The greatest thrill in writing literary biography is the detective work: the discovery of clues and witnesses and the formulation of case theory. But is this detective work better undertaken solo, in the style of the redoubtable Miss Marple; or in a team like Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey? Is co-authoring a biography double the fun or twice the trouble?
Lucy Sussex and I have spent our last ten years as a literary detective duo. Lucy was the pioneer who revealed that the mysterious and prolific crime writer, writing under the pseudonyms of Waif Wander and W.W., was in fact Mary Helena Fortune. The more Lucy revealed about Fortune the more there was to learn. I joined the party some years later, reading all of Lucy’s writing and uncovering my own pieces of the jigsaw. Lucy and I then collaborated on a few academic articles and co-presented at conferences before finally deciding, after a research trip through the goldfields, that if we could travel together without killing each other, we could write a book together.
The life of Mary Fortune was fertile ground: she was a woman of mystery – she threw out the rulebook that had been written for women in the nineteenth century. She had a bigamous marriage, was gaoled for drunkenness, had a long career writing detective fiction and had an illegitimate son who became a career criminal. While she was writing crime, her son George was committing it. Many of the devices and conventions that we take for granted in modern crime writing were introduced by Fortune and she predated Arthur Conan Doyle by thirty years. She was extraordinary and had been almost forgotten. What was not to love about Fortune as a research project?
Once our partnership formed, many of the day-to-day aspects of writing and research remained solitary pursuits, but there was always someone at the end of the phone, Zoom or an email to share the results and to shoot your more foolish ideas down in flames. The most remarkable part was celebrating significant discoveries. Nobody else could understand how important the find was or the adrenalin rush it caused. Family members could make the right noises but the co-author knew! Sometimes one person could uncover a gem and this would allow the other to uncover her own new nugget of information. Let me give you an example.
When our manuscript was quite advanced, Lucy became convinced that Mary Fortune was a police informer and decided to use “fizzgig” (the nineteenth century word for informer) in a search on Trove. This uncovered a whole new series of detective writing in the Melbourne Herald that Fortune had undertaken. Once Lucy let me know, we both hit Trove, searching and cross-searching until we were sure we had uncovered everything. Two sets of eyes and two searchers are better than one. The manuscript was put on hold so we could read all ninety-two stories. In the middle of this process, I decided I should search in the Herald using what is normally an impossible search term: W.W. What did I have to lose? Even if I thought it was futile, it would only waste five minutes of my time. I struck gold. There was a “Ladies’ Column” written by W.W. and it sounded like our Mary but before I got Lucy’s hopes up I read all of the other Herald “Ladies’ Columns” written about the same time. There were no more W.W. stories but a writer named Nemia seemed to have the same style of writing, with some stories even having the same titles that Fortune had used in the “Ladies’ Page” in The Australian Journal years earlier. Finally, I found the definitive proof: a column by Nemia entitled “A Visit to Pentridge.” It was poignant description of visiting a young inmate – one we knew must have been George Fortune because he was in Pentridge at the time. I rang Lucy, dancing around the lounge room, to share the joy.
We’ve gone down rabbit holes together and separately, we’ve haunted archives and been down the black hole of Trove and come out the other side. Like Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey we’ve solved the most important mysteries about Mary and her son George but we know that Mary is not done with us yet. I can imagine the future where one of us is breathing our last breath and the other will say “But you can’t die yet, we still don’t know what happened in those missing seven years.”
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