Reviews #12 through 16. Flying Too High (#2), Murder on the Ballarat Train (#3), Death at Victoria Dock (#4), The Green Mill Murder (#5), and Blood and Circuses (#6).
The link for this post is for a collection of the first three stories featuring Miss Fisher. The first one (Cocaine Blues) I read last year, so it’s not included in this review.
The official blurb for this book is thus:
Meet Phryne Fisher, the 1920s’ most elegant and irrepressible sleuth, in her first three adventures bound together in one great value volume. This is the perfect way to introduce your friends to your favourite and most stylish sleuth—or to catch up on some of Miss Fisher’s earlier career. Our unflappable, unconventional and uninhibited heroine, The Honourable Phryne Fisher, leaves the tedium of English high society for Melbourne, Australia, and never looks back. In her first three adventures, she encounters communism, cocaine, kidnappers, and murderers.
Phryne (Fry-nee) Fisher was born in Australia, dirt poor and struggling until World War One happens, a lot of young men die, and her father suddenly finds himself titled. Young Phryne gets educated, has her debut, and becomes one of the idle rich. She’s fluent in French! She can fly planes! She’s beautiful! She’s exotic looking! She’s sexually liberated! She’s bored, so she decides to become a Lady Investigator.
The series started out fairly strong. Set in Australia in the 1920s, Miss Fisher uses her position in society to find out secrets and deceptions going on in the upper class. She unearths a cocaine smuggling ring. She helps the police ferret out a back alley abortionist. She rescues a housemaid from an abusive employer and hires her on. She seduces a lovely Russian dancer. It’s all very cool and different and not having read many books set in Australia, it was interesting. But this review isn’t for the first book. It’s for books two through six. There are more than that in the series, but six is where I finally threw my hands up and said enough.
Each book is essentially the same: Phryne stumbles across a murder, or is hired to investigate something. No surprise because these are mysteries. That’s not the problem. The problem is that in the course of every adventure three things happen:
- Phryne meets a strange man, finds him beautiful, and has wonderful, perfect, athletic sex with him. Nine times out of ten this man will be virtually untouched — not a virgin, but young enough never to have had a fantastic lover before, or has been living as a hermit for 20 years, or mourning the loss of someone and convinced he’ll never feel lust for another, or is so convinced he’s worthless that he’ll never know physical love except with prostitutes. Until he meets Phryne, who has some sort of magical vajay that makes men throw themselves at her. Even gravely wounded men who have probably lost enough blood to not be able to sustain an erection manage to have wild, athletic, fantastic sex with her. In one case, one of her lovers is the fiance of her client. Seriously, she goes to interview him and ends up sleeping with him before she even introduces herself!
- Someone Phryne cares for ends up in mortal danger. Sometimes it’s even Phryne herself who ends up kidnapped, threatened, and nearly sexually assaulted. It always looks dire and you wonder “how on earth is this person going to be rescued in time” but you don’t need to worry because….
- Phryne turns out to have an incredibly complicated skill that’s just perfect for the situation. Need to find a guy who’s been living deep in the outback for decades? Phryne’s a fab pilot! Need to infiltrate a circus? Phryne learns to do trick horseback riding in a matter of hours! Can she sing? Like an angel. Can she dance? Like a dream. Can she infiltrate a meeting of Communists? Yes! Can she shoot? Expert marksman! Everyone is rescued just in time, no one suffers anything more than a few cuts and bruises, and Phryne is there to hand over the criminals to the police.
What finally did it for me was the book Blood and Circuses. Phryne’s magical sexuality united people from vastly different castes of circus folk (Circus entertainers don’t mix with the Carnies, and no one ever takes a clown as a lover until Phryne shows up), two men with nothing in common except their love for Phryne decide they can share her, causes a woman to fall in love with her, and charms a bear.
She does not, thankfully, have sex with the bear.
Someone with a higher tolerance for nonsense and magical Mary-Sues might enjoy the whole series – or might get farther along than I did at least.
Somehow it all works for me on the show…but I must have a high tolerance for it, because you’re absolutely right about everything. I don’t know if I could handle the formula reading it over and over again.
The TV show is MUCH different. Cec, Bert, Jack, and Hugh aren’t really that important in the books. Dot’s mentioned a lot because she’s Phryne’s maid/companion, but the others are much more on the periphery.
The second season of the show, which has finally done away with the “dead little sister” plot (not in the books at all), is based less on the books and more on the characters and is so much better than the books.
Good to know! I’ll stick with the show :)