The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana

by Jess Nevins

The Mark Sinclair Mysteries (1866-1908)

copyright © Jess Nevins 2022

The Mark Sinclair Mysteries were written by Mary Fortune and began with “The Dead Witness, or the Bush Waterhole” (Australian Journal, Jan. 20, 1866). Sinclair appeared in hundreds of short stories over several decades, although only one collection of stories was published, The Detective’s Album: Tales of the Detective Police (1871). Fortune (1833?-1910) moved from Canada to Australia in 1855. She became the first woman to write crime stories in Australia, and her work predates that of such luminaries as Arthur Conan Doyle and Wilkie Collins. She wrote over five hundred detective stories from 1868 to 1908, all appearing in the Australian Journal. It is a shame she is so little-known, since she deserves to be considered an early giant in the field of detective fiction. She was a pioneer in the police procedural genre and is one of the first authors to produce a serial detective.

Not surprisingly, Fortune’s work varies in quality and tone depending on when she wrote it. This is to be expected, given that she wrote for forty years and was young when she began writing. In many respects her style reflects the times she lived in and, likely, the mystery writers who she read. (Like her one-time collaborator, James Skipp Borlase (see: Blue Cap the Bushranger), Fortune plagiarized the work of the author of Adventures of a Mounted Trooper in the Australian Constabulary in the 1860s). Five years later Fortune published The Detective’s Album. Fortune continued writing mysteries for the next thirty-seven years. To put that into perspective, when The Detective’s Album was published English mystery novels were classified as sensation novels and Fortune’s most famous contemporary, as a writer of mysteries, was Wilkie Collins, whose The Moonstone had been published only three years earlier (and six years after Fortune began writing her detective stories). When Fortune stopped writing mysteries Arthur Conan Doyle had been writing Sherlock Holmes (see: The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries) stories for over twenty years, mysteries were thought of as belonging to a separate literary genre, and dozens of different writers were producing mysteries. Writing styles had changed, and it is only normal that Fortune’s style changed with the times.

All of which is to say that the work in The Detective’s Album is of its time, and Fortune’s later work is also of its time. Modern readers will likely find Fortune’s earlier work to be dated and less enjoyable. The vocabulary and prose style is thicker and slower, with the sort of stiff ponderousness which can make Bulwer Lytton such a chore to read. Fortune’s earlier work is not unenjoyable, but the influence of “William Burrows” is pronounced, and Sinclair shows only slight variations from the Australian detective character type of William Burrows and James Brooke (see: The James Brooke Mysteries). However, even in these early stories there is a touch of subtlety to the writing, a hint of the excellence which Fortune would later achieve. In one story in The Detective’s Album, “A Woman’s Revenge,” Sinclair is drugged and has evil dreams. Fortune describes Sinclair’s dreams for almost a page and makes them hallucinatory and frightening; Sinclair’s fear of being killed leads him to smell death all around him and to smell death coming from his own body. The passage would not be out of place in the better horror stories of the century. (Scenes of the supernatural, whether imagined or real, appeared more often in the later Sinclair stories, although he was usually a detective rather than the protagonist in a story of the supernatural).

Fortune’s style changed as she grew older, and her later work is colloquial and full of life. In the 1890s and 1900s she was undoubtedly influenced by prevailing trends in commercial magazine writing and the public’s changing tastes and made her style more stripped-down and less over-written. Her later work has a brisk tone and a snap to the dialogue which modern readers will enjoy: one gentleman is described as responding “with a laugh that came from his teeth only.”¹ Fortune had entertaining lines even in the earlier stories; in one story Sinclair refers to a flattering thought occurring to him as vanity whispering to him, and in another, when foiled, he “expressed myself in the most approved Billingsgate.” But those lines occur much more often in the later work. The later stories are also much closer to the stereotype of “woman’s writing” than to “men’s writing:” the stories have a much larger element of emotion and a concern for feelings than is to be found in the Holmes stories or in most other detective/mystery stories of the nineteenth century, whether written by men or by women.

Sinclair changes as the style of his stories does. Sinclair begins as a typical Australian detective, similar to James Brooke and William Burrows as well as to casebook detectives like James M’Govan (see: Brought to Bay). Sinclair works in Melbourne but ventures into the brush on cases; he starts the stories at the station in Country Campwether. His usual method is to check into the station in the morning to see what new rewards have been posted, and then to ride off on his own to begin investigating. He follows his own rules, which earns him the envy of his colleagues. Sinclair works for the reward money, although he is of course interested in helping people out. He refers several times to his “terrible” career and the awful things he has seen, and The Detective’s Album includes several bloody stories (the influence of the sensation genre is at times strong). Murder is a common crime. Some of criminals include an accidental bigamist and his malicious, gambling addict first wife, who frames the bigamist via a diamond scam; a female murderer of children–there are many female villains in The Detective’s Album; and a woman who dismembers another woman’s body and keeps it in a box, and later burns alive a romantic rival. These are the kinds of crimes Sinclair gets involved with.

Sinclair is average as a detective in these early stories. He is crafty, but is capable of being gulled by his suspects or even by a practical joke. He can be surprised, and his ego can lead him astray. But he is determined and usually runs down his man or woman. He has a certain esprit de corps and takes aspersions on the police force badly. He has great respect for women, because they, especially “the silly ones of the sex,” have always been of great use to him. (So, too, is coincidence, which helps him catch criminals nearly as often as his own wits). He is under no illusions about his own nature, acknowledging his temper to the reader as well as his own “inherent wickedness.” But he is also kind; when a dog shows great faithfulness to his mistress, helps solve her murder, and visibly mourns when her body is found, going so far as to lick her cold, white hands and face–Fortune goes right for the heartstrings in this story, and succeeds–Sinclair adopts the dog.

In the later stories his personality and methods change. In these later stories Sinclair is a figure of the twentieth century, not the nineteenth century. He acts like a private eye, and thinks often about resigning from the police force and opening a private practice. He describes himself as “hard-working and cynical;” his faith in society as a whole, which was present in The Detective’s Album, is gone. He becomes more human and recognizable to modern readers and is warmer and more likable. He also becomes an intervener rather than a reactor; when appropriate, he inserts himself into cases rather than waiting for them to come to him. The crimes he solves are less influenced by sensation literature and more similar to the kinds of crimes 1890s detectives like Holmes dealt with.

Interestingly, the class subtext of most nineteenth century English detective stories is missing from the Sinclair stories. Sinclair has none of the deference, implicit or explicit, toward the upper classes which many of his contemporaries did, and he behaves like a working professional rather than as a regretful intruder into proper society, as which was the manner of characters like Inspector Bucket (see: Bleak House) and Sergeant Cuff (see: The Woman in White). Sinclair treats others and is treated by others as a social equal, and if he is disliked or disrespected by others it is because of their dislike for the police rather than out of class prejudice. If anything, the class prejudice runs the other way; it is Sinclair who has a distrust for the upper class, rather than the reverse. Like the other casebook detectives, Sinclair has qualities, including this class distrust, which anticipate the hard-boiled detectives of the twentieth century.

Recommended Edition

Print: Mary Fortune, The Detective’s Album: Stories of Crime and Mystery from Colonial Australia. Shelburne, ON: Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2003.

Online: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/fortune/mary/

For Further Research

Lucy Sussex, “The (Feminine) Eye of the Law: Mary Helena Fortune,” in Women Writers and Detectives in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction: The Mothers of the Mystery Genre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 120-141.

Lucy Sussex, The Fortunes of Mary Fortune. New York: Penguin, 1989.