Murder and Mendelssohn (Phryne Fisher Mysteries, 20)

“Phryne stayed where she was, watching. Robinson admired the way she did not seem to watch; inspecting her nails, running a finger up her calf as thought to check for a run in her stocking, fussing with her hair. She looked perfectly harmless, unless you caught her eye, in which case you felt that you were stripped down to component molecules, weighed in the balance, and found wanting.”

Murder and Mendelssohn is the twentieth book in the popular Phryne Fisher series by Australian author, Kerry Greenwood. Summer, 1929, and DI Jack Robinson has come to the Hon Miss Phryne Fisher to request her unique brand of input in the case of a murdered conductor, one Hedley Tregennis. She goes with him to the Scots Church Assembly Hall to interview the members of the Melbourne Harmonic Choir, who had been rehearsing Mendelssohn’s Elijah, conducted by Tregennis. The state of the corpse indicated an angry murderer, or perhaps even two. Tregennis was not well liked, and the list of possible suspects is not short.

While at the Hall, Phryne runs into a lover from her wartime stint in the Somme: Dr John Wilson did his best to patch up victims that Phryne brought from the front in her ambulance. Now he is in Melbourne faithfully attending Rupert Sheffield, an ex-MI6 agent giving lectures on the Science of Detection. Sheffield has been the target of a murder attempt, but is sceptical of the danger: Wilson begs Phryne to establish the source of the threat.

In this instalment, Phryne again employs her minions (Jane, Ruth and Tinker), her wharfie friends, Bert and Cec, her medical friend, Dr MacMillan, her companion, Dot, and her household staff, Mr and Mrs Butler, to the best advantage. To solve her intriguing cases, Phryne joins the choir, rescues a publican’s daughter, precipitates a battle between rival criminal gangs, commissions a forgery, and is shot through her hat (drat, it was a favourite, too).

The story features a mathematician/code-breaker, an ex-gunrunner, a forger, a pianist and quite a lot of singers, an inventive poisoning and an attempted drowning. For choral enthusiasts, the (perhaps just a bit too) plentiful references to songs, music and conducting will be appealing. Certainly, this would make an excellent TV episode and perhaps Greenwood wrote it with Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries in mind. Nonetheless, an excellent read. 4.5 stars