Boston, Back Bay Books, 2011
400 pages Fiction
The first time I read one of Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie mysteries,
I was in love. Started Early, Took My Dog is the fourth time that Jackson
Brodie has met a bunch of unique women and solved some difficult crimes related
to those women. Now that Jason Isaacs is playing Jackson Brodie on BBC, we even
know what he looks like, although Isaacs may be more handsome than I imagined
Jackson Brodie to be. Atkinson has two things going for her in the Jackson
Brodie mysteries: Jackson Brodie is a very interesting, conflicted character
and the women he runs into are feisty and colorful.
Started Early, Took My Dog is messy. Brodie is in a rather
bad state; he has been running from himself for several months even as he
searches for his ex-wife who stole all his money. He is in Leeds in Yorkshire “searching
for the lost pastoral England that was lodged in his head and his heart” when
he is hired by a woman in New Zealand to find her British mother. While he
searches for his ex-wife, he is also searching for the lost mother. It appears
that the New Zealand woman is somehow tied to a woman that may have been murdered
by the Yorkshire Ripper in the 1970s. But how does the old lady actress fit
into the puzzle? And the woman police sergeant who has just bought a little
girl from a prostitute and is running for her life?
And then there is the dog. Jackson has two children including
a teen aged daughter who has occasionally gone with her father on his
escapades, but in this book she is virtually non-existent except to be worried
over. Instead, Jackson has acquired a dog that accompanies him and on one incident
saves his life. The dog is just one more complication in an already extremely
complicated life.
Like all Atkinson mysteries, the pieces eventually fit
together, the grisly crimes are resolved, some more satisfactorily than others,
and Jackson meanders on. The beauty of Atkinson’s writing is that the
characters are just as interesting as the plotting. Jackson Brodie is a great
character and no matter how messy the book gets, Jackson seems to survive and
bumble his way to a solution. One of the best comments is about the atheistic
Jackson. “He missed God. But then who didn’t.”
If you haven’t tried any of the Jackson Brodie novels by
Kate Atkinson, it’s high time you delve into them. The Case Histories BBC
series is available on Netflix and is quite faithful to the text, although Jackson gets more air time in the television show than he does in the books.
Here are the other Jackson Brodie book titles and my reviews: Case
Histories; One
Good Turn; and When
Will There be Good News.
No comments:
Post a Comment