Bridget's Locket and Other Mysteries by Waif Wander
Mary Helena Fortune
Three tales. One of murder, gore and a hint of the supernatural. Another of dramatic reveals, love, and bushrangers. The last of tainted adoration, courage, and a fateful finale. Together, a story of early colonial Australia, sweeping landscapes, and the voice of a silenced female author. A collection of proto-domestic noir crime and mystery stories, Mary Helena Fortune, writing as Waif Wander, entrusts us with Gothic tales that imitate the violent reality of her own life. Fortune subverts the oppression she faced as a female author by writing about nineteenth-century women with exceptional agency.
This beautiful collection awakens readers to a new side of Mary Helena Fortune, one of Australia's most prolific crime-mystery writers between the eighteen-sixties and eighteen-nineties. A newly uncovered novella is bookended by two short stories, showcasing a variety of tales that are united by their writer’s distinctive voice and interests. These are stories of love and murder, of the Australian bush and goldfields, of alcoholism and bigamy, of happy endings and doomed romance.
The Millwood Mystery
Jeannie Lockett
Marjory Graham runs panicked into the night, desperate to find help. When she wakes Dr Reade and returns home with him, they find Barbara Graham poisoned. The inquest reveals a wealth of suspects: Barbara's stepdaughter, her fiancé, and her future sister-in-law. Whispers begin to spread through Millwood.
The Millwood Mystery is a psychological thriller set in a small town in the remote Hunter Valley. The crime is a vehicle for our journey into the lives of Millwood society, where appearance is paramount and transgression brings judgement, isolation, and financial ruin—particularly for women. Lockett explores women’s place in society, expectations around marriage and divorce, domestic violence and women’s lack of agency, and the repercussions of loneliness and isolation in small-town Australia.
This recovered gem of Australian mystery is accompanied by Reading Notes, including an essay by the author: 'Divorce Considered from a Woman's Point of View.'
Man or Devil: Tales of the Australian Gothic
Edited by Corella Press™
"Crime fiction is, above all, a literature of resistance."
Sulari Gentill, award winning author.
Corella Press™ invites lovers of crime and mystery to a twelve-course banquet of early Australian Gothic literature. Swim with the sharks off Stradbroke Island; drink with the gold miners of far north Queensland; scream in the shadows of a rural farmhouse, dockside Melbourne, or a ghost-infested gully in the Grampians.
Be warned: the body count is high, and all is not what it seems.
Exhumed from the pages of Australia’s late nineteenth and early twentieth-century newspapers, these short, twisted tales are distinct in style and told from diverse points of view that bring forgotten Australian literature back to life. Readers will have many questions: was it murder or misadventure, a haunting or a hoax? Ideally read by candlelight, Man or Devil: Tales of the Australian Gothic is sure to whet the appetites of readers young and old, of those curious about early Australian literature, and those seeking insights into Australia’s past and present.
We hope you will sit with us awhile and share these fictional and true-to-life stories, as the lights burn low and the darkness deepens ...
Coming 2020
