The Lady with the Gun Asks the Questions by Kerry Greenwood

For Phryne Fisher fans, creator Kerry Greenwood’s short story collection is a fresh treat. Gorgeous, wealthy, self-confident, and a connoisseur of attractive men, the lady sleuth of 1920s Melbourne is busy at her usual occupation, solving murders. When she uncovers other unsavory deeds, Phryne dispenses justice by instituting restitution.

With settings that move from clubs to choirs to carnivals, these stories are written in an over the top style that verges on the hilarious. Kerry Greenwood is brilliantly entertaining, but her tales also work on a more serious level. Phryne deals with a wide range of issues: class snobbery, petty theft and fraud as well as socially accepted racism, homophobia, violence and the systematic exploitation of girls and women.

The stories are well researched and replete with references and quotations from an array of famous sources including Chaucer, Wilde, Vergil, Ovid and Milton. We can learn a few choice tidbits of history as well. For instance, while Britain and France jailed Quakers and others who refused active service in WWI, Australia held a nation-wide referendum on the issue, determining that “conchies” would not be imprisoned for their pacifism. We also hear a bit about social reformers of the day. On the drug front, we are reminded there were as yet no antibiotics, and learn when laws first outlawed opiates in the UK and Australia.

Characters, especially heroes and villains, are memorable for being larger than life. By her contrast to ordinary mortals, Phryne provides a lavish demonstration of the constricted lives led by the great majority of her female contemporaries. However, as her author points out in an interview, it is Phryne’s title, her money and her unorthodox decision not to become a wife that allow her to get away with living the life she chooses.

Naturally plain-spoken, Phryne has no problem thinking rude thoughts or breaking social rules when the situation demands it. On hearing of the death of a hypocrite obsessed with virtue signalling (as we’d call it today), she reflects that “His philanthropy appeared to have been fatal.” Safely home from a party where she danced with a clumsy young man, she complains to Dot, her companion, that “he trampled my toes like the corn beneath the harrow and made a very obvious grab for my…er…attributes.” Introduced to a pimp in a drawing room who expresses himself pleased to meet her, she retorts “The pleasure is all yours.”

Phryne also has philosophical moments in which she contemplates death. When “a beautiful young man” dies suddenly, she reflects soberly that he “had every reason to assume that the world would continue to conform to his desires, through a suitable marriage and the production of pattern children to an honorable career to a replete old age.“ As the cause of death is somewhat murky, the doctor casually remarks that the “Coroner will have to sit on him, of course.”

Greenwood’s prose is spiced with many such memorable turns of phrase. One character glares with “an eye that would open oysters.” Another has a “strong determined jaw that could have been used for ramming triremes.” In a hat tip to Wilde, Phryne reflects, after interviewing an unpleasant woman who has lost both a daughter and granddaughter that “she seemed uncommonly careless.” Called out on a case, Phryne is coached on the names of the family daughters, all named after mythological figures. There’s Calliope, Eudora, Euterpe, and Psyche. Learning that their brother Xerxes died young, she diagnoses the cause of death as “acute nomenclature.”

At the end of many of these tales, the reader rejoices with Phryne as she exerts her efforts to right what social wrongs she can, while putting all kinds of unwarranted smugness firmly in its place. When our heroine extorts money from the would-be pimp of an eight-year-old girl, readers are revolted but satisfied to learn that he disinterred “a greasy leather wallet from the unwholesome recesses of his costume” and handed over her fee, which she in turn will give to the child, now under the protection of kind step-parents.

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Love, Loss and What I Wore

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Death at the Savoy by Ron Base and Prudence Emery