Kerry Greenwood Quotes

If I ever saw my muse she would be an old woman with a tight bun and spectacles poking me in the middle of the back and growling, "Wake up and write the book!

I'm concealing a lot of things. That's what a lady does.

Had she been at all used to blushing, she would have blushed, but she wasn't, so she didn't.

Phryne was getting out of the car. Dot closed her eyes. Miss Fisher was about to happen to someone again.

There are good sailors. Well, some good sailors. In a way they are ideal as husbands. They drop in every six months for a wild celebration, then they drop out again before one gets bored with their company or annoyed with by their habits.

Ice cream was reliable. Young men were not.

A young man in one’s hotel bedroom is capable of being explained, but a corpse is always a hindrance.

I have a theory that kitchens, once they reach a certain level of complexity, attract new gadgets into their orbit, like planets. Only this can account for the fact that I own two melon ballers.

... with all the sweetness of a chocolate-coated razor-blade.

He'd pull a door off its hinges rather than work out how to turn a key.

If you are not scared then there is no merit in being brave.

Her heart was beating appreciably faster, and she took more rapid breaths, but she was enjoying herself. Adventuresses are born, not made.

I believe in absolutely nothing except yeast and the inevitability of politicians.

I can’t afford to spend days in self loathing as everyone expects fat women to do. Self loathing eats your life.

Money can't buy happiness but it can vastly improve the quality of your misery.

the first Goddess, Gaia, who was the earth, wide hipped, big bellied, the womb of the human race, the nurturing breast of all humans, the opulent and voracious beginning of all things female.

No cook can ignore the opinion of a man who asks for three helpings. One is politeness, two is hunger, but three is a true and cherished compliment.

She was sensible of the fact that while there were two sets of masculine arms to fall into, and one of them her current pet, Phryne had fallen into Dot’s.

She wondered, briefly, if she was beautiful, decided she was and blew a kiss to her reflection

Truth came home one day, naked and wounded, having been beaten and cursed by the people who did not wish to hear, while his brother Falsehood went dressed in the brightest garments and feasted with every household. “What shall I do?” cried Truth to the gods. “No man wishes to hear me and all beat me and throw things at me; look, I am covered with dung.” “You are naked” said the goddess Maat, sympathetically. “No naked one can command respect. Therefore take these robes and you will walk without fear and all men will sit at your feet to hear your stories.” And she dressed Truth in Fable’s garments, and he was welcome at every house.

The world is too harsh a place to contemplate directly, without a cushion of fancy and belief.

First, a bath. I'm feeling soiled. Too much contact with cold reality, I think.

This is what 'forever' means, my dear. You don't walk into danger on your own. Not anymore.

Now we will all die. What a pity. I haven't done half the wicked things I wanted to do, and the ones I have done I haven't done anything like enough.

I always like cases when the victim's been practically begging to be killed. It means I don't have to be sorry for him.

Both had suggestive bulges in their pockets which told of either huge genitalia or trousered pistols.

Phryne was feeling most displeased with a species to which, she reminded herself, she belonged.

The young will no longer be advised by the old," she said to the hall porter. "That is because we advised them to die," said the hall porter.

One only has a few fragrant nights of spring. Store your memories for when you are old. You will enjoy them again under such a moon as this.

In here, Phryne, is the nursery. Do you like babies? Phryne laughed. No, not at all. they are not aesthetic like a puppy or a kitten. In fact, they always look drunk to me. look at that one---you'd swear he had been hitting the gin.

My own view is that everyone works too hard and too long and they ought to get out more. There isn’t time in their improverished lives to do anything creative, or even to just sit and stare, one of my favourite occupations. And how the wired-in young—never without their music, never out of touch because of mobile phones, constantly sharing everything, even pictures—are going to cope if they ever encounter solitude and silence is another thing.

Come to the jacaranda tree at seven o'clock and you will hear something to your advantage. Destroy this note.' No signature, no clue to the identity. Just what sort of heroine do you think I am? Phryne asked the air. Only a Gothic novel protagonist would receive that and say, 'Goodness, let me just slip into a low-cut white nightie and put on the highest heeled shoes I can find,' and, pausing only to burn the note, slip out of the hotel by a back exit and go forth to meet her doom in the den of the monster - to be rescued in the nick of time by the strong-jawed hero (he of the Byronic profile and the muscles rippling beneath the torn shirt). 'Oh, my dear,' Phryne spoke aloud as if to the letter-writer. 'You don't know a lot about me, do you?

Dot had discovered in herself a keen interest in diligent research of nice calm paper records, which never wept or ran away or turned nasty.

You know how I feel about pretty boys—there aren’t enough of them in the world as it is—we can’t have people wantonly removing them.

I want to find the murderer too. I don’t like having my journeys interrupted by chloroform.

Never trust a man who bites the heads off chickens is probably a good sound rule of practice.

It was always easier to genuinely praise than to try and find something nice to say about rubbish.

It took determination to be really strange. That, or absinthe before breakfast every day.

Jane read her Anatomy, occasionally raising her eyes from a diagram to consider any human within sight in a dissecting sort of way which, Dot said, gave her the willies.

Lust was a reliable emotion, but greed was altogether simpler to satisfy and you got to keep your clothes on.

We learn love from the people who love us.

And they need not cause you grief. As my Highland grandmother said—and she had the Sight—“Tis not the dead ye have to be concerned about! Beware of the Living!” And she was a wise woman. The dead are beyond your help or mine, poor things. But the living need us. Thirty souls at the least, Phryne, are still on that island to praise God who might now be angels—or devils.

Phryne looked at a large statue of St. Joseph, for whom she had always had an admiration. It can’t have been easy, managing a girl with an inexplicable pregnancy. But he had accepted the word of the Lord and not put her away. Later generations had not been so forgiving.

Dot wondered how she was to mention Phryne’s habit of strewing her boudoir with beautiful naked young men. She could not think of a method of introducing the subject and decided to leave it to Phryne to cope with.

Conversation is a minefield until you learn the conventions, Jane dear.’ ‘I’ll never learn all the rules,’ muttered Jane. ‘Yes, you will,’ said Phryne. ‘Then you can bend them. The best advice I would give you is, “If under attack, cause a diversion”.’ ‘A diversion?’ ‘Yes, trip over the dog, spill a glass of wine on your attacker, burst into song, challenge your attacker to a duel. And the angrier you get, the lower your voice should be. Never shout unless you are shouting “Fire!

And is it any wonder that the poor woman broke out into fairies when she had been deprived of any fiction in her youth?

She was always over the horizon, chasing stars.

His voice was heavy with Slavic fatalism.

This was cheering. The real world was still there, it still contained puppies being puppies and cats being cats.

She looked as plump and self-confident as the city pigeons outside, and as sure of her place.

platypuses irresistible proof that God likes a joke as much as anyone else. ‘A platypus is intrinsically much less likely than a unicorn or a sea serpent.

You've been making a regular habit of flinging yourself in front of bullets," she remarked amiably. "It's really not a good custom. Curb this tendency to self-immolation.

Miss? Miss Phryne? Are you all right?’ ‘Come in, Dot. I’m fine. Some son of unmarried parents just tried to kidnap me.’ ‘What did you do with the body, Miss?

Money can’t buy happiness but it can vastly improve the quality of your misery.

I gave chase, and he took a shot at me, so I did the only thing I could in the circumstances…. I stabbed him in the shoulder.

Even the reeking dark in the lion's cage seemed precious and infinitely preferable to whatever lay beyond. She would go out like the flame of a candle. Where does the candle flame go when the candle is blown out? She laid her painted face against the iron bars and bared her teeth at death.

One can look at a plumber, a labourer, and say without a great sense of irony, 'He is a man, capable of the same heroism as Admiral Nelson or Saint Francis of Assisi.' But no one looks at a woman and says, 'She is a woman, she is capable of the same heroism as Lady Godiva or Anne Askew.' Our heroines are separated from us. So instead of trying to make Man accept us as daughters of heroism, we must raise all women to the level of heroines.

Things accumulated in purses. Unless they were deliberately unloaded and all contents examined for utility occasionally, one could find oneself transporting around in one's daily life three lipstick cases with just a crumb of lipstick left, an old eyebrow pencil sharpener without a blade, pieces of defunct watch, odd earrings, handkerchiefs (three crumpled, one uncrumpled), two grubby powder puffs, bent hairpins, patterns of ribbon to be matched, a cigarette lighter without fuel (and two with fuel), a spark plug, some papers of Bex and a sprinkling of loose white aspirin, eleven train tickets (the return half of which had not been given up), four tram tickets, cinema and theatre stubs, seven pence three farthings in loose change and the mandatory throat lozenge stuck to the lining. At least, those had been the extra contents of Phyrne's bag the last time Dot had turned it out.

I remind my American readers that biscuits in England and Australia are crispy flat things such as you call cookies, and the soft doughy things you call biscuits are what we call scones. And they say we speak the same language…

Amazement could go no further. If Phryne had ridden in on a unicorn he would merely have remarked on its elegant hocks and golden horn and suggested that she enter it weight for age at Felmington. Well, no, not a unicorn. Not Phryne. A dragon, perhaps. He was sure that she could tame a dragon.

She smiled brightly on Mrs. West. "Who's your dressmaker, Mrs. West?" she asked, with a view to avoiding the woman all costs. Such extremes of fashion as the purple shift dress which Mrs. West was almost wearing was not for Phryne. She preferred her personality to supply the outrageous edge to her appearance, not her exposed bosom.

Don’t be silly, Phryne, I’m an—’ ‘Invert?’ said Phryne. ‘Of course you are.’ She said this as though he had just claimed to have blue eyes, as something utterly ordinary. ‘And that means,’ John persisted, ‘that I am a sinner.’ ‘Rubbish,’ said Phryne sharply. ‘No one can help whom they love. I am positive that your God doesn’t care a fig.

My head throbbed and my mouth tasted like incontinent parrots had roosted there overnight. I

We took the peaches to bed. It is always nice to have someone else to lick the peach juice off your breast.

She restored herself with a cocktail and an excellent lobster mayonnaise. Phryne was devoted to lobster mayonnaise, with cucumbers.

She dropped on his chest with both knees and vengefully banged his head on the floor, once to knock him out and twice because it made her feel better.

I have a theory that kitchens, once they reach a certain level of complexity, attract new gadgets into their orbit, like planets.

Lindsay was treated likewise by Mr. Butler, who washed his face as though he was five years old and still unreliable with chocolate.

The Colonel was far too firmly married and full of military honours to be a threat to Phryne’s virtue, or what remained of it, so she agreed.

Bert was short and stout. Cec was tall and lanky. Between them, there was nothing that they could not reach.

Ruth did not approve of young men. So noisy.

The butterfly danced on the flower.

nothing like a few days of people telling you that you are mad and deluded when you know that you are telling the truth to turn the brain.

Phryne opened her book and sipped her lemonade. Agatha Christie. What a plotter. Phryne wished briefly that the real world was so amenable to being solved. ***

Phryne always existed as a still, self-possessed point in a maelstrom. Usually she had created the maelstrom herself.

Good morning, Meroe,' I said, dusting uselessly at my tracksuit pants. 'Might I interest you in today's special, pre-floured kitten?

If she's a flapper," mused the sergeant, wiping Passionate Rouge lipstick off his blameless mouth, "then I'm all for 'em, and I don't care what Mum says.

She had always found platypuses irresistible proof that God likes a joke as much as anyone else.

Phryne had defences against almost any argument, but not against two pretty young men at her feet. Very decorative they were and she might have uses for them.

not the dead ye have to be concerned about! Beware of the Living!

Phryne read a detective story, frequently going back because she suddenly found herself reading a conversation between two characters she had not met before—

Narrative has its prerogatives and I am not going to spoil a good story or the fairies may not give me any new ones.

They are not aesthetic like a puppy or a kitten. In fact, they always look drunk to me. Look at that one—you’d swear he had been hitting the gin.

I don't like the idea of being killed by fools. I shall have to ensure that this does not happen.

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants: it is the creed of slaves. William Pitt Speech to the House of Commons, 1783

the folly of men makes me seriously angry.

The Albion was a spacious pub, built in the days when a public house with any pretensions to gentility had to have fourteen foot ceilings, brass taps and a polished wooden bar you skate down. ... Bert, in his reflective moments, considered that if heaven didn't have a well-appointed pub where a man could sit down over a beer for a yarn with the other angels, then he didn't want to go there.

My dear, the furniture is all castoffs. No point in having good furniture if you have children. One would be forever telling them not to bounce on the couch. Too fatiguing for me and too irritating for them.

One invited artists to social events, but only for the pleasure of their company. To invite singers or dancers to perform for their supper was inexpressively vulgar, and deserved a prompt and stinging rebuke.

To Hell with all racialists,' she said aloud. 'And to Hell with eugenics, degenerate heredity, miscegenation and frauds who pile up skulls like a conqueror as well. May they choke on their bones.' A passing gentleman boggled at her and crossed to the other side of La Trobe Street. 'There is no place for them in the Kingdom of Heaven,' she added, rolling the phrase over her tongue and filing it for future reference.

If you repose your trust in anything, Mr. Collins, you can rely on her. She may whisk you in the night as on a broom and frighten the wits out of you, but what she swears to do, she will do. And she is very fond of her maid.

His dad had always told him that the red-faced were blusterers, not to be taken seriously. 'But if you see a bloke who's pale and shaking, son,' Bert's father had instructed, 'then run like blazes, because he might flamin' kill you.

Another object lesson of why humans should have stayed in trees, where they could not behave in such an idiotic way. Or possibly we should never have emerged from the sea. Evolution, Phryne sometimes thought, had a long way to go before the Homo became even close to Sapiens.

Tinker wrote neatly, though his spelling was not good, Ruth's recipes would never fail for confusion between 'add sugar' and 'seethe', but Jane's writing looked like an intoxicated inky spider had staggered across the page on the way to the bar for another drink. Which it really didn't need.

Miss Phryne Fisher. Investigations. 221B, The Esplanade, St Kilda,’ read Bunji. ‘You becoming a private Dick, eh? What larks! And what luck about the address.’ ‘It wasn’t luck, I just added a B to 221. I bought the house for the number. You must drop in and see me, Bunji. Now come upstairs and we’ll find you a gown.

All this display, while the working classes were pinched beyond bearing; it was not wise, or tasteful: it smacked of ostentatious wealth. The Europe from which Phryne had lately come was impoverished, even the nobility; and was keeping its head down, still shocked by the Russian revolution. It had become fashionable to make no display; understatement had become most stylish.

Robinson had long mastered the art of coming instantly awake, a skill which had proved invaluable when his children were young. He could be out of his bed, supplying nutriment, water, or a story, before his wife turned over in her sleep. He attributed his long and happy marriage to the fact that unlike most mothers, his wife got to sleep through the night when he was at home.

They had known that it would happen. Yet they had not prevented it. Their world had been overused, abused, their forests logged, their precious fossil fuels wasted, their rich obscenely wealthy, their poor reduced to beggary. They had been powerful enough to put up the satellites, they had plated the landscape with their roads, crisscrossed it with their machines. And now where were they?

So it was that Phryne acquired a skimpy costume of Fugi cotton, with fringes, in a blinding shade of pink known colloquially as ‘baby’s bottom’, a pair of near-kid boots with two-inch heels, an evening bag fringed and beaded to within an inch of complete inutility, stockings in peach, and a dreadful cloche hat with a drunken brim in electric blue plush. Her method in choosing these garments was simple. Anything at which Dot exclaimed, ‘Oh, no, Miss!’ she bought.

Leviticus was a series of rules for a nomadic desert-dwelling culture, where it was sensible not to eat bacteria-enhanced shellfish or terrine of unclean creeping things, where you needed to isolate people who might have leprosy, granted. But consider: if you wish to condemn yourself to hell for Leviticus 18:22, then you need to carry out all the rest of the laws—stoning blasphemers, buying foreign slaves, killing witches, making burnt offerings, and slaying those who twist thread of two types, which

1/2 cup plain flour 1 cup caster sugar 3/4 cup desiccated coconut 4 eggs vanilla 125 g butter, melted 1/2 cup flaked almonds 1 cup milk Grease a deep pie dish and preheat the oven to 180 degrees. Put all the ingredients except half the almonds and the milk in a bowl and mix well, then add the milk slowly and beat until you get a cake batter. Pour it into the pie dish, top with the with rest of the almonds. Bake for about 35 minutes. It miraculously turns itself into a spongy sort of layered coconut cake, lovely with stewed fruit and cream.

Oh wondrous,' murmured Lin Chung. 'Oh, water, mistress of earth, valley spirit, eternal feminine!' 'Taoism again?' Phryne leaned close to hear what he was whispering. 'From the "Tao Te Ching." The old Master should have seen this. All made by water, the female, cold, moon principle.' 'Yin,' said Phryne. 'This is the womb of the earth.' 'Indeed.' He took her hand. 'Completely foreign to all male, hot, sun creatures.' 'Like you?' 'Like me. Yang can only admire and tremble.' 'Come along.' She led him into the centre of the huge space. 'We don't want to get lost in the earthmother's insides.

Cold leek and potato soup. Little pastry boats filled with minced chicken or fish in a white sauce. A large green salad, a tomato and spring onion salad, a cold roast of beef with horseradish or port wine jelly to taste, cold roasted chickens with sage and onion stuffing, with a variety of crisp cold vegetables, each with their proper sauces. Fruit salad. A marmalade-filled roulade with slices of sugared oranges and crème Chantilly which was even now rolling in its damp tea towel as though there were no such things as culinary accidents in the world. Cheeses and fruits and coffee or tea.

When you see a rich man’s wife shaking her head over the thriftlessness of the poor because they do not save, pity the lady’s ignorance; but do not irritate the poor by repeating her nonsense to them. —George Bernard Shaw The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism

What have you got against Germans? The War’s over, you know.

Laws grind the poor And rich men rule the law. Oliver Goldsmith, ‘The Traveller

It would be a relief to know that my mother was suffering from loss and terrible grief, not from…’ She had no need to go on. Terrible grief was not inherited. Madness and melancholia were.

Jane bit her lip. ‘You’re thinking about Mrs. Behan, aren’t you?’ she asked. ‘I did apologise.’ ‘I know, and that the question of the real colour of her hair was only to be expected if one insists on dyeing grey-brown hair that very metallic shade of red. But it’s a known middle-class fact that ladies do not dye their hair. Only actresses and prostitutes dye their hair.

Mr. Butler poured the wine, a straw-coloured hock from South Australia, where the vines had been tended in German, which made them pay attention and get on with growing and producing Rhine quality wine, alsbalt!

of course, and then the princes and the royal dukes. Then ordinary dukes. Then we have marquess and marchioness, earl and countess, viscount and viscountess, baron and baroness, all of whom are addressed as my lord and my lady, then baronets and knights, called Sir, whose ladies are just called Lady. That is why my friend is called Lady Alice and Phryne

schadenfreude,

Phryne spent a blameless evening reading The Winter’s Tale with Ruth, who was still convinced that Shakespeare could bear translation. ‘Why does he take so long to say anything?’ ‘The Elizabethan stage had no scenes and only hand-props. His actors had to create the scene, as well as the action. Look how cleverly he has leafed the innocent conversation of the Queen and Polixenes with the King’s own jealous thoughts. It works very well onstage, I promise. We

I can’t afford to spend days in self loathing as everyone expects fat women to do. Self loathing eats your life. Being fat isn’t my fault or even my sin, despite what all those TV ads say.

Miss Jones was the sort of person who is concealed, like the nun in the foundation, in every organisation which does Good Works. Patient, dogged, meticulous, vastly overworked, unpaid and completely unappreciated, she finds, files, calls, arranges, soothes and ameliorates papers, contracts, tradesmen, repairs, hurt feelings and Very Important People. No one notices her until God finally calls her home or she quits to look after her aged parents, when the whole edifice instantly falls astonished to the ground.

Dot always felt that picnics were best enjoyed inside a nice house with tables and chairs and a reliable stone flagged floor.

adamant that the possession of pretty clothes was the second-best sustainer of a young woman’s morale in the world.

She had put on her lounging robe, of a dramatic oriental pattern of green and gold, an outfit not to be sprung suddenly on invalids or those of nervous tendencies

She had met women of this cast of mind before—the clingers, fragile and utterly ruthless, who wore down friend after friend with their emotional demands, always ill and exhausted and badly treated, but still retaining enough energy to scream reproaches at the retreating friend as she fled, guilt-stricken, down the hall. And the next week to replace that friend—always female—with another. Phryne recognized Mrs Andrews as an emotional trap, and had no choice but to throw herself in.

Trombone players have a terrible thirst,’ he explained. ‘You could blow out your soul in a trombone.

Phryne, who was not very shockable, was shocked. She hoped that better obsequies would be spoken over her own corpse.

It was a cold winter’s day in St Kilda, and Mrs Ragnell was wrapped up so tightly in furs and a sense of personal grievance that she resembled a polar bear with a hangover.

Thank you, Matthew.’ Phryne inclined her chin towards him. ‘And just so you know, if you ever go anywhere near Jean again, I will hunt you down with a blunt knife and carve my initials in your liver. Good day!’ ***

Charlie’s a bit older—maybe twenty-one?—and he’s a bit fresh with us girls. He makes rude comments.’ ‘Suggestive remarks?’ ‘Yes. But I slap him down. Helen just blushes and ignores him. She’s polite. I’m not.’ ‘Good for you, Janet.

The journey homewards in Phryne’s Hispano-Suiza was no more sprightly than usual and Dot contrived to survive it, as was her wont, by keeping her eyes shut and praying unobtrusively.

The wages of sin is death, he reckons.’ ‘So is the salary of virtue,’ murmured Phryne. ‘And at least the wicked have a good time.

Lucy wailed and tore her hair, an act which Phryne had never actually seen before.

Several voices called out suggestions. Phryne replied so indelicately that there was another silence. Not even the dock women swore like that.

She broke my heart,’ he muttered, slumping into his chair. ‘You should never entrust your heart, or other important organs, to anyone with that shade of hair or those blue eyes,’ said Phryne unsympathetically

Ubi est liber? she wrote, pinned back the notice and went home to read Malory, a prospect which did not please.

Extended study of medieval verse, thought Phryne at breakfast, produces a hangover almost as bad as that obtained by drinking absinthe cocktails.

Several students were lying at ease on the grass, and some hardy souls were reading, though most appeared to be absorbing literature by the osmosis method, which involved resting one’s head on the text and hoping that some of the knowledge would seep through into the sleeping skull.

Miss Fisher, what is this all about?’ demanded Hoskins, who had never approved of women as a sex and particularly disliked excitable ones. ‘Why the ladder?

Let me go or I’ll break your arm,’ she advised him. ‘Goodnight, Mr Clarke.’ She did not necessarily wait until her own door was closed before she added, ‘And good riddance!

My, Phryne, what a large car, and so very red! When I was a gel, I would have been considered fast for driving in it.’ She hopped into the car with delight. ‘But now I’m old, I can be as fast as I like, and I do find it refreshing

Phryne was interested in the colour of his face—a glowing purple—but reflected that it clashed lamentably with her gown.

My dear girl, revenge is always sweet but it is not generally profitable

She sipped her glass of burgundy and said, ‘Will, old thing, I am enjoying myself and all that, but what do you want to tell me? Can we get it over with, so that we can devote all of our attention to the food?

But you do not know anything about me,’ observed Phryne in a clear, carrying voice as cold as one of Brenton’s blizzards. ‘Moderate your tone and mind your manners.

The General bolted his serving, choked, and fell balletically from his chair, which crashed to the floor on top of him. It was the most interesting thing he had done all evening.

I don’t know what you think you can overhear on this balcony,’ said Phryne, walking away from Lilith and pausing with her hand on the doorknob, ‘but I didn’t hear a thing.

Those born to wealth—as she had most emphatically not been—always seemed to be looking over their shoulders, fearing to be replaced by someone richer. It was very tiresome.

Not for the first time, Phryne wondered if Lindsay ever listened to himself.

He had another diamond on his left hand, big enough to choke a parrot.

Both men looked at Phryne solemnly. She repressed a laugh. The Archbishop continued.

The adulation that men gave to football was quite beyond Phryne. It seemed to equal and surpass the delight she herself took in food, sleep, intellectual puzzles, clothes, and beautiful young men. Odd.

Granted that it was indecent, have you the right to judge other men’s sins? Has Jock McHale no free will? Can he not be allowed for his salvation to turn away from the hat, and have you not, by stealing it, removed every chance of such renunciation from him? Is that just?

And you were going to remove Arthur Johnson? Or were you just doing an Edgar Allan Poe on him and walling him up alive?

Thanks,’ he muttered. ‘You’re a very clever sheila.’ Phryne took the compliment as it was meant. After all, she was a very clever sheila.

She blossomed from the moment I wrote the first line of Cocaine Blues, and after the first five chapters, I had no further control over her. I feel like I discovered Phryne, rather than invented her.

The ideal state for the reader is one where she trusts the writer to tell her everything she needs to know.

Other writers have a young and beautiful muse who descends in fire to inspire them. If I ever saw my muse she would be an old woman with a tight bun and spectacles poking me in the middle of the back and growling, ‘Wake up and write the book!’, and I always do.

To those readers who have told me they still prefer the books, I have agreed. So do I. Yet the TV series and the movie are a delight. Phryne remains Phryne. Essie Davis IS Phryne: magnificent in her sublime self-assurance. But my novels and these stories are firmly set in the world of Book Phryne, and this will continue to be the case.

Yes?’ Phryne was beginning to dislike her unwanted guest so much that she was hoping he would choke on his whisky, even though it was not the good whisky.

Good. Come up and see m’wife, will you? She’s upset.’ *** It was possible to gauge the degree of upset from the sobbing and wailing which was apparent in the hall.

It's a good idea, generally, not to offend women with that shade of Titian hair,' mused Phryne.

syringe,

surpassing otherness, immensely attractive, supremely alive and shining from head to heel.

excrescence!

It was a cold winter's day in St. Kilda, and Mrs. Ragnell was wrapped up so tightly in furs and a sense of personal grievance that she resembled a polar bear with a hangover.

ONE As from the pow’r of Sacred Lays The Spheres began to move; And sung the great Creator’s praise

He could pass off the inferior bottles on tables seven and four. Table seven knew nothing of wine, sending back a bottle of Riesling as "corked" because it had bits of cork in it, the imbeciles. Table four had gulped down a very special old pale brandy as though it was common wood alcohol, which was probably what they had been drinking because they had said that his brandy lacked bite. They deserved inferior burgundy. The bottles that had been stored too close to the stove might have enough bite by now for table four. A wine waiter's revenge may be long in coming, but it arrives in the end.

Padre always told me me language was sulphurous.

Her face was white, her eyes blazed like emeralds, and no one who saw her had any intention of saying anything but 'Immediately' to anything she ordered.

They say that drowning is an easy death, once you stop trying to breathe.

When you see a rich man’s wife shaking her head over the thriftlessness of the poor because they do not save, pity the lady’s ignorance; but do not irritate the poor by repeating her nonsense to them. George Bernard Shaw The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism

Both of them were as athletic and as sleek as otters.

Champagne,’ she added to the hovering wine waiter. ‘The Widow ’23.

encountering

Pity he had few brains and very little style. She was wondering why no scientist had yet invented social skills in an injectable form when a sharp voice cut through her thoughts.

I ate a rough country terrine made of truffled pork with thyme and forgot about talking.

I made a jelly with gelatine, ginger syrup and pineapple juice. I made a crème anglaise with three eggs. I whipped a lot of cream. I chopped glacé ginger.

The only way to win this cat-and-mouse game, as the Cat said in Red Dwarf, was not to be the mouse.

And enthusiasm should not be quashed,’ Daniel told me, returning the kiss with compound interest.

I have a theory that all kitchens, if sufficiently occupied and loved, grow their own appliances.

moments of perfect peace are rare and to be relished. We sat and savoured. The purring of the cat, th

Get involved with humanity and you find yourself morally compromised,’ he said, unencouragingly.

Some ignorance is invincible.

What an unprepossessing thing, she thought, to see the up-jumped social-climbing middle class in terror of its position.

When you see a rich man’s wife shaking her head over the thriftlessness of the poor because they do not save, pity the lady’s ignorance; but do not irritate the poor by repeating her nonsense to them. George Bernard Shaw The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism

country that doesn’t grow its own wine grapes has no claim to civilisation.

At that moment there came a fast, unrepeatable grass-green flash before the gold and rose of sunrise coloured the sky. Phryne blew the sun a kiss, and returned to her cabin.

Phyrne leaned on the ship's rail, listening to the sea-gulls announcing that land was near, and waited for the first hint of sunrise. She had put on her lounging robe, of a dramatic oriental pattern of green and gold, an outfit not to be sprung suddenly on invalids or those of nervous tendencies-and she was rather glad that there was no one on deck to be astonished. It was five o'clock in the morning.

Epigraph But man, proud man, Drest in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he’s most assured, His glassy essence, like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before high Heaven, As would make the angels weep. —William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

Things accumulated in purses. Unless they were deliberately unloaded and all contents examined for utility occasionally, one could find oneself transporting around in one’s daily life three lipstick cases each with just a crumb of lipstick left, an old eyebrow pencil sharpener without a blade, pieces of defunct watch, odd earrings, handkerchiefs (three crumpled, one uncrumpled), two grubby powder puffs, bent hairpins, patterns of ribbon to be matched, a cigarette lighter without fuel (and two with fuel), a spark plug, some papers of Bex and a sprinkling of loose white aspirin, eleven train tickets (the return half of which had not been given up), four tram tickets, cinema and theatre stubs, seven`pence three farthings in loose change and the manda-tory throat lozenge stuck to the lining. At least, those had been the extra contents of Phryne’s bag the last time Dot had turned it out. The

She attributed this to having got drunk for the first time at the age of fifteen at a dormy feast on cheap sweet sherry; the memory of that hangover would have caused a girl with less courage to swear off alcohol for life.

A horsehair sofa of uncompromising firmness sat next to two straight-backed, hard-seated chairs.

Locus tristis et palustris,

Sleeping children gained weight according to the depth of their sleep.

But he would only spend it on drink! You know what the working classes are!’ ‘Indeed, ma’am, and why should he not spend it on drink? Would you deprive the poor, whose lives are bad and miserable and comfortless enough, of the solace of a little relief from grinding poverty?

Plump pink prawns studded the seafood aspic as thickly as daisies in a springtime meadow.

The sermon passed into the general confession, and Phryne admitted with perfect frankness that she had done those things which she ought not to have done and left undone those things which she ought to have done.

Phryne escaped from the babble to go outside and scan the ground in front of the broken window.

You broke the window, Bobby, and you pinched the necklace. Do you want to confess or shall I tell you how you did it?

The rooming house in Carlton where they both lived presently lodged three cats and two dogs which had all been found in extremis and nursed back to aggressive, barking, scratching health by his partner.

I looked over Jordan, and what did I see? Coming for to carry me home A band of Angels coming after me Coming for to carry me home.

Phryne watched as a male chest was bared by skilled hands, to be mouthed and kissed by… Another man.

The difficulty, my asclepid, is not to govern people, but to make them govern themselves,

He looked like a kobold who had just been told that he was mythical.

Her Beretta was holstered in her garter worn high on her thigh, under the shapeless blue dress. She had donned shoes in which she could run. The high heels had done their work and could be presented to the poor, assuming that they wanted to court a broken ankle along with their other problems. Along her forearm, covered by the loose sleeve, her throwing knife was strapped. Phryne, as a helpless victim, was a complete failure.

Piracy is a lot of fun; you should try it.