Blood & Circuses

 

 Blood & Circuses (1994) by Kerry Greenwood

Things are quiet at 221B The Esplanade in St. Kilda. Too quiet. All of Miss Phryne Fisher's household are off doing things and Phryne has the house to herself. And she is bored and out of sorts. There's no mystery to be solved and no beautiful young men available as a pleasant diversion. And then....her friends from the traveling circus arrive at her door. Disturbing things have been happening. A prize horse in their trick-riding act has been poisoned. Various pieces of equipment have been sabotaged. Long-standing acts are starting to think about leaving the circus. The owner of the circus has brought in the mysterious Mr. Jones who seems to have a strange hold over Mr. Farrell. Samson and the others don't like what's going on and want Phryne to "run away and join the circus" with them and try to ge tto the bottom of things. One of the trick riders has fallen and hurt her ankle and if Phryne can learn to stand on a running horse, she'll be able to come along undercover.

Meanwhile, Inspector Jack Robinson has a murder on his hands. Mr. Christopher, a hermaphrodite with the circus, has been killed in the boarding house where he stays while near St. Kilda. At first it looks like a simple case. The door was locked and the only way in or out is through a window that only a trapeze artist could have accessed. And there just happens to be a former trapeze artist in the house. And she just happens to have murdered someone before... But the constable who was first on the scene doesn't believe she did it and the evidence seems a little too pat. Before long both Jack's and Phryne's mysteries are converging and it all ends with a grand finale under the big top....well, close enough.

I've often called Phryne Fisher the grown-up's Nancy Drew. Like Nancy, she has all the money in the world to do whatever she likes--take trips, have fabulous clothes, etc. She's a super-woman who can drive a fast car as well as Mario Andretti and can fly a plane like Charles Lindbergh. If she needs to learn a new skill, then, by golly, she can--in record time. This time we have Phryne in a very adult version of the Nancy Drew title The Ringmaster's Secret. There are a number of parallels. Both young women go undercover as bareback riders to investigate circus secrets. Both wind up locked in a wild animal's cage by the bad guys. Of course, Nancy would never wind up naked in the cage. Or nearly be raped by the chief bad guy. Or recover in a tent snuggled between two of her sometime lovers. That's where the very adult part comes in.

The odd thing about this entry in the Phryne mysteries is that it takes our super-woman and in the effort to make her seem less so, Greenwood strips away a lot of what makes her heroine so good. Her confidence--in shreds at the end. Her self-reliance--apparently she never had any. This is a fish out of water story where the fish is really gasping. Phryne has always, like a cat, landed on her feet. She handles bad guys with aplomb. She knows what being without and being on her own is like (according to her back story) because she grew up poor and had to rely on herself at various points when young and in the war. And suddenly in this story she doesn't have any of that backbone in her makeup? I'm not buying it. The mystery itself is good. I liked the solution to the locked room murder. I liked the way Lizard Elsie comes up trumps--saving not only the constable at one point but Miss Parkes, the unjustly accused trapeze artist. But I can't say I like what's been done with Phryne much. Let's get her back to her usual haunts so she can be more like herself. ★★ and 1/2

First line: Mrs. Witherspoon, widow of uncertain years and theatrical background, was taking tea in her refined house for paying gentlefolk in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy.

Sergeant Terrence Grossmith was huge. His expanse of blue tunic was as wide as a tent. He had thinning brown hair and large, limpid brown eyes, which seemed to hold an expression of such placid benevolence that hardened criminals had occasionally found themselves confessing to him out of a sense of incongruity. (p. 16)

Last line: "And I'm glad to be going home."
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Deaths =  6 (one stabbed; one poisoned; one fell from height; two shot; one natural)