The Detectives' Album collects stories from one of the longest running series in crime fiction, which ran from 1868 to 1933 in the Australian Journal. Even more remarkably, its first forty years were the sole work of a woman, the Canadian-Australian writer Mary Helena Fortune. She wrote under the pseudonym of `W. W.'. her identity being kept secret by the magazine, possibly to preserve the `true crime' credibility of her detective stories, which were told by a policeman. In this she drew upon the experience of her marriage to a goldfields mounted trooper, the result being what we would now term 'police procedurals.'

She was probably the first woman to write stories centred on and narrated by a police detective: certainly the first woman to make a literary specialty of crime fiction. For the first time The Detectives' Album collects her crime stories for a modern audience.

Mary Helena Fortune (c. 18331910) was born Mary Wilson in Belfast of Scottish ancestry and emigrated to Canada (which she considered her `home') as a child. In 1851 she married Joseph Fortune, a surveyor, and they had one son before she travelled to Australia to join her father George Wilson in 1855, who was working on the goldfields. She had another son in 1856 before marrying (possibly bigamously) in 1858 Percy Rollo Brett, a mounted policeman. This marriage quickly broke up and from 1865 she wrote for the popular Australian Journal under the pseudonyms Waif Wander and W. W. She began writing crime fiction as part of a collaboration with James Skipp Borlase, who plagiarized her. After he was sacked from the AJ she became the magazine's principal crime writer, contributing over 500 detective stories between 1865 -1908. Her one book publication was The Detective's Album (1871), possibly the first collection of detective stories published by a woman. She died under mysterious circumstances c.1910.