SCRIBBLE
Jackson Brodie makes the crime genre new! Whether you are revising Kate Atkinson’s novel for your upcoming mock or whether you’re just interested in her as a writer, this article explores how Atkinson breathes modern life in to the crime genre. Four of her ten novels form a private detective series in which the protagonist, Jackson Brodie (a former police detective turned private investigator), finds himself drawn into a vortex of crime and mysteries. In When Will There Be Good News, the third novel in the series of four, a six year old witnesses a brutal and appalling crime which leaves the reader appalled. Thirty years later, Jackson Brodie finds himself on a fatal journey that sees him drawn into the aftermath of the family’s murder. However, despite being full of unsolved mysteries and suspense, this is not a ‘detective novel’ in the formal sense of the term. In fact, Atkinson’s offence, in the eyes of the avant-garde, is probably not so much the crime or mystery itself as its solution (or lack of!). However I would argue that any supposed distinction between literary and crime genre is one that Atkinson’s oeuvre destroys which, perhaps ironically, makes her an even better crime writer. To examine how Atkinson subverts the crime genre, we need to firstly establish: what is genre? It is essentially a contract or set of conventions which the writer follows. However, Atkinson’s charm is that she brilliantly and idiosyncratically adapts these conventions. With a deceptively familiar form, When Will There Be Good News treats crime fiction with a fresh complexity. One way in which Atkinson achieves this untypicality within the crime genre is by seeming more interested in the characters and their relationships than the crime itself (her other novels would seem to bear this out too). For instance, the chapter Celestial City focuses on the incapacitated Jackson Brodie
by Miss Lord
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