Phryne Fisher/YMMV

• Badass: Dr MacMillan, who in the first book manages to defeat a thug who intends to torture and possibly rape her by hitting him on the head with a washbasin as he's about to climb through the window.
• Canon Sue: Arguably, Phryne herself. If this troper had a dollar for every description of her that points out how beautiful she is...
  • Plus, she's always right, she gets away with everything, and she's incredibly superior. She does make up for it by being quite a decent person, though.
• Complete Monster: Too many.
• High Octane Nightmare Fuel: In Ruddy Gore, a weight is dropped from a large height onto the stage it was hanging above, intended to hit Phryne or the lead actor. Instead, it hits Prompt, who is crushed. Thankfully, no description is given.
  • Jane's story. She was hypnotised, she saw her grandmother commit suicide, and she was sent to a brothel- and then she saw a woman hanged on the way. Thank God Phryne rescued her.
  • Lin Chung being kidnapped by pirates.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Madame Selavy from Dead Man's Chest, who is an incredibly interesting character but does nothing important and raises a lot of questions that don't get answered. Damn it.
• What an Idiot!: Ms Prout in Away With The Fairies decides to answer the really dangerous letters sent to the magazine she works for. This sounds harmless, except that she has absolutely no knowledge about any of the things she's talking about. Combine this with her pompous morals, and her letter-answering career ends up nearly destroying a marriage, getting a woman with a very sick child sacked and indirectly leading to the suicide of a woman suffering from post-natal depression- and those are just the ones we hear about.
• Values Dissonance: Oh, boy. Given that this is set in the 1920's, there's truckloads of dissonance. Casual sexism and racism, blatant homophobia... Phryne thinks more like a modern reader than a normal woman of the 20's, but she's the exception, not the rule.
  • In Death Over Wicket, Phryne runs into several cases. Clarence Ottery says that he's a black sheep because his uni course is Arts, not Medicine, and Phryne basically thinks 'Seriously?' In another, Joss basically says that whores are cheap and worthless, and Phryne has to resist the urge to hit him because she's investigating the disappearance and possible death of Dot's sister, an ex-whore.