Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries

What happens when a Sunday night crime caper takes the history of the First World War seriously?

In this episode Jessica, Chris and Angus talk about the cult Australian television series Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. We discuss class in interwar Australia, what it meant to be a conscientious objector and why it might be a mistake to admit to bribery in front of a policeman in the third of our series on representations of the First World War in television crime dramas.

References

Jessica Meyer, ‘Matthew’s Legs and Thomas’s Hand: Watching Downton Abbey as a First World War Historian’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, Dec 2018, vo. 16, No. 1 : pp. 78-93.

Kerry Greenwood, Murder and Mendelssohn (2013)

Kerry Greenwood, Murder on a Midsummer Night (2008)

Dorothy L. Sayers, the Peter Wimsey novels

P.G. Wodehouse, the Blandings novels

Helen Smith, Masculinity, Class and Same-Sex Desire in Industrial England, 1895-1957 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

Dad’s Army, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branded_(Dad%27s_Army)

Ian Whitehead, Doctors in the Great War (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2013; first published Leo Cooper, 1999).

‘Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries Concept Document’, https://www.abc.net.au/tv/phrynefisher/classroom/MissFisher_ConceptDocument.pdf

Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man (1934); The Thin Man (1934) directed by W.S. Van Dyke

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mystery episodes:

Season 1, episode 3, ‘The Green Mill Murder’
Season 1, episode 4, ‘Death at Victoria Dock’
Season 1, episode 7, ‘Murder at Montparnasse’

Season 2, episode 2, ‘Death Comes Knocking’

Season 3, episode 4, ‘Blood and Money’
Season 3, episode 5, ‘Death and Hysteria’
Season 3, episode 6, ‘Death at the Grand’
Season 3, episode 8, ‘Death Do Us Part’

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Professor of Modern British History at Leeds University. My research interests lie at the intersection of the histories of gender, particularly masculinity, medicine and warfare.

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A historian focusing on the First World War and popular representations of warfare. I received my PhD from the University of Sussex in 2013. My thesis examined relations between British and French soldiers during the First World War.

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Is a Visiting Research Fellow at Leeds University. My current research focuses on manpower and authority in Britain, starting with the First World War and running through until the end of the Second World War.