Fluffy orange lumps

There is a trick to the trite title of Death by Water, the fifteenth volume in Kerry Greenwood’s series about the hedonistic 1920s private detective Phryne Fisher. Contrary to expectations, no murder occurs for more than two hundred pages. In the meantime, the nominal plot involves the hunt for a jewel thief aboard a cruise ship bound for New Zealand, but far more attention is devoted to meals, cocktails, cigarettes, clothes, dance music, maritime scenery, anthropological chit-chat and recreational sex. Literary quotes of approximate relevance head each chapter, while ratiocination occurs as an accompaniment to life’s more sensual pleasures: ‘Phryne ate a thoughtful croissant.’

As all this suggests, Greenwood’s allegiance is firmly to the ‘cosy’ school of mystery writing. Phryne may be ‘fast’, but her adventures have little connection with the hard-boiled side of Jazz Age mythology or with bright young things dancing on the edge of the abyss. One major set piece in Death by Water involves a costume ball, and the entire novel has a slapdash fancy-dress flavour: it seems unlikely that even the most advanced of flappers would describe herself as ‘blatantly heterosexual’. The real basis for the series is its mixture of contemporary political correctness and high-camp superwoman fantasy: Phryne is somewhere between a female Bond and a youthful Auntie Mame, a democratic-minded toff who never fails to maintain a fabulously soignée appearance while solving mysteries, disarming bullies, seducing one or two men per volume and dispensing advice with the aplomb of a no-nonsense schoolteacher.