This thesis examines the crime fiction of Mary Helena Fortune (c.18331910). My analysis concentrates on Fortune’s series, “The Detective’s Album”, more than four hundred self-contained crime stories published over forty years that are framed as the “casebook” of a colonial detective, Mark Sinclair. Although this series remains nominally the reminiscences of Sinclair, the stories within the casebook increasingly employ private and amateur detectives, and Sinclair himself transforms from a member of the colonial police force into a private inquiry agent. I characterise this move as constituting a shift from Fortune’s detecting heroes acting essentially as “public avengers” to becoming instead predominantly “private defenders”. Accompanying the evolution of the detective are other structural changes in Fortune’s crime fiction, so that by the 1880s an increasingly private model of detective was more often resolving a domestic mystery in a suburban setting than investigating a violent crime on the mean streets. The central aim of this thesis is to demonstrate the ways in which these transformations relate to the differentiated social and historical conditions within colonial Australia. Through the close analysis of Fortune’s crime texts and examination of the cultural and historical context in which they were produced, the thesis offers perspectives on broad cultural patterns. This thesis draws predominantly on a lineage of critics who have analysed crime fiction using Marxist, Foucauldian and Postcolonialist strategies. I utilise in particular the central paradigm of D. A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police (1988): – his assertion that in the nineteenth-century novel the “move to discard the role of the detective is at the same time a move to disperse the function of detection”. The appearance of private and amateur detectives in Fortune’s crime fiction indicates respectively the professionalisation and privatisation of the mechanism of detection, evolutions that reflect a broad embourgeoisment within her crime corpus. Such a social transformation of nineteenth-century crime fiction occurred across the industrialised world. In British crime fiction, for instance, the ordinary workaday policeman of the 1850s had given way by the 1890s to such independent and professional detectives as Sherlock Holmes. But while the embourgeoisment of crime fiction was an international phenomenon, I argue that in Australian crime fiction the emergence of private and surrogate detectives also performed a second, crucial function: to distance the agent of detection, and demotic crime fiction itself, from the enforcement of imperial order in the colonial landscape. The movement from simple criminal apprehensions to financial and reputation protection also increasingly distances Fortune’s crime fiction from the kind of direct social control necessary to enforce imperial order. v This thesis contains four analytical chapters, each of which is devoted to exploring mechanisms by which Fortune’s crime fiction dispersed the function of detection and concealed the conservative disciplinary order that underpins the fiction. The first three chapters examine familiar forms of fictional detectives: the official police detective; the private and the amateur detective; and the female detective, both official and unofficial. The final analytical chapter examines the way in which the criminal also worked as part of the dispersed function of detection. One of the key ways in which Fortune’s crime fiction works to reinforce disciplinary order is, paradoxically, to make the detectives often fail to solve the crime, so that order is restored only by the collective efforts of several individuals or through the mechanism of fate or an avenging land, or even as a consequence of the criminals’ own actions. Thus Fortune’s crime fiction is not a celebration of virtuoso individualism, as is found in the stories of Sherlock Holmes, but instead of an ethically logical and just world in which order is the product of collective efforts on the part of a largely cohesive community, and in which the apprehension of criminals and restoration of order are presented as inevitable outcomes. Stephen Knight has described Fortune as “internationally the most significant woman writing about crime in the mid-nineteenth century” (Continent of Mystery 4), and yet her impressive corpus of crime fiction has never received extended scholarly attention. This thesis addresses this omission, but more importantly, the conclusions I offer about Mary Fortune’s crime fiction contribute to an understanding of a much larger question about how Australians began to imagine and adopt a national identity in the nineteenth century. It is certainly clear from Fortune’s crime corpus that well before the nationalist-democratic cultural insurrection of the 1890s, Australian fiction already offered versions of the key paradigms that still inflect the national imagination into the twenty-first century.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/253940 |
| Creators | Miss Nicola Bowes |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Detected Language | English |
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