Of Swords and Parasols

I had been looking at 1900 birth noties for some reason and a lot of them were Ancient Greek names-Psyche, Irene, Iris. These ladies (the naive Psyche, Irene the Goddess of Peace and Iris the nymph of the rainbow) were far too respectable to be the sort of person I wanted my heroine to be, but then i remembered Phryne, a courtesan in Ancient greece, so beautiful that apelles used her for his Aphrodite, and so rich and notorious that she offered to rebuild the walls of thebes as long as she could put a sign on them, 'The Walls of Thebes; Ruined by time, Rebuilt by Phryne the Courtesan'. My kind of woman. Her last name is derived elaborately as a scholastic joke. She is a Fisher of Men, as all detectives are. Her name also reflects the Grail Cycle Le Roi Pecheur, the Sinner or Fisher King. I have always liked that absurd pun on Sin and Fish. And there was a street in Paris called rue du Chat qui Peche which was a good place to find a gigolo...

Kerry Greenwood on naming Phryne Fisher in the short essay "On Phryne Fisher" in A Question of Death

In the same essay, she later goes on to say that Dorothy Sayers is her favorite detective writer, and that she created phryne to be a female james Bond "with fewer clothes and better gadgets," and "I wanted to make her Simon "emplar's younger, more level-headed sister." There's a long passage that amounts to 'I kind of went FU and decided that there just needed to be a female version of the smooth and dashing hero who got laid whenever he wanted by an endless string of pretty things and had all the adventures.'