Mary Helena Fortune (1833–1910) is sadly overlooked. An Australian, Fortune wrote more crime/detective fiction than any other women in the nineteenth century (over 500 stories) and was the first to write detective fiction specifically. Her first collection of short stories, The Detective’s Album (1871), precedes Anna Katharine Green’s The Leavenworth Case by seven years. Her lack of fame is probably attributable to the anonymity which applied to all of her work. The following story, featuring an official police detective, first appeared in The Australian Journal for December 2, 1865, and, typically, her authorship was uncredited.