Jackson Brodie, ex-army, ex-police, ex-private detective, is also an innocent bystander - until he becomes a murder suspect People queuing for a lunchtime show witness a road-rage incident - a near-homicidal attack which changes the lives of everyone involved. It is summer, it is the Edinburgh Festival. To Jackson Brodie, former police inspector turned private investigator, the world consists of one accounting sheet - Lost on the left, Found on the right - and the two never seem to balance. Jackson Brodie Series Collection 5 Books Set by Kate Atkinson:Ĭambridge is sweltering, during an unusually hot summer. Jackson Brodie Series Collection 5 Books Set by Kate Atkinson Description Before then, I'd never really thought I was a writer – I was just sort of pushing my way in, but I wasn't the real thing.View all Business, Office & Industrial Suppliesīaby & Toddler Bathing Equipment & AccessoriesĬollectable Religious & Ceremonial Supplies Every one of them was a pleasure, not a chore. That's why I wrote Not the End of the World (her wonderful 2002 collection of short stories] – because I knew that if I wanted to carry on being a writer, I had to find pleasure in writing again – and I love writing short stories. When I finished it, I thought, I can't write any more. "Certainly I had a really terrible time with Emotionally Weird.
"I'd quite like to go back and break out of it," she says.
Effectively, she admits, she was writing herself into a metafictional corner. By 2000, when she wrote her third one, Emotionally Weird, the effort was becoming too great. But in those first three books, she was also creating an individuated form for each novel. If you've read the rest of Atkinson's non-Jackson Brodie fiction, starting with her stunning debut, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, you can see how they mirror such playful inventiveness. One of the other characters is an elderly actress called Tilly who's got a job playing the mother of a TV detective in a series somewhat like Heartbeat in which Jackson's former partner Julia also makes a brief appearance. Brodie and another former detective bump into each other, each unaware that the other holds the key to the case they are both working on, one of them having kidnapped a child, the other having kidnapped a dog. Their investigations run on parallel tracks. In Starting Early, for example, there's not only Jackson Brodie on the case but (unknown to him) another private detective with the suspiciously similar name of Brian Jackson.
The posh word for this is metafiction, and the reason she can't just marry off Jackson to wife number three and shift him off to solve a case in, say, Tuscany is that this just wouldn't be enough. The point – and I'll drop the metaphor in a minute – is that a Kate Atkinson novel isn't bluntly direct but contains similarly skilfully controlled games within games.
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