Case Histories

Three cold cases arrive at Jackson Brodie's door: a three-year-old who vanished from a garden tent in 1970, a young woman killed in her father's office in 1994, and a woman who killed her husband with an axe in 1979.

None is connected to the others. Brodie, recently divorced and disliking his work, takes all three.

Three unrelated cold cases in one week, and a detective who would rather be doing anything else.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The novel opens with three self-contained prologues, one per case, each establishing a family before the loss, and then moves to the present.

The design means the reader carries three sets of grief into an investigation that the characters experience separately, and the accumulation is the book's method.

Atkinson is uninterested in detection. Two of the three cases are resolved by coincidence or by someone simply telling Brodie the answer.

The refusal is deliberate and is the most common objection to the book from readers arriving from conventional crime fiction. The solutions are not the point and are handled almost carelessly.

The actual subject is what happens to a family after a loss: the siblings who stop speaking, the parent who cannot stop, the one who leaves and the one who stays.

Atkinson is exceptionally good on this, and the long-term consequence material is considerably better than anything in the investigation.

He is ex-army, ex-police, divorced, worrying about his daughter, and constitutionally unable to leave things alone.

He is more a device for connecting the stories than a protagonist in his own right in this first book, and Atkinson develops him considerably across the series. Atkinson also gives him a dead sister, which supplies his motivation economically and is the one piece of conventional detective backstory she permits herself.

The novel uses chance encounters and improbable connections deliberately and frequently, and one late development is entirely unmotivated.

Atkinson's position is that coincidence is how lives actually intersect, and the reader's tolerance for this determines their response to the whole book. She has also defended the technique in interviews, arguing that crime fiction's insistence on causality is the artificial position rather than the realistic one.

It is genuinely funny, particularly about academic Cambridge, about lawyers, and about a deranged cat-keeping client who appears intermittently.

The humour sits directly against the grief material and the combination is the novel's most distinctive quality. Atkinson also writes children extremely well, and the scenes involving Brodie's daughter are among the funniest and most affectionate in the book.

Fluent, digressive and heavily interior, with frequent shifts of perspective and a willingness to abandon the plot for several pages of observation.

Atkinson came from literary fiction, having won the Whitbread for her first novel, and the register is closer to that than to crime.

The city is rendered as a place where enormous wealth and privilege sit alongside ordinary provincial England, and the class observation is precise.

The setting is used properly: several of the cases turn on assumptions about who is worth investigating. The colleges, the tourists and the surrounding fenland are used specifically, and the contrast between the university and the town is maintained throughout.

Four further Brodie novels follow, and the later ones are more conventionally plotted while retaining the digressive method.

This is the most structurally unusual and, for many readers, the best of them. Started Early, Took My Dog and the later books also bring in characters from Atkinson's non-crime novels, which rewards readers of her wider work.

Stephen King called it the best mystery of the decade, which brought it a substantial crime readership that had not previously read Atkinson.

The book's reputation is divided along exactly the line one would expect: literary readers admire it, and readers who want the case solved properly do not.

Readers who want crime fiction used as a frame for something else, and who do not require investigations to be resolved through investigation.

It is the best-written book in this part of the section. Readers who want detection should be warned that Atkinson genuinely is not interested in providing any.