First
in the Miss Fisher Mystery series of books by Kerry Greenwood, Miss Phryne Fisher Investigates was
published in 1989. Its title was Cocaine
Blues (though in the US it was called Death
by Misadventure). Since then, over the years Miss Fisher has gained many
readers from age 17 to 90. The popularity of the books has only increased since
the airing of the TV series first in 2012 – now the third series is available
on DVD – starring Essie Davis, which is perfect casting.
To
date, Kerry Greenwood has published twenty Miss Fisher novels, the latest being
Murder and Mendelssohn (2013). The
short story collection A Question of
Death (2008) features Miss Fisher also and has been mined for the TV
series. The first episode of season one retained the Cocaine Blues title.
Although
Phryne Fisher’s family was poor prior to the First World War, all male heirs to
a British peerage were killed in the conflict and her father inherited the
title and moved to England with the family. The book begins in 1928 with
Phryne, rich and bored, solving a jewel theft and then being asked to
investigate a Colonel’s daughter who is married, living in Melbourne, Australia:
they fear she is being poisoned by her husband. Phryne agrees and moves to the
antipodes.
We
soon learn that Phryne is not your normal aristocrat. After completing
school, she ran away to France and worked with a women’s ambulance unit in the
war. Now, she can fly a plane, and drives her own car (a Hispano-Suiza) and is
quite comfortable wearing trousers. Her personality seems to match exactly that
of her 4th century BC namesake; apparently, when born her father had chosen to
christen her Psyche, ‘due to a long evening at the Club the night before, when
he was called upon for her name, he had rummaged through the rags of a
classical education and seized upon Phryne. So instead of Psyche the nymph, she
was Phryne the courtesan.’ (p16)
The story unfolds effortlessly, with light humour
interspersed with a social conscience. Drug dealing – cocaine, obviously – and illegal
abortion figure in this tale. Phryne is an emancipated woman, happy to love and
leave men – she has no wish for commitment or children. A Russian dancer,
Sasha, intrigues her while attending a soiree: ‘The guests were silenced by a
painful mixture of Schoenberg and Russian folk-song, derived from musically
obtuse Styrian peasants who had absorbed their atonality with their mother’s
milk. The sound hurt; but it could not be ignored. Too much of it, Phryne was
convinced, would curdle custard.’ (p77/78) Sasha is on a quest of his own, too, and she
gets involved in more ways than one.
Her investigations inevitably bring her into the evil
orbit of hoodlums: two men accost her – one, with a waxed moustache containing ‘rather
more crumbs than fashion dictated…’ while the other possessed a ‘thin moustache
like a smear of brown Windsor soup. Both had suggestive bulges in their pockets
which told of either huge genitalia or trousered pistols. Phryne inclined to
the handgun theory.’(p81)
Along the way, Phryne recruits Dot as her maid and
confidante, and taxi drivers Cec and Bert as her spies and contacts. She
briefly meets Detective Inspector Jack Robinson, who is blissfully
unaware how Miss Fisher is going to turn his world upside down in future
adventures.
An enjoyable crime caper with likeable characters and
plenty of plot. As I came to the book after watching the TV series, I tend to
hear the character voices from the show, which is praise to the scriptwriters
who have captured the essence of the book(s).
[Puzzling why the UK publisher doesn’t use the TV series
images on the covers; the publisher of the Murdoch murder mysteries had no such
qualms: possibly a contractual issue.]
Essie Davis - Miss Fisher TV series - Wikipedia commons
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