Murder on a Midsummer Night – Kerry Greenwood

1929 has begun with a heat wave, particularly ferocious even for Melbourne, and Phryne Fisher’s not enjoying her first real experience with an unrelenting Antipodean summer. However nothing can faze this most poised and composed specimen of womanhood – not even the search for an illegitimate child, one of several heirs to a tidy inheritance, and not the unrelated investigation into what the police consider to be the suicide of a young man on St Kilda beach. Augustine Manifold was an antiques dealer, skilled and reputable, by all accounts, and his distraught mother does not believe he would have left her. In her quest for the truth, the redoubtable Miss Fisher glides through it all without hesitation, through “terrifying séances, ghosts, Kif smokers, the threat of human sacrifices, dubious spirit guides and maps to buried pirate treasure,” to cite the back blurb.
As always when it comes to the magnificent Ms Greenwood, my amateurish fumblings cannot convey the perfection of her prose – though perfectly accessible if read on its own, the pleasure of Murder on a Midsummer Night was considerably enhanced by my familiarity with Phryne, her extended household, and her catholic array of friends and acquaintances. It is through the sensibilities of Greenwood’s more orthodox characters – from her companion Dot, and married couple Butler and Mrs Butler – that she is able to combined both a believable period setting and attitudes comfortable for a modern reader.
Also as always, Greenwood conveys a strong sense of place (“She lived in St Kilda, I think, from what she says about going down Acland Street for cakes”) without hitting you over the head, and she has without question mastered the art of being so familiar with her mountainous research that it is threaded almost invisibly through the text.
Her descriptions are complete and detailed, seamless and interesting. For example:

Gerald Atkinson was tall and skinny, with a haughty arch to his brows which might easily have been accentuated by skilled plucking and a rosebud mouth with just a trace of lip rouge. He was dressed in a very nice tweed suit which was just a bit too new and a cravat which was just a smidgen too bright, with a stick-pin in which the diamond was just a soupcon too large. If he was not a friend of Dorothy, Phryne considered, he was a relative. That was no bar to Miss Fisher’s regard. She had many friends whose interest in young men was just as fervent as her own.

The plot was detailed, absorbing, redolent of the era, and the only criticism I have is that it was all over far too quickly. Planning her twenty-ninth birthday as Murder on a Midsummer Night opens, the action all takes place in under two weeks (her birthday is mid-January and has not occurred by novel’s end). Greenwood has been clear that Phryne will not continue past the twenties, to which she is so admirably suited, into the dowdy thirties, so while there is hope of as many as another two dozen adventures, for me each novel is tinged with the sad awareness that it could be the last. In the meantime there’s always the option of rereading Phryne’s sixteen previous excursions, and the anticipation of the fifth (though I somewhat presumptuously, or hopefully, initially typed ‘fifteenth’) Corinna novel. I have no words, except: perfection. - Alex