Kate Atkinson burst on to the British Literary scene in the
1990s with her brilliantly insouciant tragic-comic debut novel, Behind
the Scenes of the Museum, which won the Whitbread (now Costa) award.
This was followed by Human Croquet and Emotionally
Weird, both of which attracted critical reviews which were lukewarm at
best, although the novels, especially Emotionally Weird, marked Atkinson
as a writer who had a great feel for humour.
After these three full length novels which could be
described as literary fiction (plus a collection of short stories) Atkinson
changed tracks and switched over to genre fiction. She began writing detective
novels. She has published, so far, four detective novels featuring the slightly
damaged yet clever and honest and uber-cool detective (is there any other
type?) Jackson Brodie.
These detective novels have sold well and, in 2011, the
first two novels were made into a BBC drama in which Jason Isaacs (hugely
talented but much underrated) played the detective.
The intriguingly titled Started Early, Took My Dog is the
fourth novel featuring Jackson Brodie.
When one is writing a detective / crime thriller, one can opt for either the
action or the psychological. An Example of action thriller would be The
Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. Chandler’s intention in The
Big Sleep is very clear from the outset. He is out to entertain. The
plot of The Big Sleep is not very intricate but never leaves the fast
lane—Chandler wheels in corpses with alarming regularity—and does not give the
reader time to think. Chandler does not waste time in developing psychological
profiles of his characters either; characters are useful to Chandler only to
the extent that they serve some purpose in moving the plot further (either by
getting murdered or telling Philip Marlowe, Chandler’s legendary detective, who
might be the killer). Chandler’s prose is stylistic (and hugely enjoyable) and
the whole thing is over in roughly 250 pages).
Started Early, Took My Dog is as far removed from The
Big Sleep as Saturn is from Sun, although, like Chandler, Atkinson has
her unique prose-style, liberally laced with humour. Atkinson takes great
trouble in developing psychological profiles of the protagonists, which, by
necessity, involve a raft of subsidiary characters which have no direct
relevance to the plot of the novel but serve the function of elucidating for
the reader the personality profiles of the protagonists. Also, since Started
Early, Took My Dog—while a complete novel on its own—is fourth in a
series of detective novels featuring Jackson Brodie, Atkinson probably feels
obliged to bring in characters, which might have played a less peripheral role
in the previous novels (I read Case Histories, the first novel in
the series, many years ago, but can’t remember anything about it other than it
was a moderately enjoyable read), so that the fans of her novels can have a
sense of continuity. It also allows Atkinson to bring some or more of them back
into playing a more prominent role in future Jackson Brodie novels, which, I am
sure, will come out.
The result is a novel that is almost 500 pages—witty almost
throughout, and entertaining in part.
The plot of Started Early, Took My Dog has
several strands. At the heart of it is the murder of a prostitute named Carole
Braithwaite, in Leeds UK, in the 1970s. Carole
is found in her flat three weeks after she was murdered. The first person to
reach the scene of crime is a WPC named Tracy Waterhouse, who finds in the flat
a four year old boy, presumably the dead prostitute’s son. The flat was locked
from outside, which suggests to Tracy that whoever murdered Carole locked the
flat from outside before leaving, probably in the full knowledge that there was
a little boy in the flat. The boy is whisked away from the flat by the Social
Services and a rookie social worker by the name of Linda Pallister is in charge
of arranging foster care for him. There is a veil of secrecy surrounding all
this and Tracy’s attempts to make inquiries—both with regard to the boy’s fate
and the progress, if any, made in the investigation of Carole’s murder—fall on
deaf ears. Carole’s murder has taken place at the beginning of what would turn
out to be the reign of terror of the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe (a
real-life murderer, serving an indefinite life sentence—a bit of post-modern
device used by Atkinson). Carole’s murder however remains unsolved; she is not
considered to be one of the victims of the Yorkshire Ripper. Zoom forward
several years and we are in the first decade of the twenty first century. Tracy
Waterhouse is in her fifties; she has left the police force and now is in
charge of a private security firm operating in a local mall. All the police
officers—senior and junior—associated with Carole Braithwaite’s murder are
either dead or retired—except one: Barry Crawford; and he is due to retire in
two weeks. Then, while on her stroll in the mall Tracy notices a known
prostitute called Kelly walking with a little girl, shouting abuses at the girl
and generally mistreating her in full public view. Tracy, on an impulse, ‘buys’
the girl from the prostitute for 2000 pounds. This provides the second strand
of the story. Tracy, having illegally gotten hold of the girl from the
prostitute (who probably was not the mother of the child in the first place),
begins planning her escape from Leeds, preferably England, and, towards that
end, is not above using her contacts in the underworld to obtain fake passports
and travel documents for her and the girl. In case you are wondering where
Jackson Brodie fits into this, please be advised that he is hired by a New
Zeeland woman named Hope MacMaster, who wants to trace her biological parents.
Hope is English but immigrated to New Zeeland with her parents—the Winfields—at
a very young age. All that Hope knows about her background is that the
Winefields—who lived in Leeds—were her adoptive parents, and that her birth
name was Nicola, which the parents changed to Hope when they adopted her.
Jackson Brodie is tasked with the job of tracing, if possible, Hope’s
biological family. Jackson Brodie arrives in Leeds and his first port of call
is Linda Pallister, now nearing retirement, who is still in charge of adoption
and foster care in the Social Services. Linda however proves very elusive and
Brodie begins to suspect that she is going out of her way to avoid her. In a
situation that is possible only in detective fiction Brodie manages to gain
access to Pallister’s office and goes through her files; and discovers the name
Carole Braithwaite written on the Winfield folder, along with a photograph of a
young girl who he thinks could be Hope when she was a baby. Soon Brodie
discovers three more things: (1) Tracy Waterhouse was present when Carole
Braithwaite was found murdered (Tracy proves as elusive as Linda when he tries
to arrange a meeting with her); (2) another man by the name of B. Jackson,
calling himself a private detective, is also going about making inquiries; and
(3) he (i.e. Jackson Brodie) is being followed, probably by the other Jackson.
Tracy, in the meanwhile, does not take long to figure out that she herself is
being followed by leather-jacket wearing thugs who will not hesitate from using
violence. Then there is a bunch of retired police officers, more shifty than the
people featuring in BBC documentaries with titles like ‘Fake Britain’, who, you
are not surprised to learn, have direct or indirect connections with the
Braithwaite murder. Finally, to add more spice to what is already turning to be
a vindaloo, there is a dementing actress called Kitty, who is filming—you have
guessed it—a detective serial in which Brodie’s second ex-wife, Julia, is also
playing a role. The dementing Kitty is in the mall when the prostitute is
mistreating the child (did I tell you that the prostitute, in due course, also snuffs
it?). It all gets resolved in due course and leads up to the corruption at the
heart of the police force.
If all of the above has given you the impression that Started
Early, Took My Dog is a taut thriller with suspense leaking out of
every page, you would be partially correct. There is, as must be evident, from
the summery above, a lot of suspense, but the story has a meandering feel to
it. What I like to see (or read) in a detective novel is the writer getting on
with the various strands of the story at a brisk pace. What I don’t necessary
want to read is pages of descriptions of the protagonist’s (Brodie) previous
failed marriages, his difficult relationship with his teen-age daughter, his
impoverished childhood etcetera. It does not add much to the story-line (which
is essentially an old-fashioned detective / murder mystery) in a way that is
meaningful. Having read only one previous novel in the series (and forgotten
about it), it was impossible for me to link this with the plots of previous Jackson
Brodie novels (if there was a link); neither do these descriptions offer any
great insight into Brodie’s personality make-up (he spends much part of the
novel being duped by one or the other person). I think this has happened
because Started Early, Took My Dog is a detective novel with literary
ambitions. Nothing wrong in that. Graham Greene and John Le Carre and Len
Deighton have done it with great success in the past. What is dissatisfying is
the two have not gelled together neatly.
The alter on which a detective / crime novel will succeed or
fail is the skill with which the mystery is resolved. For me a satisfactory
detective novel is one in which there are no loose ends; the explanation of the
events taking place is plausible; and when secret is revealed in the final
pages, it is as if you have emerged from a mist. Unfortunately, Started
Early, Took My Dog, fails this litmus test. The dénouement, when it comes, fails to give you the
emerging-from-the-mist feeling. Atkinson ratchets up the tempo several fold
towards the end, and the narrative, which, for the best part is trundling along
at just about manageable pace is, in the last fifty odd pages, suddenly full of
action and melodrama not out of place in a Bollywood pot-boiler. This gives the
reader a bit of a jolt as, until then, it has the pretention of being an
erudite, intelligent psychological thriller.
There are too many loose ends in the story-line that has
holes big enough to drive a schooner through. For example, one of the two major
strands of the novel, the kidnapping of the possibly-already-kidnapped girl by
Tracy Waterhouse, has no evident link to the other strand of the story, the
murder of Carole Braithwaite. It is as if there are two novels within the novel
that are running a parallel course, and never converge. Tracy’s action (of
stealing the girl) remains ultimately unfathomable. Despite reams of pages
devoted to her actions, we are still left in the dark as to why the staid and
solid Tracy decides to risk everything for a girl on whom her gaze happens to
alight in the mall. (Most people, when they see a kid being mistreated in a
public place by woman who seems to be off her heads on drugs, would phone the
police, not ‘buy’ the kid. There is nothing in Tracy’s background and family
situation that prepares the reader for this highly unusual step the former
policewoman takes. The girl (four years old), in turn, begins her clandestine
existence with Tracy, whom she has never met in life, without batting an
eyelid.)
What saves the novel from being a total let-down is
Atkinson’s prose which sparkles with smart and waggish observation. That does
not quite make up, though, for the weak story. Six out of ten.
