It’s publication day for George Pelecanos’s newest thriller, WHAT IT WAS, and we couldn’t be more excited. You can read Janet Maslin’s terrific review here, and you can also read (if you subscribe) this Wall Street Journal article about the novel’s unconventional three formats and prices. Or you can check out George himself, via our friends at Mulholland Books, discussing his favorite Italian movies, and showing you some of the places where WHAT IT WAS takes place, in his own D.C. back yard.
My press kit for Eowyn Ivey's THE SNOW CHILD
There is no shortage of reports on how bad book publicists are. The thrust of most of these essays is this: in-house publicists will do a crappy job on your book. They won’t take your call for more than a few weeks, they don’t have the time or inclination to listen to your ideas, and they use the same media lists for every book, over and over. Whenever I read one of these, my dander is up, my feathers ruffled, my other idiom to make it three is roused. Are there bad book publicists out there? I am sure there are. In fact, I hope there are just so the torrent of negativity towards my profession has a basis.
This brings me to the latest hit piece written about in-house publicists: this essay, posted on Publishing Perspectives. Read it for yourself, I’ll wait. I will give the author his due: this is an entirely new and creative angle on the chestnut “your publicist sucks.” In an oversimplified nutshell: a blogger didn’t like how large the press kit was for a lead list title by an author on the brink of enormous literary success. I haven’t seen the kit, but I’ve made a few that sound similar to it: Q&As, praise sheets, a release, some reviews singled out, and all in a pretty folder. Sure, more people are talking about the Auslander book now that this has run and never us mind that it received a smashing New York Times daily and NYTBR, Apparently Janet Maslin and Steve Stern were unaware that they were being “intellectually bullied,” so please do not tell them.
I ask you, dear reader (I assume there is one and her name rhymes with Bay-gin): how do we win? We don’t do enough or we do too much. We are lazy or we are bullying. It feels like we need to cater to what each particular contact prefers or we have failed miserably. Of course, this is unreasonable. We send books and follow-up with hundreds of people and for every person that hates a large press kit and tosses it, I have two asking me for talking points. Reviewers get an absurd amount of mail- have you ever seen those book rooms? I fled from Publishers Weekly’s once; it was overwhelming to see just how much competition there is for space. Let’s not even get in to what we are up against when pitching the morning shows or radio (Santorum, sinking cruise ships, and frakking come to mind). Is it a crime to try to give the media all the information they could possibly need to decide if this particular book is the one they should crack? I don’t think it is. In fact, I’m fairly sure that is exactly my job. And I’m also pretty certain (please, correct me if I’m wrong @lenabitts) that most authors would rather have the publicist who was overly passionate over one who is getting a mani-pedi during the workday (I’ve never actually met that type, but I’ve read enough to know they must exist!).
I would like to take a small moment here, on this cozy soapbox, to mention one other point. We did not go to Publicity University, where you learn diabolical lying, anti-ethics101, and small dog maintenance. We are not people who passed up working in Hollywood for the high-paying and prestigious publishing racket. We are book people who, for one reason or another, are just better suited to talking with strangers about literature than we are talking to the text itself. But we are on your side. We sleep with our phones under our pillows, often give up weekends to travel with authors, have several work night events to attend, and take your call, lovely writer and researching journalist, at 9pm when we should be halfway through a bottle of wine while watching Downton Abbey, like everyone else. It’s not working in a mine and I know that, and these are not complaints. Because I have a truly fantastic job where I get to work with some of the best writers working today. If I get a little zealous about making sure you know it, too, I hope that you’ll forgive me. But it’s hard out here for a pitch.
I try not to be too bossy, but I’m going to have to insist that you read this beautiful and moving excerpt from Caitlin Flanagan’s GIRL LAND, which ran in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine. As mothers have been saying since time began: You’ll thank me later.
I always dreaded that back-to-school essay we had to write about What We Did Over Summer Vacation. Like most kids, I didn’t have a lot of control over my summer activities (I pretty much just went to swim team practice). If it were up to me, I’d have spent the summer before 4th grade training for the Iditarod, and the summer before 7th grade ranching and sauntering around in dusty chaps. A more revealing essay topic would have been: What I Read Over Summer Vacation (in which case the teacher would have learned that I read Dog Song by Gary Paulsen before 4th grade, and Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty before 7th grade). I may never have had full say in where I spend my vacations, but I’ve always enjoyed complete autonomy when it comes to my reading list.
My in-laws live in North Texas. I can just hear what you’re thinking. At least it’s warm, and there’s BBQ! Wrong, my friends. In North Texas, near the Oklahoma border, it’s cold, flat, and windy. The upside of our annual visit (besides getting to play Scrabble on the Official Scrabble table, where the tiles are 24 karat gold-plated–really) is that reading time passes completely uninterrupted. Feel free to recline on your husband’s childhood bed, alternately reading, napping, and eating the gummi bears your mother-in-law brings to you. Because you’re not missing anything! I highly recommend their home as a holiday destination.
And so, here is my answer to the question I always wished my teachers had asked after vacation – What I Read:
Before we even left home, I finished Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. I started this at my mother’s suggestion over the summer, and I swear I didn’t finish it until holiday break because I just didn’t want my relationship with the characters to end.
Next I read The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, a short novel that won the 2011 Man Booker Prize. Immediately, the tone of the book reminded me of the anecdotes a dear friend of mine tells me about his youth. He was born in the late 1930s and his stories are alien to me both because they revolve around actual key moments in our cultural history (like stumbling into a Cream concert by accident, or listening to early Miles Davis albums as they are released) and because he’s lived with his memories long enough that the telling of each story is more important than how he feels about what happened. Like the protagonist in Barnes’s novel, my friend has the patience to wait for events to run their course, he accepts who he is, he’s not blinded by pride or vanity, and yet the truth behind his memories still has the capacity to surprise him.
Then I read In Zanesville by Jo Ann Beard, and what a delight it was. It’s like Judy Blume for grown-ups, conveying all of the humor and intensity of adolescence with the depth of theme and strong, potent writing of the best literary novels. Beard completely captures what it’s like to be a teenage girl. The novel opens with a scene in which two 14-year-old babysitters hesitate to call the fire department because…it’s embarrassing. It’s funny because it’s true, people.
I re-read and forced my husband (he was more than game!) to read Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. For my money, this is one of the greatest books of our time. It’s intense, harrowing, funny, provocative, and chock-full of knowledge bombs. My last order of business before leaving for the holidays was to acquire a graphic novel by Isabel Greenberg, who just won The Observer Cape Graphic Short Story award. As Isabel sets off on the mission to turn that short story into a brilliant novel of her own, I wanted to remind myself of the transformative, unique power that a graphic novel can wield.
I was lucky enough to read an upcoming novel about the Iraq War called The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers. Michael Pietsch acquired it late last year, and Little, Brown will publish it later in 2012. Someone at the office compared it to The Hurt Locker but I think it’s far more powerful, and the writing—about the deserts of Iraq and the farmland of Virginia—is beautiful and lyrical. The juxtaposition between the war and home, and the details Powers chooses from each landscape, are small facets of this novel’s brilliance. I know it’s one that is going to generate a huge amount of attention and discussion upon its publication; it’s the sort of novel that’s an honor to read.
I ended the vacation with The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson. The book has been recommended to me by everyone from Julie Barer, Wilson’s agent who snagged me an ARC, to Time Magazine, who included it as a pick for the Best Fiction of 2011. Think From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, The Royal Tenenbaums, and Everything Matters! by Ron Currie, Jr. A wild, fun book about art, family, and chaos, it was a perfect reminder of what a privilege it is to work in publishing. I am lucky enough to have early and ready access to what’s long been my favorite thing: good books.
Cheers to a new year, friends!
P.S. One of my resolutions for 2012 is to read more nonfiction. If you know a book that will catch a novel lover’s full attention, feel free to point me in that direction in the comments section below.
I really went out on a limb with my 2011 resolutions. Let’s see how I did:
1. To do more of the things I don’t do enough. Three times a week, in the name of cardio fitness, I now do something that involves loud, often terrible music, and is not karaoke.
2. To do less of the things I do too often. I did less karaoke in 2011.
3. To master the tripod headstand. If by “master,” I meant “do it a few times in a very slow and shaky way when nobody is within range of my falling body” – then MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
We can’t imagine a better way to start the week, let alone a whole year, than a Shouts and Murmurs column by Simon Rich in the New Yorker. Especially when we’ve got Simon’s novel, What in God’s Name, coming in August. But that’s not all! This week’s New Yorker piece is part of a collection of love stories, as only Simon could tell them, called The Last Girlfriend on Earth, out next January. (It’s never too soon to start planning your Valentine’s Day 2013 reading list!)
Our new editor Laura Tisdel is so new – “How new is she?” Thank you, folks – her business cards still haven’t arrived. But that didn’t stop her from leaping into action last week, and buying a terrific debut novel at auction. We are all thrilled that Laura’s first acquisition brings Gabriel Roth to our list, with a novel called THE UNKNOWNS that is funny, sweet, and original, a heady delight from its first page to its last.
And here is where Twitter comes in: when Laura started reading THE UNKNOWNS, she emailed a copy to me, saying she was loving it so far. The author name rang a bell, and I realized that just the day before, I’d started following him on Twitter, after someone retweeted this: @gabrielroth There should be a German word meaning “something for which there should be a German word.” Which I thought was funny. Who knew that a day later I’d be reading his novel, and two weeks after that, we’d be celebrating its future publication together. O, brave new, small world!
Today is a very special day, and not only because our moms are getting the turkey ready to brine and preparing batches of Chex Mix, but because today Ian Rankin’s newest novel The Impossible Dead goes on sale. To celebrate, we’re featuring an excerpt from a special piece that Rankin wrote called “The Death of Willie McCrae” that will whet the appetite of the lucky readers encountering Rankin for the first time, and give all of you who already adore his work insight into his process.
The Death of Willie McRae
By Ian Rankin
On the morning of April 6th 1985, two Australian tourists were driving along a desolate stretch of the A87 in north-west Scotland. They saw that a maroon-coloured Volvo had come off the road. There was a man in the driving-seat, alive but in bad shape. They flagged down another car, which happened to contain a doctor as well as a Scottish National Party councillor. The councillor recognised the man in the Volvo as Willie McRae, a fervent Nationalist who had run for the SNP leadership in 1979. An ambulance was summoned and McRae was taken to Raigmore Hospital in Inverness, before being transferred to Aberdeen. It was here that a nurse washed his head-wound and noticed something startling: a bullet-hole. At this stage, McRae was still alive, but had suffered massive brain damage. The following day, with his family’s consent, his life-support was turned off. His car meantime seems to have been removed from the scene of the crash, only to be re-sited by police once they knew about the shooting. A search was made, and a handgun eventually found some distance away. The gun, a Smith and Wesson .22 revolver, belonged (albeit illegally) to McRae. He had taken to carrying it with him. Why? Because he was afraid.
No Fatal Accident Inquiry (the Scottish equivalent of an inquest) was ever held. McRae was deemed to have committed suicide, though not everyone was convinced. When a journalist got access to the official paperwork in 1995, he noted that the death had been ruled ‘undetermined’ rather than ‘suicide’.
I first came across the case in a non-fiction book called ‘No Final Solution’ published in 1994 by the journalist Douglas Skelton. It was only in November 2010, however, that I began to pay close attention to the story. McRae was back in the news, due to calls by SNP councillor John Finnie for the death to be reinvestigated. In December, there was a follow-up piece in ‘The Scotsman’ newspaper, but by then I had already re-read Skelton’s chapter on Willie McRae. Skelton mentioned that McRae, a lawyer, had ties to the Scottish National Liberation Army, who throughout the 1980s had waged a campaign against the British state. They had sent anthrax spores to Porton Down Biological Research Station and letter-bombs to the likes of Margaret Thatcher, Norman Tebbit, Michael Heseltine, Malcolm Rifkind and even the Queen. Downing Street and Woolwich Arsenal were targeted, as was Glasgow’s Lord Provost - on a day when Princess Diana happened to be visiting. According to Skelton, McRae was alleged to have been the SNLA’s ‘paymaster’, but was also (so friends said) writing a book on the nuclear industry and had found something important. McRae’s death occurred only a year after that of anti-nuclear campaigner Hilda Murell, who had been found in woods near her ransacked home. McRae had told friends that his home and office had been broken into and paperwork rifled.
The news stories, plus the chapter in Skelton’s book, whetted my appetite and sent me at first to the internet and then to Edinburgh’s Central Library, where I pored over newspapers from April 1985. In 1985 I had been a student at Edinburgh University, but could recall little of the events I now read about. Companies were being advised to protect sensitive electronic information from the effects of a nuclear detonation’s Electronic Magnetic Pulse. Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev were preparing to meet at a ‘Star Wars’ summit. Bombs were going off in Northern Ireland. There were protests against acid rain and animal testing. Teachers were warned not to wear CND badges in the classroom. 20,000 demonstrators had arrived at a proposed Cruise missile base at Molesworth in Cambridgeshire. There were ten arrests at a demo at Coulport on the Clyde (Coulport being the handling and maintenance depot for the UK’s Polaris fleet of warheads; nuclear warheads were taken by road from there to the Royal Ordnance factory near Reading every month).
By November 1985, many of us would be sitting down to watch the BBC drama ‘Edge of Darkness’, finding that it captured the febrile paranoia of the time. So too did Peter Wright’s book ‘Spycatcher’, which he tried to publish in 1985 and which was leaking out due to the Scottish media being exempt from the injunction applied in England.
In all this reading, I saw scant mention of Willie McRae. No journalist, it seemed, wished to linger over a suicide. McRae was a heavy drinker who had taken his own life. That was that. But I could see something emerging from my reading, as is made clear in my notes to myself at the time: ‘Theme, I guess, is that we always live in an age of fear. In the past we had the coming ice age, CFCs destroying the ozone layer, acid rain, the Cold War and the IRA. Now we have climate chaos, North Korea, Islamic extremists and the possible collapse of capitalism.’ At around this time, I clipped and kept another news story about an explosion in woodland near Loch Lomond. The press had speculated that it could be the work of al-Qaeda, testing ‘their deadly homemade bombs’. I penned a further note to myself: ‘By focussing on a case from the 1980s, I can explore similarities and differences between Scotland then and now. It becomes a story about where Scotland is and how it got here.’
The SNLA had come into being as a result of the ‘failed’ devolution referendum of 1979. By 1981 it was collecting anthrax samples from the mainland near the west coast island of Gruinard. Gruinard features on few maps. During World War 2, anthrax was seeded there as an experiment, the thinking being that it might prove useful if dropped over Germany. It was certainly useful to the SNLA. There were arrests, however, and some SNLA members fled to Ireland. But the campaign continued. A letter-bomb was sent to John Nott, then Defence Secretary. The Conservative and Labour HQs north of the border were damaged by fire, as was an Edinburgh army barracks. An attempted arson attack on the Glasgow MP Roy Jenkins was botched. Hoax threats disrupted government and commercial enterprises both in the UK and in the USA. The SNLA then experimented with Ricin but found it wanting. As late as 2002 they sent caustic soda (in the guise of massage oil) to Cherie Blair, having previously mailed a letter-bomb to her husband’s constituency home in Sedgefield. They also carried out cyber-attacks, taking over the Scottish Parliament’s e-mail system in 2001, and they wrote ‘An Assassin’s Guide to St Andrews’, passing it on to the Real IRA in the hope of disrupting - fatally disrupting - Prince Andrew’s time as a student in the town.
Some of the above information comes from an unpublished book by journalist David Leslie. The text of the book, ‘Inside a Terrorist Group: the Story of the SNLA’, can be found online. Since the book was written with the cooperation of SNLA supporters, it is difficult to know how many incidents recorded by Leslie have been exaggerated in the telling. He does say, however, that the SNLA sees the Scottish National Party as a sham and a hindrance to ‘genuine’ Scottish Nationalism. The antipathy appears to be mutual, as Alex Salmond, current Scottish First Minister, is quoted as having told another journalist that the SNLA was ‘entirely publicity-driven, the work of one or perhaps two fantasists’.
Nevertheless, the SNLA came into existence when devolution looked a busted flush and SNP support was stuck at around fifteen percent in the polls. This situation has changed, but it got me wondering: what happened to all those zealots who felt they had to resort to terrorism in order to be heard? What might they be doing today? We have seen in Northern Ireland how one-time proponents of domestic terror can be persuaded into the mainstream political process. I am a writer of fiction, and I saw intriguing themes and plot-lines emerging from my research.
But what of Willie McRae? The facts are far from lucid, while there are plenty of conflicting theories and allegations. According to one commentator, no fingerprints were found on the gun - perhaps not so surprising, as it was found in running water and had been there for some time. But had police been tailing him, on one occasion all the way to his weekend retreat? Was McRae’s briefcase missing from the Volvo, only to be returned to his family some time later? As a chain-smoker, why were there no cigarettes in the car? And how could his lucky hundred-pound note (the fee from his first job as a solicitor) have vanished? Two shots had apparently been fired - so where was the second bullet? Had the car been moved and was it then put back at a slightly different location? Plenty for conspiracy theorists to chew on.
According to David Leslie’s source, McRae did indeed have close ties to the SNLA. He had given a couple of members enough cash so that they could evade arrest and prosecution. These men had almost certainly been under Special Branch surveillance, which means McRae could have been targeted, too. Leslie’s source states that McRae’s office was the base for the attack on Glasgow’s Lord Provost. In 2006 a private investigator came forward to say that he had been paid (anonymously) to keep tabs on McRae. Yet on his last day alive, McRae came out of a Glasgow off-licence, seemingly light of heart. He was about to drive to his weekend cottage near Dornie in the Highlands, and was carrying two bottles of whisky. A policeman who knew him stopped on the pavement and made a joke about drink-driving, but then noticed two men watching. A little later, when McRae drove off, two cars made off after him.
Having seemed happy in himself, and having made appointments for the following week, what could have made him commit suicide? Well, if he suspected the surveillance, and felt that because he had aided the SNLA he might now face professional ruin and even jail, it could have triggered such thoughts. Or did he stop on the road to confront his pursuers, firing once at them and another time at his own head?
A Channel 4 documentary about the mystery can be viewed on YouTube. The internet can be trawled and libraries consulted. Most probably there will never be closure, except in a speculative work of fiction. The victim in my new novel ‘The Impossible Dead’ is not Willie McRae, but a married Edinburgh lawyer called Francis Vernal who dies on a lonely road in Fife. There are ties to a long-disbanded terror group for whom he may have been paymaster. Vernal does not die on April 7th, but on the 28th, just as many of us were tuned in to Dennis Taylor’s extraordinary World Snooker clash with Steve Davis. And those mysterious explosions at Loch Lomond: they make it into the novel, too.
Authors are often asked: where do you get your ideas? Mine come from many sources; some begin life as stories torn from newspapers and kept in my ideas file. ‘Black and Blue’ features a real-life killer called Bible John who has yet to be identified (the latest name in the frame is that of convicted serial killer Peter Tobin). ‘The Falls’ began when I saw an exhibit in a museum - seventeen tiny coffins found hidden on an Edinburgh hillside in the nineteenth century. No one could explain them, and that was all the challenge I needed.
We may never know what really happened to Willie McRae, but his life has provided me with the inspiration for a work of fiction looking at the fears we had back then and the new set of threats we seem to face today.
Copyright John Rebus Limited, 2011
To buy The Impossible Dead visit an independent bookseller near you, Barnes and Noble, or Amazon.
Learn more about Ian Rankin by following him on facebook, following him on twitter, or visiting our cousins at Mulholland Books.
A couple of years ago I witnessed a particularly hilarious moment on the Today Show. Without warning, the anchors wandered off the beaten path of over-blown news reports and segments on making a Thankgiving centerpiece out of leftover Ikea hardware and dental floss and veered into the territory of The Internet. Specifically, Twitter.
Gem-like questions were unearthed including: How do I know if I’m Tweetering? Who should I be friends with on the Tweeter? And the instant classic: Am I Tweetering now? I laughed at them from the safety of my hand-me-down couch in an area of Brooklyn that can only be reached via the F train. Despite my jaded snickers, I must admit that I am not, in fact, a Twitter master (not like some, ahem, @reaganart). It’s only 140 characters and yet the stakes—for resonance, wit, and zeitgeist-y momentum—are so high. Let’s face it folks: I’m still learning the fine art of the Tweet.
If you’re brand-new to the game or if you’ve got a handle but are unsure where to go from there, let us make things easy for you. Follow authors. And here is a list of great ones, which we say without any bias whatsoever:
@pelecanos1 George Pelecanos
@elinhilderbrand Elin Hilderbrand
@emmarathbone Emma Rathbone
@tednotedward Ted Thompson
@jameshynes James Hynes
@elenamshapiro Elena Mauli Shapiro
@jezebelannan Anna North
@mmitchmoore Meg Mitchell Moore
@meganeabbott Megan Abbott
@Beathhigh Ian Rankin
@patrickerville Patrick Somerville
@natashasolomons Natasha Solomons
@stuartnadler Stuart Nadler
@elizmccracken Elizabeth McCracken
@kathleenkent214 Kathleen Kent
@Sherman_Alexie Sherman Alexie
@EowynIvey Eowyn Ivey
@annezouroudi Anne Zouroudi
@JacksonBrodie Jackson Brodie (okay, so he’s not real but his twitter feed is)
Here is a small selection of other entertaining writer/tweeters who deserve a special shout-out for conquering the medium:
And finally, follow us!
Ever since I received the exhilarating news that I got the job working as an editor with Reagan, Sarah, and Marlena over here in midtown, I’ve been worried about this blog. You don’t know me, dear reader, but I am chatty. I am gregarious. My high school Geometry teacher used to do this turning-down-a-dial motion in the air that meant, Laura, BE QUIET. And yet, imagining my first blog post was a bit terrifying. Was I scared of starting at a new place, of the big responsibilities that come with a big promotion, of impressing my boss? No. But the blog. Oh, the wakeful nights spent worrying about the blog! And I had a fair amount of time to pace around noodling my predicament: I managed to squeeze in a break between saying good-bye to lovely Penguin Books and starting here. What did I do with that precious time, you ask? Well, lucky for you, that’s what I’ve decided to blog about! The thing I did for fun was, as we called it in elementary school, free read. I read for pleasure. I sat quietly on a Tuesday afternoon in an armchair with some celery sticks (or Cheetos, whatever) and read novels for hours at a time. It was like Christmas every day. Mind you, I did other things too—I moved apartments, I traveled home to Michigan, I played bridesmaid at my brother’s wedding in Colorado—but whenever there was a break in the action I could sink into that lovely space that so characterized my childhood and lose myself in a good book. It was a treat.
And here’s what I devoured:
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
I should’ve read this one before. Like, when it came out. I may have even fibbed about reading it, nodding knowingly during some cocktail party convo. I should’ve read it before I edited Lev Grossman’s brilliant novel The Magician King because I know that Lev adores this book and I know that Clarke’s achievements here pushed him to keep going down the rabbit hole into Quentin Coldwater’s world. I should’ve read it because I love magic. Because I read The Lives of Christopher Chant eleven times during my eleventh year because that somehow made sense to me in fifth grade. But look people, I didn’t. And boy was I missing out. Clarke’s prose reads like found history—and it’s not just the footnotes! There is a Nathaniel Hawthorne-like formality and scope to the terrain she covers. Like Golden Compass meets Wolf Hall. More British pomp or less quirk (it’s perfectly illustrated), and you’d feel like you’d seen the novel before. But Clarke finds a masterful balance between all the elements at play and creates a deep, involving, utterly original novel that I treasure as I should have long ago.
Heart of the Matter by Emily Giffin
This year, I have gotten caught up on this whole Emily Giffin business. When she first began publishing books, I was just starting out in bookworld and couldn’t escape the slush pile to indulge myself. The good friend who urged me to get on the band wagon told me she loved Heart of the Matter best, and so I’ve been saving it to read last. And it was worth the wait. Giffin’s books are a great way to lose track of the time—you wouldn’t go wrong taking this in your bag on a plane, to a doctor’s office, even to a boring dinner where there will be big, linen napkins under which a paperback could be artfully concealed. I’ve heard Giffin called “this century’s Jane Austen” and I give that description two thumbs up! Her characters feel real: not unrecognizably neurotic, and not complete confections either. Heart of the Matter pulls off the ambitious task of telling two sides of the same story in two alternating voices. And the heroine here isn’t exactly the girl you think you’d root for. These books go down easily because they are so perfectly executed. Ms. Giffin, color me impressed.
The Jackson Brodie novels—Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will There Be Good News, and Started Early, Took My Dog—by Kate Atkinson
I promised myself that during this break I wouldn’t reread anything. Rereading books is a trap I fall into too often. As my buddy Joe Queenan pointed out in a particularly memorable piece he did for the Times some years back, our time on earth is finite. And thus our time to READ is finite. I took this as a personal directive to STOP REREADING. But I broke my own rule when it came to Kate Atkinson. I really wanted to delve into Started Early, but I figured I should read When Will There Be Good News first since I hadn’t read that yet. And by the time I did finish Started Early (I managed to stretch the read out over 48 hours—and that showed restraint, I swear!) I couldn’t really bear to let Jackson Brodie go so I threw caution to the wind and went back and reread Case Histories and One Good Turn again just for the hell of it. I really let my hair down. Atkinson is funny and astute; she’s the sort of writer I feel like I’m friends with just because I’ve read her work. I have a habit of dog-earring pages with particularly good lines as I read and then, when I’m finished, copying those key lines down in a journal. It took me FOREVER to get through copying down the lines from Started Early. There are too many wonderful moments when Atkinson hits on just the right phrasing. Today, as I type this, Started Early is my favorite. Detective Jackson Brodie is ever delightful, and Tracy Waterhouse nearly matches him with her sardonic humor and pure moral compass. She reminds me a bit of Olive Kitteridge. Started Early also validates my long-held and oft trumpeted belief that malls are devoid of culture and spirit-draining. I win again.
So, if you’ve got some free time I recommend tackling one of these puppies. Me? Well, my free-reading time is over for now. I’m off to discover the next brilliant, engrossing thing that you’ll add to your list.
–Laura Tisdel
