I'll still be a book behind, but I decided to kill 4 books with one post (or something) by writing about Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie novels all at once. I've read all four of them (Case Histories; One Good Turn; When Will There Be Good News?; and Started Early, Took My Dog) in the last 6 months and the last two in January of this year.
I started watching detective TV shows maybe 4 years ago and gradually they became the only TV shoes I could tolerate. I often half joke that I have terrible taste in television, but it's true that what I look for in TV is very different from what I look for in other entertainments. TV satisfies a certain mindless, escapist need for me. I don't like my TV to be too dark or too serious or too drawn out. I avoid programs that don't resolve in a single episode. Much of what is praised as the best television is just not for me. I like exactly the kind of detective programs that Kate Atkinson subtly derides here and there in her books: cozies set in English villages, especially if they're also period dramas. Not much gives me as much pure pleasure as a 90-minute murder-detection-resolution cycle. After a couple years of watching detective programs, I thought maybe I should give detective novels a try. I'm glad I did.
I have a much higher tolerance for dark and unresolved stories in books than I do in TV. It's a good thing because the Jackson Brodie books are, while not utterly grim, not the TV cozies I love either. (There is a BBC adaptation of the novels and I wonder if I would enjoy it; I suspect I might not -- the books are spread across several episodes apiece.) In my very limited reading within the genre, I've noticed there is a type of detective that shows up here and there who, unlike the masterful detectives of my preferred TV shows, does not have a particularly brilliant mind, but who does the grunt work of being a detective and kind of just happens to be in the right place at the right time to solve the crime. (If indeed he solves the crime at all.) Jackson Brodie is one of these. He seems to stumble into and out of most of his cases despite himself. It's not that he's a bad detective and it's not bumbling comic relief (though sometimes the absurd situations he finds himself in are laugh-inducing); if anything, this seems more realistic than the highly perceptive genius model of detective. While Brodie himself is reasonably sympathetic, it's the other characters that populate the books that I've found particularly compelling. I really enjoyed all four books, but without question my favorite was When Will There Be Good News?, which features two central characters who really drew me in: a smart, independent teenage girl who just needs a little stability in her life; and a woman with a seriously troubled childhood who has gotten her life totally together as an adult. These two - and especially their relationship with each other - kept me reading late into the night. But all the books feature compelling characters who have complicated, tender relationships among each other. When I finished the fourth book, I was very disappointed to discover there is not (yet, I hope!) another.
In a funny aside, I took a lunch break partway through writing this and after eating I went to a thrift store near my office where I sometimes go to browse during lunch. There was another woman looking at books there and she picked up a copy of One Good Turn. Of course I interjected and recommended it.
