Colonial Australian Popular Fiction

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 squatter's beautiful daughter, Flora McAlpin, save her lover from the gallows? Or is the circumstantial evidence against him too strong?

Ellen Davitt's 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)