Image by Anne Taintor
Sorry for a week’s absence. I’ve been in bed with Jackson Brodie, on the page and on the screen. And I like him. I like him a lot.
I’ve heard lots of great things about Kate Atkinson’s Started Early, Took My Dog, so I bought it and it sat on the shelf. I’ve had it on my shelf for ages because I did not want to read it out of sequence, but I also didn’t want to have to read the three previous books. Then Tanis MacDonald raved about book three in the sequence, and I decided to begin at the beginning and give the first book in the series a go. I’m doing a mystery reading challenge, after all.
I read Case Histories without a pencil in hand, because this was going to be just fluff, and, honestly, Nathalie, you don’t need to annotate detective fiction, but then there were bookish passages! Like this one:
Amelia didn’t want to be this prudish—she felt like someone who’d missed their way and ended up in the wrong generation. She would have been much more suited to a period with structure and rank and rules, where a button undone on a glove signaled licentiousness. She could have managed quite well living within those kinds of strictures. She had read too much James and Wharton. No one in Edith Wharton’s world really wanted to be there but Amelia would have got along fine inside an Edith Wharton novel. In fact, she could have happily lived inside any novel written before the Second World War.
And this one
They drove to Bamburgh and he took Marlee for a long walk on the beach. He kept his shoes and socks on (like an old man, like his father), but Marlee rolled up her gingham pedal-pushers and ran in and out of the waves. They didn’t bother going to look round the castle, even though he thought it had some kind of Harry Potter link that Marlee had been excited about initially. Jackson tended to close his ears to her incessant Harry Potter chatter (he had had a wizard-free childhood himself and failed to see the attraction).
T.S. Eliot (“I grow old… I grow old.”) and Harry Potter in one paragraph!
But it gets bookishly better because book Jackson may have had a wizard-free childhood, but in audiobook world, Jason Isaacs, of Lucius Malfoy fame, reads all the Jackson Brodie books.
Aaaaaaand on the BBC, Jason Isaacs IS Jackson Brodie!
Not that I’m a crazed addict or anything.
Oh, I luuuuurve Kate Atkinson. Have loved her for years. She is incredible at making detective stories into literature, and making crazy people seem normal. Also good at the literary detective story thing? Denise Mina.
Thanks, Jen. I’m off to investigate Denise Mina!
I’d second the Denise Mina recommendation – particularly the Paddy Meehan novels. The first one, Field of Blood, was also just aired on BBC but didn’t seem to me as interesting an adaptation as that of the Atkinson novels.
Also meant to say: Denise Mina has an excellent website with excerpts of her novels.
You should live over here in the UK where our leading film critic has a real ‘thing’ about Jason Issacs. He always says hello to him in every programme he does.