Multilingual Narratives and Cultural Diversity in the Phryne Fisher Series and Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries : Representing 1920s Melbourne’s Chinese and Jewish Communities

Kerry Greenwood’s bestselling Phryne Fisher historical crime novels (1989–2022) and their acclaimed ABC television adaptation, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2012–2015), draw on historical research to portray 1920s Melbourne. Centring on the affluent private detective Phryne Fisher, the novels and television series address post–World War I social issues within the city’s culturally diverse neighbourhoods. This article examines multilingualism as a narrative strategy within Greenwood’s fiction and its television adaptation. It offers close readings of Ruddy Gore and Raisins and Almonds, novels that foreground Melbourne’s Chinese and Jewish communities. It analyses portrayals of multiculturalism across the novels and their screen adaptations and examines how popular period fiction shapes collective memory and an imagined Australian past.