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"Case Histories" Review - The Literary Murder Mystery

11/12/2020

 
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I was wandering through Barnes & Noble when it caught my notice. The name wasn’t quite peculiar, but it was minutely out of place. Case Histories. I recognized the title mostly as a clinical term, a synonym for “medical records.” Well then, what is Case Histories doing in the fiction section? - I asked myself. Maybe it’s a psychological procedural, Hannibal-type fodder. Maybe it’s a hospital novel or a techno-thriller about finding patient zero during an epidemic. But the cover’s serene and ominous foggy light blue sky above a country road and green shrubs seemed more typical of straight dramas like A Separate Peace.

The cover also noted “National Bestseller” status. My intrigue increased.


Then there was this review excerpt below the title:

“Not just the best novel I read this year, but the best mystery of the decade....”

That’s high praise, I thought in a Nicholas Cage voice. And contrary to the title and cover art, it’s a mystery; I found that interesting.

Oh, that review excerpt was by Stephen King.
THAT’S HIGH PRAISE, I screamed in my head in my own voice.

I was sold even before Stephen King’s pitch. This was during a time in my life where little marketing attributes, like a title or cover that seems slightly out of place, were enough to make me buy a book. This was also a time when I was adamant about finishing any book I started, no matter how awful.

Luckily, I wasn’t in such a bind.
Case Histories by Kate Atkinson is great.

   What wonderful powers of deduction you have Mr. Brodie,” Julia said, and it was hard to tell whether she was being ironic or trying to flatter him. She had one of those husky voices that sounded as if she were permanently coming down with a cold. Men seemed to find that sexy in a woman, which Jackson thought was odd because it made women sound less like women and more like men. Maybe it was a gay thing.

- Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

The Jackson here is Jackson Brodie, a former cop and now private-eye. He’s a melancholy small-time P.I. who pursues small-time ineffectual cases like infidelity accusations. This changes when three seemingly unrelated cases find their way to him. One is the case of Theo Wyre.

   
And after one too many early morning vigils waiting for her to come home from work in the pub (although he always pretended to be asleep), Theo had suggested casually that they needed a temp in his office and why didn’t she come and help them out and to his astonishment she’d thought about it for a minute and then said, “Okay,” and smiled her lovely smile (hours of patient, expensive orthodontic work when she was younger), and Theo thought, “Thank you, God,” because although Theo didn’t believe in God he often talked to him.

- Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

Theo is a lawyer who, as exhibit by the quote above, dotes on and greatly loves his daughter, Laura. His over-protection of her is what leads to her untimely death though, when she is stabbed in her father’s law office, the killer going unfound.

   Time did not heal – it merely rubbed at the wound, slowly and relentlessly. The world had moved on and forgotten and there was only Theo left to keep Laura’s flame alive. Jennifer lived in Canada now and although they talked on the phone and e-mailed each other, they rarely talked about Laura. Jennifer had never liked the pain of remembering what had happened, but for Theo it was the pain that kept Laura alive in his memory. He was afraid that if it ever began to heal she would disappear.”

- Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
Theo’s become a sort of out of shape recluse since Laura’s passing. He seems to wallow daily in the sorrow of her loss, in a reserved, English sort of way (at least as his story is told to us.) This general reserve is useful in making passages which describe his love and loss all the more pointed.

   Theo never doubted for a moment that when he died he would be reunited with Laura…. It wasn’t that Theo believed in religion, or a God, or an afterlife. He just knew it was impossible to feel this much love and for it to end."

- Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

As an American, I might dramatize the collective British psyche, so take the following perception with a grain of salt. Theo’s anguish over his dead child, his talking to God even though he doesn’t believe in one, his belief that the love he and his child shared couldn’t just evaporate with death – these are miniature aspects of a larger British sentiment. The UK is known for both a longstanding stiff-upper-lippery and a growing atheism. I speculate that during the last century science and war have exacerbated these characteristics. But the latter has also fomented a kind of unity that contains, to a certain arguable extent, intangible spiritual agreement. I wonder if the newest UK generations, not directly related to anyone who had to withstand a military attack, will possess the conditions I describe.

All this to say that Theo isn’t the only outwardly “reserved” character; all of the protagonists and suspects and instigators are. The plotting on a whole is held back, stripped of some common crime novel thrill formulas, and replaced with keen (sometimes witty) observation.


  
There were enough people in the world, surely, without keeping space for the evil bastards who tortured children and animals and macheted innocent people. “Evil bastards” – that was tabloid language from the slaters’ Suns. She may as well cancel her subscription to the Guardian right now, the way she was going.

“Is ‘macheted’ a verb?” Amelia asked Julia.

“Don’t think so.”

Well, that was the end then, she was Americanizing words. Civilization would fall.

- Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

I think I’ve already Americanized a few words in this review. Dope!

As a pair, the Amelia and Julia quoted above are one of Brodie’s three clients. In childhood their younger sister, Olivia, went missing, never to be seen again. When their stodgy professor father dies and they find one of Olivia’s toys in his desk it peaks their suspicion – or longing for closure – and they hire Brodie to pursue the tragic cold case.

Another of Brodie’s three cases involves Caroline, who murdered her husband in a fit of rage. The act itself and the time in prison for it drastically estrange her from her sister, Shirley, and her daughter, Tanya.


  1. She’d said to Shirley, “Treat me as if I’m dead,” but she hadn’t expected her to actually do as she said. But there’d been nothing: no visits, no cards, no birthday gifts, no word at all. For months she waited for Shirley to turn up on a visiting day, with Tanya in her arms (Look, here’s Mummy), or chaperone their useless parents (Come on, you have to visit Michelle), but no. All her letters went unanswered, all her hopes were knocked back until she came to think maybe it really was for the best. Let them get on with their lives, let them be free of her, because what good had she ever done them? She hadn’t loved the people that she’d had a duty to love, and you had to pay the price for that, sooner or later.

    1. - Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
The dutiful love mentioned in this excerpt is also dwelt on by Brody, in relation to his own family.
      1.    They were already at the secondary school by then and Jackson knew life was changing and if he had to choose between his sister and a gang of morons it had to be his sister, even if he’d rather be with the morons, because no matter how you felt, blood always came first, and that wasn’t even something you learned, it was just something that was. And anyway she paid him ten bob a week."

      2. - Jackson thinking about working for his sister during high school Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
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Even with Brody’s deflection at the end there, the ideas of obligatory love in Case Histories struck me as a valuable and pertinent reminder. Across the [Western] world we seem to be getting quicker to abandon those who don’t benefit us, or have betrayed us, or are hard to get along with. Our self-comfort and anger increasingly take the helm over a sense of duty in relationships. I say “we” and “our” because I’m ever guiltier as I age.

Back to the Caroline and Shirley subplot. After Caroline’s sentence for murdering her husband, she makes a new life (changes her name to Caroline) and marries again. This husband is wealthy, comes with his own children and an annoying mother.
   Rowena, Jonathan’s mother, talked all the time about 'breeding' because she had a stable of hunters (big, frightening brutes), but sometimes she seemed to be applying the concept to her own family, and Caroline wanted to point out to her that natural selection led to a vigorous species whereas 'breeding' resulted in congenital defects, in pale, blond children who spoke French on Wednesdays and whose blank Midwich Cuckoo faces suggested latent idiocy. In Caroline’s professional opinion."

- Case Histories by Kate Atkinson


But Jonathan isn’t her only beau. She’s taken by a local priest.
   Maybe he wasn’t the right person for her…. but surely there wasn’t just one person in the whole world who was meant for you? If there was then the odds against you ever bumping up against him would be overwhelming, and knowing Caroline’s luck even if she did bump against him she probably wouldn’t realize who he was. And what if the person who was destined for you was a shanty dweller in Mexico City or a political prisoner in Burma or one of the million people she was unlikely ever to have a relationship with? Like a prematurely balding Anglican vicar in a rural parish in North Yorkshire."

- Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

But while Caroline makes a new life, her sister, Shirley, searches the past. While Caroline was incarcerated, her daughter Tanya was left in Shirley’s care. Tanya eventually is made a ward of her grandparents, on her dead father’s side. They force what becomes and end to Tanya and her Aunt Shirley’s relationship.

Shirley hires Jackson Brody to trace the whereabouts of Tanya, who would now be a young adult. It is Brody’s narrative that interested me the most, maybe because I’m a simple sucker for the more sluethed aspects of a detective novel, and maybe it’s because Brody and his thoughts are just well crafted. Check these witty descriptions of him taking likings to women:
   Both Sharon and the Dental Nurse had dark, enigmatic eyes, and they had a way of looking at him indifferently over their masks as if they were contemplating what they might do to him next, like sadistic belly dancers with surgical instruments."
- Case Histories
by Kate Atkinson 

Well, it was a new way of getting a fresh start, a new life: just blow up the old one.

“Gas?” he’d said hopefully to the fire investigation officer.

“Dynamite,” the fire officer said. (A short, manly kind of exchange.) Who had access to dynamite? People who worked in mines, obviously. Jackson fished in his wallet for DC Lowther’s card and phoned him. “The plot thickens,” he said, and wished he hadn’t said that because it sounded like something from a bad detective novel. “I think we have a suspect.” That didn’t sound much better. “My house has just exploded, by the way.” At least that was novel.

(“Quintus Rain,” DC Lowther ruminated, “what kind of name is that?”

“A bloody stupid one,” Jackson said.)

He carried the drinks outside, an orange juice for himself , a Coke for Marlee, and a gin and tonic for Kim Jessop, except she was called Kim Strachan now because at some point in the last ten years she had married and then divorced a “mad Scottish head case” called George Strachan. Now she owned a bar in Sitges and a restaurant in Barcelona and was partnered up with a Russian “businessman.” She was still blond and sported the deep leathery tan of someone who thought skin cancer happened to other people, although, judging by her smoker’s cough, it was going to be a race with lung cancer. As befitted a mafia mistress, she was wearing enough gold to furnish an Indian wedding. She hadn’t lost any of the Geordie in her – Kim Strachan, née Jessop, didn’t have a single drop of soft southern DNA in her body. Jackson warmed to her immediately.

-
Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

Brodie’s weathered, sarcastic, can handle himself, is divorced and rough around the edges, haunted by the murder of his own sister as he investigated the murder of someone else’s. Case Histories is really a miserable set of circumstances all around. His wit and his tagalong daughter provide some needed sunshine throughout.
    Marlee began to grumble in earnest. “I’m hungry, Daddy. Daddy.”

“Yeah, okay. We’ll get something to eat on the way.”

“Say ‘yes,’ not ‘yeah.’ Way to what?”

“A convent.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a bunch of women locked up together.”

“Because they’re bad?”

“Because they’re good. I hope.”


- Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

Case Histories isn’t a nail-biter. Its heavy, the air and plot more something to chew on slowly than flip through. It isn’t even slow in a Law & Order procedural type of way; it’s a set of family dramas that unfold like crumpled paper into a complex mystery. Read it if you like meticulously reading great writing.

Buy Case Histories HERE


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