Cocaine Blues (2006)
Cocaine Blues is a 2006 phryne fisher (fictitious character) book written by Kerry Greenwood.
The Honourable Phryne Fisher has money, style, and a growing boredom with the London party circuit. So she sails for Melbourne, ostensibly to check on a friend's daughter, and lands at the Windsor Hotel with an appetite for something sharper than cocktails. Detective work finds her fast: a poisoned wife, a cocaine ring, bent policemen, and whispers of communist agitation. Kerry Greenwood opens her long-running series here, giving the flapper-era sleuth a wardrobe as considered as her nerve. The 1920s glamour is real, and so is the grime running underneath it.
A few thoughts on Cocaine Blues
Phryne fans should try Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot mysteries for the same interwar puzzle-craft, or the Maisie Dobbs novels, which put another sharp woman to work as a 1920s investigator. For the period glamour and class friction with less murder, the show Downton Abbey covers similar ground with more manners.
The screen version after you finish the books
Kerry Greenwood's first Phryne novel became a television fixture, and the Melbourne of Cocaine Blues survives the move intact: the Windsor Hotel, the frocks, the pistol in the handbag. These adaptations all begin on the page too, so you can read the source first and then let someone else's casting argue with the version in your head.
Women detectives who fund their own investigations
Phryne Fisher takes up detection because she inherited a title and a fortune and got bored of both. She answers to no client and carries no badge. These sleuths work the same way, on their own money and standing, and their cases turn on people telling them things they would never say to an inspector.
Mysteries where the period is the point
Cocaine Blues dates itself precisely: 1928, a flying lesson, a cocaine ring working the Melbourne dance halls. Greenwood gets the cut of a coat and the fare of a taxi right. These picks share that care across books, television and comics, from Chesterton's 1922 puzzles to Victorian London drawn in ink, furnishing an era instead of gesturing at it.
Cosy crime that still shows you the damage
The frocks and cocktails in Cocaine Blues sit on top of a drug trade, bent policemen and women with nowhere safe to go. Greenwood lets the glamour and the grime share a page rather than choosing one. These crime stories hold the same balance, well mannered on the surface, with harm underneath that the detective cannot tidy away.