At one point in Cocaine Blues, the first novel in Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher series of detective novels, the protagonist finds herself annoyed at the jazz band hired for a social occasion, saying that they are playing too fast and loud. And boy, is that an instance of the pot calling the kettle black.
Phryne Fisher is a London socialite, elevated to sudden wealth when an unexpected series of deaths makes her father a Lord. After she impresses her father’s rich friends by calmly apprehending a jewel thief during a soiree, one of them asks her to go to Australia and investigate his daughter’s marriage. The daughter, Lydia, is prone to mysterious illnesses, and her parents suspect the husband they’ve never liked.
Quick as she can, Phryne hightails it for Melbourne, and within a few days she’s a hit among the society there, effortlessly fashionable and charming. Phyrne is an adventuress, a daring pilot, a terror on the motorways in her new Hispano-Suiza automobile, and an acrobatic lover. She seems like wish fulfillment in the extreme, if you ask me. A woman from the 1920s with thoughts and sentiments decades ahead of their time, fearless and beautiful and staggeringly wealthy while somehow still maintaining the common touch; she’s the smartest person in every room, and the wittiest and cleverest etc.
Phyrne’s attempt to get close to her target somewhat ludicrously wind up getting her wrapped up in both an illegal and unsafe abortion racket, and a drug ring getting people hooked on cocaine. Along the way she collects associates like postage stamps, including a crusading Scottish female doctor, two raging communist taxi drivers (who are, of course, still charmed by Phryne in spite of her wealth, a hardscrabble young maid, and an entire Russian ballet troupe (whose stars, brother and sister, are both desperate to get Phryne into bed with them. All this in under 200 pages.
It’s a lot to take. In many ways it feels like Kerry Greenwood is moving so fast in the hope that you won’t realize how ultimately shallow it all is. There’s one decent twist in the mystery plot, but that’s about it. There’s just a lot of Phryne being this impossible person who couldn’t ever exist and constantly being told how great she is.
