Started Early, Took My Dog

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...

When Will There Be Good News?

I'm obviously a sucker for a title like that, even if I wasn't already a huge Kate Atkinson fan. A couple of novels ago, Kate fooled the book-buying world into believing she was a crime writer - a clever ruse since genre fiction tends to breed a devoted following and often sell more than the literary gems she was previously credited with.

This then is the third "Jackson Brodie adventure", though perhaps it would be more appropriate to call it the second "Louise Monroe adventure" as by now it's the Scottish DCI introduced in Atkinson's previous novel One Good Turn who's become the real star of this series. She's witty, she's short-tempered, she's extremely self-aware... and this time, for better or worse, she's married.

Joining Jackson and Louise in this third installment is another character I hope we'll see more of in the future, 16 year-old amateur sleuth Reggie Chase. In many ways she's the smartest cookie in the book, though not at all precocious, and a worthy addition to this dysfunctional family of detectives.

Atkinson's writing deviates from genre in two notable areas. Firstly the plotting. Although the novel begins with a gruesome murder, this isn't the crime we're charged with solving, merely an introduction to a couple of important characters. The central dramatic event is a train crash, though that's an accident not a crime. Indeed, for a large part of the book we're left wondering just what we're actually investigating. It's not so much a whodunit as a whodunwhat... though just as gripping.

Secondly, the writing. It's not formulaic, neither is it self-consciously literary. The omniscient narrative follows multiple perspectives, sometimes leaping from one character's mind to another's mid-chapter. The writing - and thinking - is extremely conversational - at times almost frustratingly colloquial. Occasionally I found myself wishing some of her characters wouldn't speak with so many cliches... not novelistic cliches, but the kinds of dull cliches we use in everyday life. It's very real, but sometimes you want your heroes to speak the way you only wish you could.

A small criticism of an otherwise hugely entertaining novel. When Will There Be Good News? As soon as Atkinson releases book 4.