Detective Inspector Jack Robinson

"You might as well call me Jack. Everyone else does."

~ Jack Robinson, Murder on the Ballarat Train, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries

Vemod is a Swedish word that is not exactly easy to translate into English. It can best be described as an underlying, longing sadness. A sadness that is actually rather positive how strangely as that sounds. The concept might not have an equivalent in English, but I still think it summarize the character of Detective Inspector Jack Robinson perfectly.

I have talked a little about Jack in most of my previous entries about Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries and the Phryne Fisher books. However, I have long felt a need to give him an entry totally on his own.

To this date I have only read four of Kerry Greenwood's books about Phryne Fisher and even though I enjoy the books just fine, I really miss the Jack of the TV series while reading. In the latest one, Death at Victoria Dock he only gets a few mentions and, unlike in the TV series, has remained pretty much in the background in the other three as well.

From Murder on the Ballarat train

There are also som major differences between the TV and book characters as well. Book-Jack is happily married with children and has much easier time accepting Phryne's meddling in police work from the very beginning. TV-Jack is far more reserved and at first thinks Phryne is a stupid socialite in need of a hobby. However, as they continue to meet at different crime scenes, he starts to respect her more. This is as far as I will take the comparison between the two. This entry will henceforth be entirely about TV-Jack because he was the one I fell in love with in the first place.

"I see a very careful man, who professes to be cynical in the face of mysteries he can't explain, and claims to have no passion in spite of a heart that runs as deep as the Pacific Ocean"

~ Phryne Fisher, Death Comes Knocking, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries

Jack is a very private man. Therefore we do not know much about his personal life or his background and we have never visited his home.The little we do know is that he was married to the Deputy Commisioner's daughter Rosie, but that their marriage got destroyed by his participation in the First World War and he tells Phryne that Rosie has been living with her sister for "quite some time". They get a divorce at the end of season one.
There is a lot to say about Rosie and Jack's relationship to the other women in his life, Concetta and last, but certainly not least Phryne. However I have noticed a tendency in the fandom on the internet to view Jack only through those relationships (Especially the one he has to Phryne.) and I do not think that is entirely fair to the character. Because of this, I will focus on him in this entry and only briefly go into his relationships.

"It'd be a tactical error to think you had me pegged just yet, Miss Fisher"

~ Jack Robinson, Death at Victoria Dock, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries

From Murder and the Maiden

In June this year, I wrote an entry in which I discussed the similarities between Phryne and the girls Astrid Lindgren (She would have turned 109 yesterday, 14th of November, by the way.) wrote about. The Astrid Lindgren parallel actually fits very well for Jack as well. He is more or less like a typical "Astrid boy". He is somewhat lonely, introverted and brooding and like them he needs to show himself worthy of the super hero title Phryne (and the "Astrid girls") have from the very beginning. The series is also extremely good at not showing all of him at once. This might be because the show is so focused on Phryne (Which it should be. It is her show!) and we get to know the other characters through her.

At first I thought he would be like so many male detectives in murder mystery franchises. Aloof and haughty and having trouble with their bosses and their women and using violence as a mean to enhance their position. But Jack is not at all like that. I actually appreciate how the series depicts him. He deals with his experiences both from his life as a policeman and from the war in a way that is quite unusual in pop-culture of today. Especially for a male character. He desperately wants to hide his emotions, but they more or less run straight off of him anyway. Nathan Page is also extremely good at showing them without saying a word. You see it in his face, usually in less than a second so you miss it if you blink. (Essie Davis, who plays Phryne, is just as good at this.)

From Dead Air

While Phryne is the super hero, Jack is totally human. He really feels compassion for both the victims and the criminals, not least shown through his special relationship with Elsie Tizzard that is revealed in Blood and Circuses. His way of dealing with violence is similarly refreshing. He does not, like for example the character Gunvald Larsson from the Swedish police film series Beck, do it to enhance his position at all. He limits it to when it is inevitable to use it to save himself or someone else and even then he seems to be unwilling to use it to kill someone.

From what I have gathered from fan discussions and fanfictions on the Internet, Jack is generally understood as "broken", but I do not really see that. I think he might have been broken when he got back to Australia after the war. He says the war changed him and he probably has suffered depression and/or PTSD. However, he is not broken when we meet him and this is actually where I think the vemod comes in because there really is a sad longing to him which is positive in nature and makes him a rather unique character. He is definitely the best depiction of how someone who has gone through a depression really is. There will always be a sadness left, but that sadness is not exactly negative and does not prevent you from having fun. I know. I have suffered from depression myself. Besides, the word vemod itself is poetic and beautiful. Just like Jack!

Jack and Phryne