Books in the Colonial Australian Popular Fiction series

A bad-tempered squatter is murdered in country Victoria and the local townsfolk are swept up in the rush to solve the crime. Will the squatters beautiful daughter, Flora McAlpin, save her lover from the gallows? Or is the circumstantial evidence against him too strong?Ellen Davitts Force and Fraud: A Tale of the Bush is a feisty account of a murder investigation in the colonies that takes the twists and turns of English sensation fiction in a uniquely Australian direction. The novel brings an innovative forensic eye to its crime, reinventing the squatter romance as it takes its characters from country to city and from public house to courthouse. Force and Fraud was serialised in the popular, long-running Australian Journal from 2 September to 18 November 1865.This edition includes an introduction by Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver.';a romance with a tight mystery plot . . . an assured whodunnit'Lucy Sussex, Blockbuster! Fergus Hume and the Mystery of a Hansom Cab (2015) ';Force and Fraud is pioneering in its status as the first murder mystery in Australia . . .'Kate Watson, Women Writing Crime Fiction, 1860-1880 (2012)

John Lang was Australias first locally born novelist, publishing early work in Sydney in the 1840s and going on to write several bestsellers. The Forgers Wife (1856) is a lively adventure novel, set in an unruly colonial Sydney where everyone is on the make. The forgers wife is a young woman who follows her rakish husband out to Australia and struggles to survive as her marriage falls apart. She soon meets detective George Flower, a powerful man with a cavalier sense of justice and retribution. Flower literally controls the fortunes of the colony: taking on the local bushrangers, instructing colonial authorities, and helping himself to the spoils along the way.First serialised in Frasers Magazine in 1853, The Forgers Wife was popular in its day and was reprinted many times over. It is Australias first detective novel and most likely, the first detective novel in the Anglophone world.This ebook edition includes an introduction by Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver, and a translation of the appendix by Sophie Zins. The text includes both the lightly modernised text of the print edition as well as the unamended original text.It is a powerful, if occasionally painful, book. It sells even now in all the colonies and in England by the thousand...Rolf Boldrewood on Australian Literature, The Advocate (Melbourne), 20 May 1893