I've not been watching the new Case Studies TV series starring Jason Isaacs as Kate Atkinson's accidental detective Jackson Brodie... mainly because I enjoy the books so much, and couldn't imagine the most successful elements of Atkinson's writing translating well to TV. Unlike the majority of TV shows adapted from crime novels, Atkinson's stories are never about the plot. They're about character, about history, and about writing.
Take her latest, with the sublime title of Started Early, Took My Dog. There is plot here. A mystery gradually unfolds about a crime that took place many years earlier. Jackson's been hired to trace the parentage of a New Zealand woman who was adopted as a child, and his investigations lead him back to his home city of Leeds. Adoption is a recurring theme - another character, a former policewoman called Tracy, buys a child from a local prostitute to give the little girl a better future, while even Jackson becomes an adoptive parent, of sorts, when he liberates a small dog from its thuggish owner (the dog later repays Jackson by saving his life). As with all great mystery novels, there's twists and misdirection aplenty. There's also - typical of Atkinson, though anathema to many thriller writers - huge dollops of coincidence and serendipty. Yet none of this is all that important. It's all about the writing.
Atkinson writes wonderfully chatty, meandering prose that feels at times like being caught on a bus with an old woman nattering away in the seat beside you. Yet there's so much truth contained within her stories - the kind of everyday details that grant us keen insight into the characters she creates, and make the world they inhabit as real as the one outside your window. And she's given us a unique hero in Jackson Brodie. More than just a reluctant detective, in many ways he's a reluctant human being. He wanders round the country making little effort to solve the mysteries he's presented with, stumbling across clues, very occasionally connecting with someone else (but usually ending up disappointed), living out of Holiday Inns and B&Bs, getting into scrapes, eventually coming up with answers. At least now he's got a dog to keep him company...
