Big Sky
Private investigator Jackson Brodie is back for a fifth time, his first outing since Started Early, Took My Dog in 2011. The book is enormously enjoyable, mainly because of Atkinson’s superb writing and her wonderful cast of characters.
Some things have changed for Jackson since the last book – for one thing, he now has a thirteen-year-old son. But some things haven’t changed: he’s still running his investigations business, though as usual he’s easily sidetracked. And he’s still yearning for Julia, who hasn’t become wife number three, even though they share a child.
Though Brodie is a colourful character, he doesn’t actually do a lot of detecting, and much of the book takes place without him. Intertwining story lines include:
A convicted pedophile who may soon get parole, and is rumored to be about to name a “Mr. Big” who was never identified as part of the pedophile ring;
Two aging performers – a foul-mouthed comic and a drag queen – who entertain tour group audiences nostalgic for the nineteen-eighties;
A group of golfing friends with a secret source of income;
A young mother with a dark background, determined to keep her daughter and stepson safe;
Two young Polish girls who think they’re coming to the UK to work in an upscale hotel;
A client who wants Jackson to keep finding additional proof that her husband is unfaithful;
A former dominatrix who’s happy to act as a honey trap, though she’s “more hornet than honey bee;”
Two sets of police officers whose separate investigations suddenly converge.
If this sounds confusing, it’s saved by Atkinson’s wonderful writing and her ability to bring characters to full life in a page or two (an ability she honed as a short-story writer before turning to novels).
She actually didn’t expect to be a writer at all. “I was a reader, that was my part in the whole book process.” Growing up in northern England, a single child of parents who ran a medical supplies shop, she was a voracious reader who later attended the University of Dundee in Scotland, where she completed a master’s degree (and near-PhD) in English literature. Two marriages and two divorces later, she was scratching a living as a single mother of two daughters when she began writing stories in her thirties. In 1988, she won the Woman's Own Short Story Award, which gave her the confidence to continue writing.
Atkinson published her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, when she was 43. It won the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 1995, much to the shock of critics who had expected an established male writer to win (Salman Rushdie was in the running). One London paper headlined the story of her award as “unknown chambermaid wins prize” (picking up one of her early jobs as a hotel cleaner).
She has now published eleven novels—many of them award-winning bestsellers—in addition to several plays and screenplays. All are unusual, quirky, often amusing and endlessly inventive. Only five of them, the Jackson Brodie series, are considered crime novels, and even they are at the “literary” end of the genre. According to a recent interview, she’s now working on two new novels. One of them features Jackson Brodie again; the other, The Line of Sight, takes place in York during the second world war.
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