Murder and Mendelssohn - Kerry Greenwood

Phryne Fisher is back with her 20th case. Obnoxious conductor Hedley Tregennis has been murdered. He was poisoned but was actually killed by suffocation - someone stuffed the score of Mendelssohn's Elijah down his throat. Tregennis was loathed by the members of his choir as he had a nasty habit of groping the sopranos & humiliating & bullying everyone else. Phryne is called in by Inspector Jack Robinson to help his investigations. He finds questioning the members of the choir as easy as herding cats & Phryne steps in to help as she is more on their wavelength. She soon discovers that two copies of the score are missing & that Tregennis had a secret visitor, a woman who brought him delicious, expensive meals. Discovering the mystery woman becomes vital but the post mortem reveals a surprise about the actual cause of death.

Phryne also runs into an old friend, Dr John Wilson. John & Phryne first met during the War on the Western Front. Phryne drove an ambulance & their brief relationship was a great comfort to them both, even though John is basically homosexual. Phryne saved John's life by driving her ambulance in the path of a sniper, leaving him badly wounded but alive. Now, John is in Melbourne with Rupert Sheffield, a mathematical genius lecturing on the science of deduction. Sheffield is an unpleasant man, arrogant & cold. John's unrequited love for Sheffield makes him unhappy but he needs someone to devote himself to. John is also concerned that someone is trying to kill Sheffield. There have been several accidents that could be more than that. Phryne & Sheffield dislike each other on sight & she agrees to investigate the attempted accidents for John's sake. This leads her back to the War again, as Sheffield was involved in Intelligence work in Greece & Phryne had also dabbled in Intelligence, working with novelist Compton Mackenzie. Her contacts lead her to the MI6 agent based in Melbourne as she tries to discover more about Sheffield & what he could be involved in.

Phryne investigates with all her usual aplomb & confidence. Assisted by her adopted daughters Jane & Ruth, Tinker & his dog, Molly, Dot Williams & Hugh Collins, Mr & Mrs Butler, the Hispano-Suiza, gorgeous clothes & delicious food. Phryne becomes a member of the choir & gets to know the impoverished students who put up with unpleasant conductors because of their love of music - & each other. There are several budding romances among the choristers & Phyrne observes everyone carefully while searching for a motive for murder more compelling than just hating the victim because he's an unpleasant person. When Hedley's replacement is also murdered horribly, the members of the choir come under even greater suspicion & Phryne has to decide whether she has one or two murderers to uncover.

The lingering effects of the War are everywhere in this book. Phryne & John still suffer from the after-effects of their war service & we learn more about Phryne's activities in Intelligence.  Echoes of Sherlock Holmes & Doctor Watson in the relationship between Sheffield & John & the characterisation of the choir are beautifully done. Kerry Greenwood has sung in choirs & she uses her intimate knowledge to great effect. The notes at the end of the book are fascinating as Greenwood discusses her inspirations for the plot & the themes of music, love, war & detection. I didn't expect it but Murder and Mendelssohn was an appropriate book to read in the weeks before Remembrance Day. As always, one book leads to another & I'm now reading Emily Mayhew's new book, Wounded, about the men wounded in action & the men & women who tried to put them back together again.

The Rosie Project - Graeme Simsion

I'm usually very reluctant to read books, especially when they've been much-hyped. I find that I'm almost immediately offside with a book that's been over-praised even before publication. I might read it months or years later when all the hoo-ha has died away or I might never read them. However, I heard an interesting discussion about The Rosie Project on the ABC's Book Club program & we had the ebook available at work (there was a long reservation queue for the hard copy) so I thought I'd give it a go.

Don Tillman is a genetics professor at a Melbourne university. He believes in routine & order. He lives his life by schedules & the lists written on his whiteboard. He has few friends, only Gene, a colleague at work & his wife, Claudia. Don is somewhere on the autism spectrum. His relationships with women have been disastrous, the most recent date ended badly when he tried to convince his date that she couldn't tell the difference between mango & apricot ice cream because all ice cream tastes the same. Approaching his 40th birthday, Don decides that it's time he married so he devises the Wife Project, a scientific questionnaire to find the perfect partner.

A questionnaire! Such an obvious solution. A purpose-built, scientifically valid instrument incorporating current best practice to filter out the time wasters, the disorganised, the ice cream discriminators, the visual harassment complainers, the crystal gazers, the horoscope readers, the fashion obsessives, the religious fanatics, the vegans, the sports watchers, the creationists, the smokers, the scientifically illiterate, the homeopaths, leaving, ideally, the perfect partner, or, realistically, a manageable shortlist of candidates.

You can see from this list what Don is preoccupied with. His social interactions are awkward because he doesn't pick up the emotional cues from the people he meets. Gene helps Don sort through the applicants & tries to convince him to loosen up some of the criteria but doesn't have much success. So, he sends Rosie to see Don &, although Rosie is the opposite of the woman Don imagined when he prepared his questionnaire, they become friends, mostly as a result of misunderstandings.

Rosie is a student working part time as a bartender. She is a free spirit compared to Don. She smokes, she's fussy about food (she's basically vegetarian but eats seafood if it's sustainable) & she claims to be able to tell the flavours of ice cream apart in a blind test. Rosie is also obsessed with finding out the identity of her father. Before she died when Rosie was 12, her mother told her that she wasn't the child of her husband Phil. Rosie has found Phil wanting ever since. Her mother had a fling with one of her fellow medical students after graduation but didn't say who it was. With Don's help, Rosie sets out to collect the DNA of all the possible candidates & discover her father. This becomes the Father Project.

Don & Rosie's friendship grows as their commitment to the Father Project increases. Don is intrigued by Rosie & the turning point is when he realises that even though she's totally unsuitable as a partner according to his questionnaire, he has had the most fun in his life with Rosie (apart from his visits to the American Museum of Natural History in New York). Every time they seem to be growing closer, Don's lack of social perception spoils the moment & almost ends their friendship. He decides to start the Rosie Project to try to change his life for the better.

The Rosie Project began life as a screenplay & eventually, after being turned into a short story & then a novel, won the Victorian Premier's Award for an unpublished manuscript in 2012. It's been sold to 30 countries & I'm sure the film rights are about to be sold if they haven't been already. I enjoyed the book very much with only a few reservations. Maybe it was Don's narration or maybe it's because it was originally a screenplay but there was very little sense of place. If it wasn't stated that it was set in Melbourne, I would have thought it was set in an American city. There's no sense of Melbourne at all apart from a few mentions of pubs. Don grew up in Shepparton but, again, it could have been any midwestern American town. The only moment when there was a sense of being in Australia was when Don's brother called him Mate on the phone.

On the other hand, there's a lot of humour & some very poignant moments as well. Don has an awareness that his social perceptions are not the same as everyone else's. Although he sees this as "simply variations in human brain function that had been inappropriately medicalised because they did not fit social norms - constructed social norms - that reflected the most common human configurations rather than the full range.", he knows that his lack of friends & close personal relationships derives from his different brain function. His voice is quirky & very endearing. The Rosie Project is a book that looks at some serious issues with a very light touch & I enjoyed reading it.

By the Book - Ramona Koval

What is the right moment to read a book? Is it when the book reflects the story of our own lives, so that we recognise the characters and what happens to them? Or is it before our own story takes the path of characters? Do we read to show us how to avoid the events within? Has a book read at the right time saved any of us from certain doom?

I think this quote sums up the way Ramona Koval reads & why she reads. I think it's probably true of everyone who can't imagine a life without books.

Ramona Koval is a well-respected & much-loved broadcaster & journalist. For many years she hosted Books & Writing, a weekly radio show about all aspects of literature. She has also interviewed hundreds of authors at writer's festivals from Melbourne to Edinburgh & Toronto. Unfortunately her radio career came to an abrupt end last year after some changes at the ABC but she has now written a book about her love of reading & the kinds of books she reads.

Koval grew up in Melbourne in the 50s & 60s, the daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors who had lived in Paris after the war before emigrating to Australia. Both her parents were the only survivors of their families & their marriage wasn't always a happy one. They didn't talk about their experiences & had very little in common. Ramona's mother was a voracious reader who already knew several languages & taught herself English through her reading. Ramona was encouraged to read but she never discussed her reading with her mother & now sees that as a lost opportunity to know her mother better.

Ramona was a good student & had her sights set on a scientific career until, as she puts it, she married her own Charles Bovary & found herself married & pregnant at the age of 20. All her reading of Flaubert, Mary McCarthy's The Group & Betty Friedan hadn't made her any wiser. Eventually she began a career in radio, first science journalism with the Marie Curiosity Show & eventually Books & Writing on Radio National.

This book is structured around Koval's life & the books she was reading at each stage. So she moves from Enid Blyton to Colette & Simone de Beauvoir. She reads Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kafka & George Orwell. A fascination with anthropology leads to Margaret Mead & then the books debunking Mead's theories. There are the books she reads about Poland to try to understand more about her parents' early lives. Sometimes the memory of a book or a story leads to the recollection of an interview with the writer as when she meets Grace Paley & Oliver Sacks. I would have liked more about the writers Koval has interviewed although I realise this isn't that kind of book. There are already a couple of collections of interviews, Speaking Volumes & Tasting Life Twice, that were published some time ago. What I enjoyed here was the more informal recollections & Koval's own recollections of reading the work & then meeting the author. As an interviewer she is always intent on keeping the spotlight on her subject.

My favourite chapter, probably because I share the obsession, was about the memoirs of polar explorers. She reads Scott, Shackleton, Cherry Apsley-Garrard. She shares my fascination with the efforts of these men, venturing into the unknown in inadequate clothing & risking their lives for a handful of penguin eggs. She wants to know what they read during the long polar nights & discovers their love of poetry, reference books to settle arguments & cookbooks to feed their fantasies when all they had to eat was seal meat & blubber.

By the Book is a walk through the life & library of an intelligent, inquiring woman. I know Ramona Koval's voice so well that I could hear her voice as I read & I enjoyed learning about her life as well as about the books she's read. I could only agree when she wrote, "A library is a kind of autobiography of interests, fads and life stages."

Unnatural Habits - Kerry Greenwood

The Hon Phryne Fisher is beautiful, rich & a brilliant detective. She lives in 1920s Melbourne, drives a Hispano-Suiza, has an eclectic group of friends & adopted family, and is able to fell a villain with wit & charm or if that fails, her skill with a pistol.

One night, Phryne saves a young reporter, Polly Kettle, from a beating in Little Lonsdale Street. She discovers that Polly is on the track of a story about young girls vanishing from the Magdalene Laundry at the Good Shepherd Convent. The Laundry was a place where unmarried, pregnant girls were sent in disgrace, worked unmercifully hard & then, when they were due to give birth, sent to a nursing home run by cruel Mrs Ryan. All the time the fact of their disgrace was dinned into them & their babies were taken away for adoption. Three of these girls sent to Mrs Ryan's have disappeared. Have they been kidnapped or have they run away? When Polly herself goes missing shortly afterwards, Phryne investigates.

With the help of Inspector Jack Robinson, her maid, Dot, adopted daughters, Ruth & Jane, new arrival Tinker & Communist taxi drivers Bert & Cec, Phryne infiltrates the Convent. She discovers the horrors the girls suffered there, disowned by their families & at the mercy of a rigidly moralistic Church establishment. Phryne's title & her impeccable style give her access to the Bishop's Palace, an exclusive gentleman's club in Melbourne & the homes of the Camberwell middle-class. The stories of cruelty & neglect that Phryne uncovers during the investigation daunt her spirit for a time but she is determined to find the missing girls, expose the scandal of the Magdalene Laundry & stop an evil trade in young girls that begins at the Williamstown docks & ends in the Middle East.

Phryne is the ultimate fantasy figure. She has everything she could want but she inherited her wealth after an impoverished childhood so she appreciates it. She drove an ambulance during WWI & her politics are impeccably liberal & non-discriminatory. Non-racist, non-sexist, inclusive of everyone regardless of race, creed or sexual preference, she's really a 21st century woman in the 1920s. The detail of Phryne's life, from the food to the gorgeous clothes & her love of Jicky perfume, is a lot of fun. The reader can sense Kerry Greenwood's delight in her creation's sense of style & luxury. Her adventures are always a delight & I love visiting early 20th century Melbourne with such a stylish guide.

The Mystery of a Hansom Cab - Fergus Hume

As someone who reads mostly English books I rarely come across a local reference. So, I had to smile when I read that the main suspect in The Mystery of a Hansom Cab had been spotted being driven along Powlett St, East Melbourne. I was sitting in a doctor's surgery (waiting for my sister who has had successful foot surgery) just around the corner from Powlett St as I read those words. That was one of the charms of this book for me, the references to Melbourne. Melbourne was a boom town in the mid-ninetteenth century thanks to the Ballarat gold rush & was known as Marvellous Melbourne. Many of the buildings of that period have survived & the city centre hasn't changed that much since 1886 when this book was written so I could visualise where the action was taking place.

The Mystery of a Hansom Cab is one of the most successful detective stories ever written. The author, Fergus Hume, was an Englishman who came out to Australia as many young men did in those days. He was looking for adventure & a way to make a living. He wanted to write plays but nobody would produce them. So, he asked a bookseller what kind of books sold well & he was told it was detective stories. He wrote The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, sold the copyright for £50 & never saw another penny of profit from the 750,000 copies sold during his lifetime. Someone else even turned it into a play & made money from that. Hume only spent two years in Melbourne, then returned to England. He wrote over 100 other books but never matched the runaway success of his first book, which has been cited as an influence by writers such as Agatha Christie & has never been out of print.

The Mystery of a Hansom Cab is still immensely readable & includes several very modern aspects. The book opens with a newspaper account of a baffling murder that had taken place two nights before. A drunken man was put into a cab by another man & the cabby was directed to take him home. The second man got out of the cab soon after. However, when the driver stopped to ask his fare for directions not long afterwards, the man in the cab was dead. The driver took him to the police station & it was discovered that he had been suffocated with a chloroform soaked handkerchief bearing the initials OW. There was no clue as to the dead man's identity or the identity of the man who had travelled with him.

The murder was a particularly clever one. A hansom cab is the perfect location for murder as the driver sits at the back of the cab & can't see inside. The murdered man had no identification on him & the murderer was dressed in evening clothes with a light coat & wide-brimmed hat, a costume worn by many men, including most of the suspects in the book.

The case is handed to police detective Gorby, who soon discovers that the dead man was Oliver Whyte, a young man who is connected to the highest levels of Melbournr society. Whyte was part of the social circle of Mark Frettlby, one of the richest men in the city, & is pursuing Frettlby's daughter, Madge. Madge, however, is in love with Brian Fitzgerald, an Irishman who has come to Melbourne to make his fortune. Frettlby has encouraged Whyte's suit although he knows his daughter is in love with another man. Whyte & Fitzgerald are therefore on bad terms & Fitzgerald has been heard to threaten Whyte at his lodgings. Fitzgerald also wears a light coat & wide brimmed hat. Gorby is convinced he's found the murderer, especially when Fitzgerald refuses to provide an alibi for the time of the murder.

Mark Frettlby hires an ambitious lawyer, Calton, to defend Fitzgerald. Calton & another detective, Kilslip, are convinced that Gorby has arrested the wrong man & set out to prove it. Kilslip has been a rival of Gorby's for years & his motives are more to do with this rivalry than with any conviction of Fitzgerald's innocence. The trail leads them from the Collins St Block, the milieu of the rich & titled to Little Bourke St, the haunt of the destitute & the criminal. These two streets are only a block apart but many miles apart in every other way. It's in Little Bourke St that Fitzgerald's alibi is found, in the rundown tenement where old Mother Guttersnipe lies in an alcoholic stupor & a mysterious woman who asked to see Fitzgerald, died on the same night as the murder took place.

Fitzgerald refuses to reveal the secret whispered to him by the dying woman but Calton successfully defends him on the murder charge anyway, thanks to the appearance at the last possible moment of Sal Rawlins, old Mother Guttersnipe's granddaughter, who confirms his alibi. Then, Calton, with help from Kilslip & Madge must work to discover the murderer of Oliver Whyte & the nature of the secret that Fitzgerald refuses to divulge.

The Mystery of a Hansom Cab is an absorbing mystery with a mix of realism & melodrama that is very exciting. Brian & Madge are pretty stock characters but some of the supporting players, such as Calton, Kilslip the dogged detective & Fitzgerald's garrulous & mournful landlady are more interesting. There are more than enough secrets to be discovered to keep the pace moving along. The mix of high society & lowlife is also interesting & the solution of the mystery is bound up with respectability, that most important attribute of Victorian society. The lengths that several characters go to to keep up the facade of their respectability is indicative of that importance & it's something that can be seen in many other novels of the same period. At just over 250pp, I also think it's about the perfect length for a detective novel.

I borrowed the e-book of The Mystery of a Hansom Cab from my library & it's part of a new initiative by Text Publishing here in Melbourne. Text have brought out a range of Australian classics with new introductions, most of which had fallen out of print. It was in response to comments in the press that universities weren't teaching Australian literature anymore. It became a circular argument - it wasn't taught because the books weren't in print therefore teachers couldn't read & set the books for their students therefore... Michael Heyward at Text took up the challenge & did something about it. It's a fantastic initiative & I've filled a lot of gaps in my library's collection & bought several titles, including The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, as Bookclub sets. They're all available as paperbacks or e-books & the paperbacks are only $12.95 which is a great price. I love publishers who bring back the classics of the past & make them available so hooray for Text Publishing!

Cooking the Books - Kerry Greenwood

I can't read Kerry Greenwood's Corinna Chapman books when I'm hungry. It's torture. If I'm stuck on a train or on a journey of any kind without rations, I just read something else. I sat down on Friday afternoon to begin reading Cooking the Books. It was grey & threatening rain. I had a cup of tea beside me, Lucky was asleep on the couch, Phoebe was asleep on my lap. An hour & a half (& a very loud thunderstorm) later, I was starving & had to upset sleeping cats to get to the kitchen & eat.

Corinna Chapman is a baker. She's a big woman, traditionally built as Alexander McCall Smith would say. She lives in Melbourne in an Art Deco building called Insula with her lover, Daniel, cat Horatio & an assortment of friends & fellow tenants. Her bakery, Earthly Delights, is closed for January, her assistant, Jason, has gone to surf on the coast & her two assistants, resting actors Goss & Kylie, have landed roles on a new soap, Kiss the Bride. When an old school enemy begs Corinna to help her out in a catering emergency, employing a little bribery to ensure success, Corinna is happy to oblige. Holidays aren't for her & she's bored. The job, baking for the production of Kiss the Bride at Docklands studios, means she can keep an eye on Goss & Kylie as well as be highly paid for doing what she does best - baking.

The kitchen is fraught & tense, as all commercial kitchens are, in Corinna's experience. The tension is also evident on the set where star Molly Atkins plays the prima donna on & off the set. Her downtrodden assistant, Emily, suffers most but stays on, hoping for her big acting break if Molly pulls a few strings for her. Who could be playing practical jokes on the leading lady? Chili oil in her scrambled eggs, mustard in her face powder & wasabi in the lip gloss is only the start of it. Then, Corinna becomes aware of other little conspiracies among the cast & crew. Emily seems quite different off the set & when Molly faints & Emily has to step in at the last minute, she is transformed. Cameraman Ethan seems close to Emily & very antagonistic to Molly. The writers, Gordon & Kendall, seem to be hatching plots they haven't written into the script & Tash, the director, just wants to keep Molly happy & get to the end of shooting with no disasters.

Corinna's lover, Daniel, is a private detective & his latest case is a hard one to crack. A young woman, Lena, who works for a firm of corporate lawyers, is desperate to recover some missing papers. Lena is being bullied by her employers & it soon becomes obvious that something dodgy's going on. The search for the papers leads Daniel to the haunts of the homeless & to deciphering clues left by the mysterious Pockets, a former banker, now one of the many people living on the streets, suffering from mental illness & alcoholism.  Pockets has "filed" the missing papers somewhere safe & obviously understands their worth. He leaves clues at various locations around Melbourne & Daniel & Corinna set off on the treasure hunt. Daniel is also employed by Molly Atkins to find the son she gave up for adoption at birth. All the clues point to Molly's son being on the set or in the kitchen at Kiss the Bride.

There's always lots of plot & subplot in Kerry Greenwood's novels. But, even the plot doesn't distract me from the ever-present food. Corinna's bread is legendary as are Jason's muffins. In this book, Corinna takes on Bernie, a young pastry cook, to help out while Jason's away & the two of them create some mouth-watering treats. The catering company has a different theme for the Kiss the Bride set each day. So, on Greek day, we have spanokopita, baklava & Greek shortbread. Hungarian day means apricot cake, hundred layer cake & raspberry cream roulade. You get the idea? I could practically smell the bacon & scrambled eggs for breakfast. Then there are the medieval recipes Bernie makes out of an old cookbook she found. Lots of marzipan, spices & fruit.

I also enjoy the setting of the novels. I love the fact that I guessed a couple of the clues in Daniel's treasure hunt (the fine lady on the fine horse, for example) because I live in Melbourne & I knew exactly what statue was referred to. I don't read many novels set in Melbourne but this series & Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher detective series set in the 1920s, are a lot of fun. There's almost as much food in the Phryne books but I especially love the fact that Corinna's a baker. I love baking & as well as eating, this book made me long to bake something, anything! There are recipes in the back of the book as well.

Dead Man's Chest - Kerry Greenwood

Phryne Fisher, private detective, is taking her family (companion Dot Williams, adopted daughters Ruth & Jane & dog, Molly) to Queenscliff for the summer holidays. She arrives at the house loaned to her by anthropologist, Mr Thomas, to find the house shut up, the Johnsons (cook & butler) missing & the house ransacked. This is not the relaxing holiday Phryne had planned. However, nothing daunts Phryne Fisher. Beautiful, elegant, rich, intelligent & always beautifully dressed, Phryne is determined to get to the bottom of the mystery. Along the way, she also has to discover the identity of a phantom hair slasher, who cuts off the plaits of unsuspecting women & maybe find the treasure of Benito, the pirate rumoured to have hidden his treasure in one of the many caves on the coast near Queenscliff. Phryne also helps Detective Hugh Collins (Dot’s fiancé) from Melbourne break up a rum & tobacco smuggling operation, attends a party hosted by the local Surrealists & gives us a glimpse of Australia’s early film industry.


Phryne is the perfect fantasy figure. The series is set in 1920s Melbourne, apart from this excursion to the coast, & Phryne is the woman who has everything. She grew up poor & inherited wealth as a young woman so she appreciates what she has. She’s the perfect clothes horse, slim, elegantly proportioned with green eyes & a black Lulu bob. She drives her Hispano-Suiza with dash & handles her Beretta with deadly accuracy when required. She can also eat whatever she wants & never put on weight. She’s kind, practical, non-judgmental but doesn’t suffer fools gladly & is ruthless with evildoers.

Kerry Greenwood’s research on the period is impeccable. She wrote a thesis about the Melbourne dock workers strike in the 1920s & then used the research for the Phryne books. I’ve been on a walk through 1920s Melbourne with Kerry at a Melbourne Writers Festival some years ago & her knowledge of the architecture & history of the period is terrific. There’s still a lot of 1920s Melbourne left, the 1960s developers didn’t knock it all down. You can see most of it by just looking up above the awnings of current buildings to see the facades of the original buildings still intact. The walk ended with afternoon tea at the Windsor Hotel, which will surprise no one who’s ever read a Phryne Fisher mystery! Actually, the food is one of the great pleasures of reading Kerry Greenwood. Phryne’s adopted daughter, Ruth, wants to be a cook & is given the chance to try her skills as the Johnsons have disappeared. She’s working her way through Mrs Leyel’s The Gentle Art of Cookery & so we’re treated to luscious descriptions of egg & bacon pie, roast lamb & chutney sandwiches, strawberry gateau & impossible pie (recipe at the back of the book).

Kerry Greenwood also writes another series of mysteries set in contemporary Melbourne. Corinna Chapman is a baker who lives in an Art Deco building above her bakery, Earthly Delights. The tenants of the building, Corinna’s apprentice (who’s trying to create the perfect muffin), her cats & gorgeous lover Daniel, all bring mysteries to her door. The emphasis on food & cats makes this series even more fun, along with the familiarity of Melbourne. Corinna also hates the heat of summer & the commercialism of Christmas, so she’s a woman after my own heart! Kerry’s books have been published in the US by Poisoned Pen Press & I’d recommend them to anyone who loves a good mystery with style, elegance, cats & food.