READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

  The author’s gift for memorable openings is recalled in ‘The Museum of Innocence”, where the two lovers of the story are first introduced in the middle of the act of lovemaking, an extended erotic description that infuses the reader’s thoughts for the rest of the novel, in the expectation of when will this happen again.   ‘My Name is Red’ employs an equally remarkable device to take hold of the reader’s attention and keep it there: the reader listens to a story told by a dead person. And not just any dead person, but a fresh corpse, the murdered man at the centre of the story, speaking now from where his body has been thrown at the bottom of a well.   The whole novel is spoken in the voices of different characters, living and dead, as well as unexpected voices like a dog, or a tree in a picture-book. Such variety of voices keeps the reader alert to what might happen next, while enabling a decameron of perspectives about the late 16 th century world of Constantinopl...

    Kerry Greenwood’s knowledge of church ways and the Anglican Province of Victoria a century ago are marvellously, if quirkily at times, on show in her posthumously published Phryne Fisher mystery, ‘Murder in the Cathedral’. The stylish socialite detective has been invited by her old friend Lionel Watkins to attend his installation as Bishop of Bendigo. For this reason, we learn from Miss Fisher that “I’m not much of a believer myself, but I was brought up in the Church of England. It is the religion of the Great Compromise. It is above all a creed founded on the principle that murdering each other on points of doctrine is something that only foreigners do.” This confession of faith, if you will, is basis for her opinion, shared with the investigating constabulary, that “every church has its awkward moments, but clergymen and organists don’t go around killing each other because they have guilty secrets.” She works by her own process of elimination, nearly always leaving offi...