Currently rereading… Blood And Circuses and Ruddy Gore by Kerry Greenwood

 I’m still rereading the Phryne Fisher books until I get to read the final book in the series.

This post will be about Volumes 6 and 7, Blood And Circuses and Ruddy Gore. Both were filmed for the first season of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. If you live in Australia you can watch them on the ABC app iview. They aren’t very close to the novels, but still, worth a watch. And iview is free.

In Blood And Circuses Phryne joins the circus as a trick rider, in order to solve a mystery about the circus’s recent run of bad luck.

There is also a murder, of the half man/half woman, who is killed in bed, asleep. The accused woman, a former acrobat with the circus, had, in fact, killed her abusive husband and gone to jail though she was released recently, so seems the obvious killer. Of course, she didn’t do it, and it’s up to Phryne to find the real killer.

Did I enjoy it? Yes, as usual, though not as much as the other books in the series. It may just be me. I like Phryne, but this is the one in which I think she is the Mary Sue that a friend’s wife accuses her of being. It’s interesting, though, that this is the one in which she has to be poor, and keep her mouth shut when she is groped by a baddie, in order to keep her secret.

In Ruddy Gore, Phryne is on her way to the theatre in the Melbourne CBD and takes a short cut through Little Bourke St. This is still Melbourne’s Chinatown, full of Chinese shops, but in those days people still lived there. They encounter an attack on an old woman and her grandson. Phryne manages to shoo off the attackers by yelling, “The cops!”

The young man, Lin Chung, eventually becomes her boyfriend and a regular character. His family are wealthy silk merchants. They invite her to clean up. Phryne invites him to dinner and continues on to the theatre, where there is a gala production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Ruddigore. The lead actor falls down in a faint on the stage in the middle of the performance and then his understudy also falls down. Both are taken to the hospital. One dies. The producer,Bernard Tarrant, asks Phryne to solve the mystery, although her friend policeman Jack Robinson is also working on the case. There is another mystery involving a G and S star of the Victorian era who was pretty certainly murdered during a performance of Ruddigore - and the killer is still around. 

It is written quite deliberately as a G and S operetta, complete with a long lost child. Kerry Greenwood did that quite often and enjoyed it. 

I enjoyed the book very much and I admit that the first time I read it, I didn’t pick up whodunnit. The telemovie was not very close to the novel - and Lin Chung’s grandmother runs a Chinese restaurant instead of being a silk merchant. He doesn’t become Phryne’s boyfriend, though he does appear in another episode.

I bought a copy of the novel in ebook. My local library has it in audiobook, though it’s always out dammit! 

The next book I’m rereading, Urn Burial, is an Agatha Christie tribute. More next time!