One Good Turn

Almost the Perfect Crime

How is it that Kate Atkinson — the warm, funny one who took a Whitbread prize for the family drama Behind the Scenes at the Museum — has become mixed up in a killing spree? How is it that our Kate, pictured on her new book just as we used to imagine her, cosied up in a lovely cardie, has a rave review from Stephen King on that same cover? It is a question that you could ask, in a different way, of some of the characters in One Good Turn, a murder mystery that follows Atkinson’s first departure into the genre, the rapturously received Case Histories. Gloria Hatter, for example, a no-nonsense lady of a certain age, who defends her recipe for Turkish cheesecake to the death, but has no appetite for crime fiction.

When her friend Pam (in Gloria’s suburban world friends are called “Pam") asks her to go to a reading by an Edinburgh crime writer, she refuses. Crime writing “had sucked the life out of her father, and anyway, wasn’t there enough crime in the world without adding to it, even if it was only fictional”? Gloria need not have worried. The crime writer in question is a certain Martin Canning, who does not write anything grisly (Martin is a vegetarian), but rather nostalgic romps starring people named Bertie and with words such as “merry” and “jape”.

Martin and Gloria seem like innocent bystanders on life, and indeed, on the horribly violent road rage attack that they happen to witness as they queue for an event at the Edinburgh Festival.

This is where Atkinson flings off her cardie and puts on her noir raincoat. She draws into the plot a murderous thug, a Russian call girl, an assassin, a soulful woman police detective, and the star of her previous mystery, the private eye Jackson Brodie.

The novel follows a tumultuous week in the lives of these characters, switching between their viewpoints in short chapters in a way that could be confusing in a lesser writer but with Atkinson proves thrillingly addictive. All strangers at the outset, they connect by the end, their loneliness a little diminished. All too share a desire to be someone else — almost everyone in the book goes by at least one pseudonym.

The result reminds me of what someone once said about the actress Holly Hunter. In half of her films she is jolly, nuanced “Holly”, in the others, strong, predatory “Hunter”, but she never manages to be both. In One Good Turn Atkinson proves quite unique in her ability to fuse emotional drama and thriller. She is so successful that it is surprising this has not been attempted more often (although it takes a writer of extraordinary range to bring it off), because both genres benefit.

Too many of Martin’s escapist reveries, or too many of Gloria’s wry reflections on her marriage (“where had she been when feminism occurred — in the kitchen making interesting packed lunches”), and we might have suffocated in the niceness of it all. But this is where Atkinson brings in Brodie, and the single-mother-turned-police-detective Louise who are both harder, nastier, more cynical — on the surface, anyway.

Emotional dramas can be too cloying, and noir can be too dark. I don’t like to gender stereotype, but the perceived “femininity” of Atkinson’s previous work is now placed in a happy relationship with the “masculinity” of crime fiction. Imagine a Richard Curtis film scripted by Raymond Chandler, both a little enlivened by the collaboration, and you have something of the mood.

The mix is embodied by Brodie. Like all good detectives, he is a hero for men and women alike. Louise’s friends tell her that Jackson can’t be tough and tender because “men are like steaks, it’s one or the other”. But the appeal of private detectives is that they are not like ordinary men, they are paid to understand and protect — a bit like a hairdresser crossed with a soldier.

One Good Turn is not perfect — I don’t think Stephen King will have to revise his view that Atkinson’s previous novel was “the best mystery of the decade”. Although the plot keeps the pace page-turningly fast, it may not satisfy crime fans as it is not as clever as you are tantalisingly led to expect.

And, although very funny, the tone can get a little Victoria Wood-ish. Subtitled A Jolly Murder Mystery in a nod to Martin’s brand of mysteries, it can be too jolly, with too many cartoonish extras. But a little imperfection is forgivable, when the pleasures are so great.