We arrived on Miss Fisher’s doorstep in a “bass-akward” kind of manner: first by the television series from Australian Broadcasting being “recommended” by the Affinity Engine in Netflix, and then discovering that there is a whole shelf of books following the Honorable Phryne Fisher through her career as Melbourne’s most discerning, delectable, sexually-active, and wealthiest female detective.

For someone who tries to write well, it’s hard to shake the idea that “more” equals “less”. When biographies report that Kerry Greenwood has written more than twenty novels, my initial reaction was that of someone typing eight hours a day, six days a week, recycling tons of characters and idea, not showing much creativity or imagination as her editor sits in the living room, waiting for pages.

In fact, with some experience behind me, I’d say that Miss Fisher stacks up pretty well with most of the classics: at least as entertaining as Agatha Christie, and miles ahead of the plain vanilla “cozy mysteries” that are being produced by the thousands to fill Kindle readers.

In case you’re unacquainted with them, “cozy mysteries” are among the oddest of our new genres. It’s murder, without much mayhem, usually in a more rural setting: diluting Death to the point where it’s such another thing to talk about when you run into someone at the post office. “Oh my...someone’s been murdered! I hadn’t heard. Will there be cake at the funeral?”

“Cozy” is easy to write, because it’s never very disturbing—you can pull characters “off the shelf” so to speak—and the narrative doesn’t need to be the least bit tight, as events move very, very slowly. The author has an entire book to fill up, and chatting (with a side of misdirection) takes up most of it.

And then we have Phryne Fisher, who—apart from the other virtues contained in these books—qualifies, for me, as one of the most interesting characters in modern fiction: what James Bond might be like, if he went on the operating table for a change of plumbing.

She’s the yin-yang symbol itself: male and female contained in the same space. The emotional distance of a man—with the full emotional spectrum of a woman. Passionate, yet cool. Analytical, yet empathetic. A crack shot who carries a gun almost everywhere, and doesn’t mind using it. Someone who has her own plane, and knows how to fly it. A woman who drives herself, and doesn’t even ask if the man who’s with her might want to take the wheel.

Ready for sexual intimacy with the right person, but never being sentimental about it—and, beyond any question, bisexual (I could never imagine Phryne passing up some bedroom action because the person in question is the “wrong” gender).

Because the narratives have been written in modern times, they include modern problems to the 1920s venues where Phryne is solving her cases, and (of course) the terrain is not the usual place—not London, or New York, or L.A. We’re in Australia: with its strange landscape, and convict-laced history. The seasons, there, are entirely wrong—and legend has it that water takes a wrong turn down a drain.

The Miss Fisher Mystery books are quite small, only about 60,000 words, but I could definitely see loading about six of them into an e-reader to pass some time away from home. You could do worse than vacationing with Phryne, her ultra-religious assistant and seamstress, Dot, and all the other voices that chime in when Miss Fisher has a case.