But mystery readers - or thriller readers, or crime-fiction readers, however you want to characterize them - aren't a community the same way the SFF readership is. They haven't been patronized by the literary world (more than in a minor, barely-noticeable way) for two or three generations - you have to stretch back to the 1920s to get anything really juicy and nasty - and sometimes I think the self-image of the field is "regular novels, only with a death or two in them to keep from being boring."
I'm reading these books slowly and tardily - 2004's Case Histories in 2012, 2006's One Good Turn in 2013, and now, a whole decade later, 2008's When Will There Be Good News? There are three more already; one just came out this year. I'm getting further behind.
Jackson Brodie is a central character in all of the books, but they're - so far, at least - multi-viewpoint novels (Good News has four) in which Brodie is just one of the viewpoints, and not the most important or central one. He's ex-army, ex-police, working, at this point, intermittently as a private detective. The first three books are all set in and around Edinburgh; the second and third both take place in a short, compressed period of time - three to four days.
Brodie is nothing like the cliché of a fictional detective. He's not trying to solve murders, and he generally doesn't. He's neither the coldly ratiocinative expert who connects strands unexpectedly or the bull-headed wrecking machine who forces his way through events to shape them the way he wants them. He's just a guy, stuck in his own head like all Atkinson's characters, trying to do what he can where he is and unsure of what he should be doing a lot of the time.
One of the other viewpoints of Good News also returns from previous books, and looks like the kind of person you'd find in a genre mystery, if you squint enough: Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe, of the local police, who almost had a relationship with Brodie in the previous book. (But both of them have since married quickly - and we know what happens afterwards at leisure when you do something in haste.)
The other two viewpoints are a doctor with a nearly year-old baby and her "mother's helper" - Dr. Joanna Hunter and Regina "Reggie" Chase. Hunter was the sole survivor of a shocking crime in her childhood; Reggie is a smart, inquisitive teen burdened with a criminal older brother and a life full of tragic deaths.
Central to this book are two events: a disappearance and a train crash. Dr. Hunter is the one that disappears; Brodie is one of the victims of the train crash, and his life is saved afterward by Reggie. But both of those things happen a solid third of the way into the book - Good News, again, is not structured at all like a standard mystery. It's a literary novel about people's lives, in a moment of tension and danger and destruction, and it starts by setting the scenes for all four, including a lot of background and details - psychological and environmental - that I don't have the space or time (or, frankly, ability) to detail clearly here.
It is brilliant and gripping and amazing. I read it much faster than I expected, dog-earing nearly half-a-dozen pages with particularly incisive bits of writing. (I could have done that a dozen more times: Atkinson is a wondrous writer, both in her specific sentences and her larger construction.)
The best thing I can say to recommend this book is that it made me look at my shelves (where I have three other unread Atkinson books) and then look at Atkinson's website, to add everything else she's written to my "look for these books" list. I haven't done that for any author for ages. But Atkinson is fantastic, and I'm ready to read anything she writes - everything, I hope, if I can.
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