Murder in the Dark

I actually read one of the Phryne Fisher mysteries by Kerry Greenwood years and years ago, maybe as a student, and I remember being terribly shocked. They're set in the roaring twenties in Australia, and feature a very liberated heroine who sleeps with a different man each book, and has references to all sorts of salacious things. Now, how sad is this, it seems rather tame. This is the result of the hundreds of books I've read since then!

Greenwood obviously does a lot of research for her books, and they're very interesting on that side. Basically Phryne is invited to an end of year bash, knowing that there's a murderer there. She has to catch the murderer and rescue a couple of kidnapped children and seduce a government agent while enjoying herself at the wild party which features Japanese cuisine, medieval dance (very interesting for me, even a crumhorn was mentioned, although negatively) and some very odd Turkish sex practices which, the notes tell us, were fashionable at the time. She doesn't dwell on details, so it's not explicit or anything, and in fact it's rather distanced so that you do feel that Phryne is slightly bored by it - after all, this is number fifteen in the series?

Mysteries in general don't do much for me. It's the characterisation and so on that makes it interesting. This is based on an actual place in Victoria and some actual incidents, and so as a piece of Australiana it's original and clever. As a piece of literature, it's mediocre, and the characters are too distant to care about particularly. Greenwood is definitely writing this as a piece of pro-feminist, pro-gay rights, pro-ethnic minority righs, pro-left wing, pro whatever and whatever and whatever; it's kind of like reading a student paper from university. I probably won't bother with any more of hers, especially as they are unlikely to include a repeat of the crumhorn.