Phryne Fisher

This article is about Phryne Fisher. For fandom, see Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries.

Fandom
Name:	Phryne Fisher
Abbreviation(s):
Creator:	Kerry Greenwood
Date(s):
Medium:	Literature; three TV series, movie.
Country of Origin:	Australia
External Links:	Phryne Fisher at Allen & Unwin
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Fanart: Jack and Phryne by clwnprincessofcrime (Deviant Art)

Phryne Fisher's adventures were the creation of Australia author Kerry Greenwood. The writing of each novel required meticulous research and planning: "I spend three months researching and three weeks writing, but the three months also includes thinking about the book. It's finished in my subconscious before I ever write it down."

... Phryne is a hero, just like James Bond or The Saint, but with fewer product endorsements and a better class of lovers. I decided to try a female hero and made her as free as a male hero, to see what she would do. Mind you, at that time I only thought there would be two books.

I decided that if I want to write about a female hero in the 1920s, I'm going to have to give her all the advantages I can, because she has serious disadvantages in being a woman. I wasn't going to have her cowed or overawed by class, so she had to be titled. She had to be rich so nobody could make her do something for money, and she had to be bold. The class system of the time required that if you wanted to be able to go everywhere and do anything, you had to be either at the top of it or the absolute bottom of it.

About Phryne

Phryne was accidentally named after Phryne, a famous Greek courtesan who lived in the 4th century BC. At her christening, her father forgot the classical name Psyche that her parents had intended for her.

Phryne lived at 221B The Esplanade, St Kilda (in Melbourne) as an apparent fan tribute to Sherlock Holmes.

The Honourable Phryne Fisher is a ‘Lady Detective’ living in Melbourne, Australia in the late 1920s. As an historical construct, she is the embodiment of the Jazz Age liberated female but she is more than this: she is also quintessentially Australian. Fisher is unlike earlier female sleuths such as the maiden aunt (Agatha Christie’s Jane Marple) or the partner (Dorothy L. Sayers’ Harriet Vane or Dashiell Hammett’s Nora Charles). Fisher is also a counterpoint to contemporary sleuth types including the ‘screwball’ (Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum), the forensically informed (Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta) or the ‘loner’ private eye (Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone). To date there have been relatively few Australian female detectives, with one of the better-known creations, Australian author Carter Brown’s Mavis Seidlitz, being essentially an American construct.

Media Treatments

The Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries television series was filmed in and around Melbourne in 2011 and premiered on ABC1 on 24 February 2012. A second series was commissioned in August 2012, with filming beginning in February 2013 and the series airing from 6 September 2013. A third series was commissioned in June 2014 and began airing on 8 May 2015. A whole fandom has been built around this series, featuring fan networks and conventions (see Fanlore).

A film released in 2022, "Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears", continues her television adventures. This film was, in part, crowd funded by fans from around the world.

The resulting fandom drew attention from academic Sue Turnbull in 2020:

Attending a screening of Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears at Melbourne’s Sun Theatre surrounded by fans – some who have flown across the world to be here – is an experience to remember.

Miss Phryne Fisher, “that unpredictable whirlwind of a woman” as she is described in the film, has become a global fan phenomenon...

Watching the film with fans, it’s the ballroom scene that galvanises the attention. As the camera tracks around the space, I realise many of the on-screen guests are sitting around me. These are the fans who not only contributed to the successful crowd-funding campaign that raised A$733,210 from 7,763 fans and helped get the film made, but who also signed up to be extras...

As an academic with a long-standing interest in ethnographic audience research, I’m particularly interested in the stories the Miss Fisher fans tell me about their first encounter with the show, how they found like-minded others online, and how these encounters gradually gathered momentum...

The rhetoric is all about empowerment, but also the need to be unapologetically oneself, demonstrating the inestimable value of a fictional character who has found her way onto a global stage and into the hearts and minds of her devoted fans.

The TV series was redone by HBO Asia in 2020 as ""Miss S, set in Shanghai in the 1930s instead of Melbourne in the 1920s. The show was filmed in Mandarin, Miss Phryne Fisher was renamed as Su Wenli. Fan reaction to this series appears to have been enthusiastic overall but somewhat mixed..

The latest spin-off series, "Ms Fisher's Modern Murder Mysteries" (also stylised as "Ms Fisher's MODern Murder Mysteries") is an Australian television drama series which began screening on the Seven Network on 21 February 2019. It revolves around the personal and professional life of Peregrine, daughter of Phryne’s half sister Annabelle, living in Melbourne in the mid-1960s. The premise is that Peregrine inherits a fortune when the famous aunt she never knew goes missing over the highlands of New Guinea, and she sets out to become a private detective in her own right, guided by the exceptional women in The Adventuresses' Club, of which her aunt was also a member. (This last detail bears remarkable resemblance to Greenwood's founding of the Sisters in Crime organisation).

Phryne Fisher Sample Fan Fiction

• Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, Fan Fiction Net.
• Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, Squidgeworld
• Phryne/Jack fiction, Archive Of Our Own.
• Miss Fisher's MODern Murder Mysteries, Archive of Our Own.

Some Phryne Fisher fan fiction is classified as Queer het,[1] a term used to describe het romances or fanworks that are considered to not adhere to heteronormative conventions. Some queer het may be understood as a subversion or critique of heteronormativity in fiction, fandom, or fanworks. This queer perspective aligns with Phryne's sister being a lesbian, and with Greenwood's perspective of empathising with 'outsiders':

I myself am straight but not narrow, and I believe that every writer with that small outsider inside is queer and cannot escape a queer sensibility. Also, it's useful when you want to be outside reality, to look at the world through a distorting mirror, from underneath or to the side.