler in the occult. Solomons is the direct descendant of Ben Suleiman, who two thousand years earlier led an expedition out of Mesopotamia to northern Australia where he established a new civilisation based on Egyptian magical beliefs. Koi is the Soul Shadow, a disembodied spirit that attaches itself to a living person and only departs during sleep, sickness and death to wander in other places - aboriginal descendants of the ancient race are accompanied and aided by their Koi. Solomons plans to return to northern Australia and set himself up as ruler of the revived kingdom - a European invasion of the Commonwealth, no less! Heady stuff: a spectacularly over-the-top fantasy.

"Classic Fantasists on Film": Lord Dunsany's Dean Spanley

It was a surprise for me to learn recently that a novel by Lord Dunsany had been newly filmed, and even more of a surprise to learn that of Dunsany’s dozen or so novels it was My Talks with Dean Spanley (1936) that had made it to the big screen. By no means Dunsany’s best novel, it is an enjoyable, minor work, in which a cleric, under the influence of a certain tokay, recollects his previous incarnation as a dog.

The film, titled more simply Dean Spanley, was scripted by Alan Sharp and directed by Toa Fraser. It boasts a first rate cast: Peter O’Toole, Sam Neill, Jeremy Northam, and Bryan Brown. An independent British production, the film was released in England in December 2008, and had a limited release in the US a few months afterwards. The film has a running time of 98 minutes. It is now out on DVD in England (I don’t know if a North American release has yet been scheduled).

What a delight! It is frankly a skilful deepening and slight expansion of Dunsany’s novel, rather than merely a screenplay based upon it. Dunsany’s book is the first-person narration of an unnamed man, a scientific writer, who uses the tokay on Dean Spanley in the hope of learning the answers to some of the mysteries of life. To this end, the narrator gets help from his friend Wrather, and late in the book, the Maharajah of Haikwar. The pleasure of Dunsany’s novel is primarily to be found in the Dean’s uncanny revelations about the inner life of a dog.

Alan Sharp names the narrator Fisk (he is played by Jeremy Northam), and centers the story upon Fisk’s relationship with a new character, Fisk’s elderly father (Peter O’Toole), bringing in a familial and emotional center that is nowhere to be found in Dunsany’s novel. Sam Neill plays the difficult part of Dean Spanley excellently, and the screenplay utilizes many of Dunsany’s own words in the Dean’s reminiscences. The character of Wrather is also slightly altered—he becomes Fisk’s supplier of the tokay, as well as a participant in the experiment. Northam and Neill give first-rate performances, but it is Peter O’Toole who steals the show as the elder Fisk. O’Toole has most of the best lines, too (all original to the screenplay, not lifted from the novel). It is not merely for sentimental reasons that I hope that the film garners some award nominations for O’Toole’s acting and for Alan Sharp’s screenplay.

Dean Spanley is one of those quiet, enchanting little films that come along too infrequently. Keep your eye out for it.

My Talks with Dean Spanley

The cover of the first edition of Lord Dunsany's My Talks with Dean Spanley (London: William Heinemann, 1936), left, has always seemed garish to me. Trying to translate the central conceit of the novel into an image for advertising purposes must be difficult, and this one succeeds only in appearing laughable. The cover to the American edition (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1936), right, utilizes the frontispiece illustration drawn by Robert Ball. It's is not especially attractive, and only slightly better. S. H. Sime contributed the frontispiece to the London edition, his last illustration for a Dunsany book, top. While it is a delightful illustration that does indeed capture the spirit of the book, I'm not sure that it would have made a successful cover illustration. (Click on the illustrations for larger views.)

Arthur Conan Doyle Exhibit at the University of Michigan

Yesterday I was in Ann Arbor, researching at the University of Michigan libraries. Displayed in the elevators at the graduate library was an eye-catching poster about the current exhibition in Special Collections, “Clues Beyond Sherlock Holmes”—the illustration on the poster also serves as the cover to the exhibition booklet (reproduced above). The exhibit showcases items from the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Collection donated by alumnus Dr. Philip Parker, collected by Parker and his family, including his father Hyman Parker and his cousin Dr. Bruce Parker. The exhibit showcased Doyle’s interests and publications, from his war histories to his books on spiritualism, including items on the Cottingley Fairy photographs, as well as his historical novels and his immortal stories of Sherlock Holmes. This delightful exhibit continues through the end of this month. (I have a spare copy of the 32 page exhibition booklet, should a rabid Sherlockian wish to claim it.)

The Demon of Brockenheim

Australian journals and periodicals are a largely untapped source of supernatural and fantastic fiction. This is a shame because there are some fascinating examples of the genre that have been forgotten. One such is the excessive gothic serial "The Demon of Brockenheim" which was serialised in The Australian Journal between April and October, 1877.

AUSTLIT, which provides useful synopses of stories and serials in The Ausralian Journal up to 1900, describes it as follows:

"In the town of Mayence, Germany a dark foreigner who speaks an unknown language is to be hung for the murder of Baron Von Brockenheim. A mysterious pilgrim attempts to bribe the gaoler to see him but fails. In his search for the prisoner he sees alchemical flames in a distant tower of the castle, and knowing thus that the Baron still lives he utters the terrible summoning cry of the Secret Tribunal, warning the Baron that he has been detected and justice must bedone. For the Baron had been due to appear before an ecclesial commission to answer charges of evil and illicit activity. The foreigner, emissary from Grenada's king, is executed and the pilgrim - his father - swears he will have the blood of the Baron's daughter in revenge. He is unaware that she had tried to save his son who had given her the magic ring of Mahmound in return ..."

The author of "The Demon" remains unknown. An advertisement in the March 1877 issue of The Australian Journal says, "We have much pleasure in intimating that in our next number will be commenced a sensational serial tale, by a well-known author, entitled "The Demon of Brockenheim; or, The Enchanted Ring." The well-known author may have been Mary Fortune, the Ireland-born author who wrote a regular detective series for The Australian Journal for 40 years, and who produced four gothic romances for the journal in succession throughout 1866, including "Clyzia the Dwarf." The Austalian writer/researcher, Lucy Sussex, has written extensively on Mary Fortune and has recently edited a selection of her tales for the Canberra-based Mulini Press. Another possible author is the prolific American, Sylvanus Cobb, whose tales were serialised in The Australian Journal, including "Wolfgang; or, The Wrecker's Beacon" in 1876.

The resourceful Australian bookdealer, John P. Quaine, bound up "Demon" and "Wolfgang" and advertised them in his 1931 catalogue of Bloods. The asking price, 7/6.