Kate Atkinson’s previous novel, Case Histories, was a successful experiment in crime fiction. One Good Turn is its sequel. In the first book, which was set in Cambridge, Brodie Jackson was a standard-issue private eye — ex-army, ex-police, with a broken marriage and a penchant for country music. Now, thanks to a £2 million inheritance from a grateful client, he’s an ex-private eye with a house in France and a swimming pool. Another legacy from Case Histories is his lover Julia, an actress in the Nell Gwyn mould, both physically and emotionally.
Brodie and Julia are in Edinburgh, where Julia has a role in a doomed Fringe production, largely funded by Brodie. The plot kicks off with a road rage incident in the middle of city witnessed by most of the main characters and some of the minor ones, many of whom are queuing for a lunchtime performance by a comedian whom no one finds funny. One driver is only prevented from killing another by the intervention of Martin, a mild- mannered writer of cosy crime novels, who floors the attacker by lobbing his laptop at him. Brodie slips away, grateful he didn’t have to intervene.
The victim has a gun in his bag. The attacker owns a geriatric rottweiler and works for Graham Hatter, a corrupt and wealthy builder whose life is built on the tenets of Scottish religion (‘alcohol, football, feeling badly done by’). Hatter has had a heart attack while in the arms of a Russian prostitute and is now in an ICU. His wife Gloria is happy for him to remain there, for reasons of her own. The prostitute works for Feathers, an illegal agency offering domestic cleaning and sexual services. Women from Feathers, some of them Russian, clean both Martin’s house and the Hatters’. Martin has a very good reason to be acutely sensitive about nubile Russians offering sexual services. One of the cleaners is seduced by the ghastly comic, who happens to be Martin’s unwanted house guest for the duration of the festival. Brodie finds another of them dead — but her body is washed away before the police get there. To complicate matters, he fancies the police officer investigating the case. She happens to have a teenage son who witnessed the road rage incident while developing his shoplifting skills.
And so on. One story nests within another, like the set of Russian dolls that Martin owns, a grim memento of a traumatic event in St Petersburg. The narrative wanders sideways, backwards and occasionally forwards, like a drunken crab, from one witness to another, pursuing digressive interior monologues through time and space. But there’s nothing casual about the novel’s construction. The plot rests on carefully built foundations. Every now and then there is a flurry of action, which not infrequently turns the reader’s expectations upside down, and the climax is wonderfully fitting. Best of all, Kate Atkinson has that priceless Ancient Mariner ability that keeps the reader turning the pages.
Readable though the novel is, however, it lacks the freshness of its predecessor. The tone is very similar, perhaps unwisely so. Taken as a whole, the interior monologues share a slightly cloying quality, somewhere between wistful and winsome, that subtly undermines them. And why on earth equip the novel with the subtitle ‘A Jolly Murder Mystery’, a verbal equivalent to a wink and a nudge in the ribs? In sum, then, though there’s a great deal to enjoy here, Case Histories is a better book.
Andrew Taylor’s latest novel is A Stain on the Silence (Michael Joseph).
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