Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries author dismisses 'tramp' criticisms 'I just wish Miss Fisher wasn't such a tramp': US viewers take issue with ABC's Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries. Phryne Fisher is the playful, unmarried, lulu-bobbed lady detective of Kerry Greenwood's imagination. A woman of independent means whose first hand experience of the viciousness of The Great War drives her to live with sexual abandon. Melbourne-based author Kerry Greenwood didn't receive a single complaint when the ABC production Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries series screened on Australian television. "Not once," says Greenwood. Not even from old ladies, not even from nuns. It's the old man about town/whore distinction which I had hoped we had got past sometime in the '70s. But Phryne - brought to the small screen by actor Essie Davis - is in trouble with some conservative American viewers for her love-them-and-leave-them ways with men. What is life without a skinny dip: Essie Davis plays Miss Fisher. "I just wish that Miss Fisher wasn't such a tramp," wrote one reviewer reported on the Jezebel website. I mean she gives it away like Halloween candy. It is hard to respect some one with such little morality. The first season of the 13-episode show is streaming in the United States on Netflix to mainly glittering reviews, except for some conservative viewers who consider the devil-may-care Jazz-age heroine too promiscuous for their tastes. Scandalous was the assessment of another viewer. We cared not one iota for the main character. Sleeping around and generally being an obnoxious airhead hardly appeals to our investment in time for this trash. Greenwood has long expected the outcry but says the negative commentary comes from a place of misunderstanding and hypocrisy. From Cocaine Blues, the first of the 20-book series, Greenwood wrote Fisher as a feminist icon."When I wrote the first book female protagonists were all noir, bourbon bottle and Eat At Joe's neon signs. I wanted a hero who was perfectly self assured about every aspect of her life. Phryne's behaviour is undoubtedly scandalous. She beds who she likes and skinny dips in male company, without repercussions to her reputation. She once remarked that her friends thought her a "perfect lesbian if I didn't have this strange yen for male genitalia." As Greenwood points out, her heroine behaves with the same freedom as a male hero of the ilk of James Bond or The Saint. No one thinks their multiple lovers are indications of slutishness. Phryne does exactly as she likes, does not make false promises or break hearts, and explains to her lovers that they don't own her; which is more than the male heroes do. Greenwood says Phryne's detractors also need to understand the historical context of her behaviour. Phryne joins an all-women ambulance brigade in France during the last year of The Great War, and is decorated for courage. With all her relatives killed during war, Phryne is rich but remains beholden to her past. Her "grasping at any reliable pleasure is accurate," says Greenwood, for the roaring and soaring 1920s. Fiona Eagger produced the two series, which has sold into 120 territories worldwide including Channel 5 and the cable network Alibi in the United Kingdom, as well as American cable TV. There is public agitation for the ABC to commission a third series. Eaggers finds the series is incredibly tame and thinks the objections might lie in Phryne's casual attitude to sex, rather than what is represented on screen. We are quite decorous in what we show and like true murder mysteries there is not a lot of blood and the murders are downplayed, and it is the same for Phryne's love life - it is always hinted at. The enjoyment is in the foreplay. You never see a full-on sex scene and it's always pre or post coital. What we see on screen is quite tame compared to watching music videos. It's not the act itself, it must be do with her feminist attitudes.