"Introducing the Honourable Phryne Fisher" by Kerry Greenwood

Synopsis: 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 handles everything—danger, excitement and love—with her inimitable panache and flair, and still finds a little time for discreet dalliances and delicious diversions. This brilliant omnibus volume presents Cocaine Blues, Flying Too High and Murder on the Ballarat Train.

My review: I absolutely adore Kerry Greenwood's Corinna Chapman series.  But her Phryne Fisher series is more prolific (6 in the Corinna Chapman; 19 in the Phryne Fisher).  "Introducing the Honourable Phryne Fisher" is an omnibus of the first three titles in the series (Cocaine Blues, Flying Too High, and Murder on the Ballarat Train).

I wasn't sure if I was going to like this series or not.  I'm not into murder mystery novels and police procedurals.  I don't like blood and gore.  Thankfully, reading these, I was able to let my mind gloss over the details and not work too hard at imagining it too closely.  But I loved these books because, like the Corinna Chapman series, I really enjoyed the characters themselves.  I enjoyed their depths and the environment created in each novel.  In reading all three, my personal enjoyment of tea has been refreshed.  In the second book, Dot (a grown woman) gets her own room for the first time in her life and it made me appreciate that I have my own apartment and can keep it just as I like.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first book I've read set in the 1920s.  Phryne Fisher is a woman born of poverty, granted wealth later in life (I believe she's in her 30s).  She is fashionable, strongly independent, has no interest in having children, and has casual sexual relations with good-looking men.  She's free-spirited, smart, widely skilled, and is able to solve mysteries.  In short, I like her a lot.  She makes me want to be a bit more glamorous than I am.

In fact, Phryne Fisher is so fashionable that the first novel went into a lot of detail of her clothing choices.  Not being a fashion maven, I didn't understand a lot of it and didn't care to find out.  That doesn't happen so much in the other two novels.  But there was enough for you to understand that her clothes were stylish, expensive, and beautiful.

I read somewhere that someone complained about the abrupt change to another character's point-of-view without indication (like, in the same paragraph as another character's POV).  Yes, it caught me off-guard the first time it happened but you get used to it as you continue reading her books.  If you want to talk about writing style and form, fine, go ahead and complain.  But for me, it blends well with the story.  Instead of waiting until later in the story, Greenwood cuts to what the other character in the scene is thinking (usually about Phryne) or gives some background to the character that explains something about them in reference to the scene or what is happening to them within the plot.  I didn't mind it and usually it was only a few sentences. A brief aside, as it were.  Not so horribly distracting from the story.

Yes, so I did indeed enjoy this book (and therefore the first three novels in the series) and so now I will have to hunt down copies of the other 16 novels.  I have five non-consecutive titles from later in the series on ebook; I'll just have to find the earlier ones.

On another note, I recently bought a copy of Kerry Greenwood's "Salmancis/Jetsam" from Amazon; it was published in March 2013 and is only available for Kindle.  And we got a copy of her "Out of the Black Land" (published in February 2013) at one of my libraries but I haven't completely decided whether or not I will read it, simply because it is set in ancient Egypt.  And in case I haven't already said it anywhere else, Kerry Greenwood is my all-time favourite author.  If we count "Introducing the Honourable Phryne Fisher" as the three separate titles, I have read nine of her books and loved all of them.  I happily look forward to reading more.  And I sincerely hope she writes more in the Corinna Chapman series.

Read on,
Paula