Phryne Fisher

I haven’t blogged for while, excepting the short pieces I just uploaded, largely because I’ve been taking advantage of the long weekend to have a bit of a break—the first time in seven weeks I haven’t had assessment to mark. W00t!—and partly because I’ve mostly spent that time rewatching Veronica Mars season two, and I have nothing to say about that, except that I miss the show.

But I have been reading something recently—Kerry Greenwood’s Death by Water, her fifteenth Phryne Fisher mystery, according to Wikipedia. And it reminded me that somewhere along the line, I started to get really annoyed with this character.

Way back when I edited the book review section of a review journal, I never either published or wrote a hatchet job—and I don’t intend to do so now. It’s not Greenwood’s novels that I have a problem with; they’re enjoyable murder mysteries/period pieces.

But at some point, Phryne started ringing false for me.

I read Cocaine Blues and Flying Too High after finding them in a secondhand book shop many years ago—I don’t know how many years, but well after they were published. Wikipedia, frustratingly, offers alternate dates of 1989 and 1991 for the first book and I don’t have it on my shelf, so I’m not even sure when it was published. But I can’t have read it before my undergraduate years, which still makes it over a decade ago.

Back then, we were told that Phryne was the daughter of minor aristocracy: her father had been an unsatisfactory younger son, shipped out to the colonies, in traditional fashion, where he had lived in abject poverty until a couple of the people between him and the title died and he was whisked back as the now comfortably affluent heir.

I’ve always wondered why the colonial branch was so straitened, when Phryne’s own resources indicate that the baronetcy was an unusually wealthy one, but that’s not important.

The important point was that that back story made sense: Phryne hadn’t always been rich, but she was now. She enjoyed the money, but wanted something a little more exciting, and slipped into detection almost by accident. Not, perhaps, as convincing a back story as that of Hercule Poirot, ex-Belgian Police Force, or Miss Marple, an unusually intelligent person constrained by the late-Victorian restrictions on her gender, but it was plausible.

But at some point, it came to seem that Phyrne was capable of anything, at which point I started wondering about how the back story worked. Phryne’s years driving ambulances behind the lines in World War One, working as an artist’s model, and barely avoiding a career as a prostitute seemed to fill to short a gap.

I think it was around the time that I read Queen of Flowers that the character struck me as suddenly infallible. I’d not read all the books leading up to that one and those that I had read I hadn’t read in order, but in that book, Phryne managed to leap onto a stampeding horse—one of a herd of stampeding horses—as a result of her earlier experience in a circus, and it rang suddenly false for me.

It’s not as simple, I suspect, as describing the character as a Mary Sue. In fact, I don’t think she is a Mary Sue, because to me—although the definition might have shifted a little recently—the key point of a Mary Sue for me is a desire for wish fulfillment on the part of the author, and I don’t think that’s what’s happening here.

(Similarly, I note from the Wikipedia page on Mary Sues that Bella and Edward from Twilight have been read as Mary Sues, and I don’t think that’s entirely the case, either—although I suspect the author is partly fulfilling the perceived wishes of her readership, I still don’t think that’s quite how a Mary Sue character works.)

But Phryne is increasingly infallible, surviving drownings and being thrown over her horse’s head—something that, due the nature of the act, can kill accomplished fox hunters. And even if you find fox hunting morally repugnant, as I do, it does provide an extraordinary challenge to a participant’s horsemanship.

Unfortunately, for me, this increasingly infallibility brings with it a commensurate lowering in the amount of sympathy that I can generate for the character, because she seems less human. That’s not a problem with superheroes, but it is a problem here.

Call me old fashioned, but I enjoyed the old days, when Phryne changed lovers every book—before she became formalised in the slightly disturbing position of “concubine,” in her words, to a married man—and the outfits were lovingly detailed. Then I enjoyed both the mysteries and the period.

As it stands, the deumanising of the character means I can’t sympathise with her. And that effects my enjoyment of the depiction of 1920s Melbourne society and of the murders, and drives me straight back into the arms of Rex Stout.