Work in progress

The Adventures of Captain Lightning is a young adult novel that reads like a series of short stories, with an over-arching narrative.

It pays tribute to the nineteenth century traditions of the amateur detective serial. Those stories, by writers such as Wilkie Collins, Grant Allen, and Arthur Conan-Doyle, appeared in popular magazines such as Charles Dickens’ All the Year Round. While Sherlock Holmes is the most famous of the fictional sleuths, several of these important early crime stories featured women detectives such as nurse Hilda Wade and the young adventurer, Miss Cayley.

“I don’t know what girls are coming to nowadays.”

– Miss Cayley’s Adventures, Grant Allen, 1898.

These women, along with Conan-Doyle’s creation Irene Adler – one of the few people to outwit Sherlock Holmes – and Marian Halcombe in Collins’s Sensation novel, The Woman in White, were among the first women characters in popular fiction with agency, fierce intelligence, and sometimes even a profession. (Of course, Jane Austen created many women and girls with agency and fierce intelligence, too, but sadly none were detectives – though they could be!) They were central to the story, and in many cases solved the mystery at the centre of the plot. They are among the ancestors of many of the fictional heroines of today.

The Adventures of Captain Lightning (working title) features two young women, Jessie and Boots, who represent two of the classic female character types of nineteenth century fiction: the plucky heroine and the ‘female gentleman’ – a woman who is seen as ‘almost as good as a man’. But, because I made them up, nothing is that simple.

On the run after committing their own highway robbery, Jessie and Boots become amateur detectives, solving or resolving a series of unrelated crimes and mysteries, while trying to evade capture themselves. Reading like light-hearted historical mystery adventures, the stories subtly interrogate issues of exile, class, gender and sexuality in a rapidly changing world of colonial expansion, displacement and destruction of indigenous people and cultures, and the hardships and exhilaration of the Gold Rush. They also make me laugh.

The first story, ‘Boots and the Bushranger’, was written for the Clandestine Press And Then… adventure anthology (2017).

And then … I decided I adored Boots and Jessie and wanted to write more.

The novel is set on the Goldfields and in the High Country of the colony of Victoria in the late 1850s. Because that time was a moment of great impact on Country and its original inhabitants, I’ve worked with Wotjobaluk artist, writer and consultant, artist Kathrine Clarke, now based in the Goldfields, on writing about Country and creating First Nations characters; and with Gnerick Gnerick Gary Murray to think about ways to bring aspects of Waywurru and Dhuduroa communities’ histories and Country into this story. I thank them both for their wisdom and guidance over many years.

The Adventures of Captain Lightning was supported by the Artists in Residence program of the Falls Creek resort in the Victorian High Country.