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Summary
Summary
Waterhouse leads a quiet, ordered life as a retired police detective-a life that takes a surprising turn when she encounters Kelly Cross, a habitual offender, dragging a young child through town. Both appear miserable and better off without each other-or so decides Tracy, in a snap decision that surprises herself as much as Kelly.
Suddenly burdened with a small child, Tracy soon learns her parental inexperience is actually the least of her problems, as much larger ones loom for her and her young charge.
Meanwhile, Jackson Brodie, the beloved detective of novels such as Case Histories , is embarking on a different sort of rescue-that of an abused dog. Dog in tow, Jackson is about to learn, along with Tracy, that no good deed goes unpunished.
Author Notes
Kate Atkinson was born in York, and studied English Literature at the University of Dundee. She earned her Masters Degree from Dundee in 1974. She then went on to study for a doctorate in American Literature but she failed at the viva (oral examination) stage. After leaving the university, she took on a variety of jobs from home help to legal secretary and teacher. Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year ahead of Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh and Roy Jenkins's biography of William Ewart Gladstone. It went on to be a Sunday Times bestseller.
Since then, she has published another five novels, one play, and one collection of short stories. Her work is often celebrated for its wit, wisdom and subtle characterisation, and the surprising twists and plot turns. Her most recent work has featured the popular former detective Jackson Brodie. In 2009, she donated the short story Lucky We Live Now to Oxfam's 'Ox-Tales' project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Atkinson's story was published in the 'Earth' collection. In March 2010, Atkinson appeared at the York Literature Festival, giving a world-premier reading from an early chapter from her forthcoming novel Started Early, Took My Dog, which is set mainly in the English city of Leeds.
Atkinson's bestselling novel, Life after Life, has won numerous awards, including the COSTA Novel Award for 2013. The follow-up to Life After Life is A God in Ruins and was published in 2015. This title won a Costa Book Award 2015 in the novel category.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
New York Review of Books Review
Kate Atkinson returns to a crime series, with layered mysteries and studies in human nature. IT'S West Yorkshire not long before the Yorkshire Ripper starts his killing spree, and two police officers make a grisly discovery. Behind a locked door in a block of flats lies the decomposing body of a woman. But that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is there's a child locked in with her, "filthy, nothing but skin and bone," looking "like a famine victim." Slain women have become a staple of Kate Atkinson's crime novels, which also feature the gruff yet protective ex-cop, ex-P.I., ex-husband and father of two, Jackson Brodie. "Started Early, Took My Dog" is the fourth book in a series noted for its unorthodoxy. The Brodie novels are twisting, turning, tangled narratives that leap from decade to decade, character to character, with the secrets playing second fiddle to Atkinson's sad and funny studies in human nature. Age 45 when we first met him in 2004 in "Case Histories," Jackson is now 50, and, in four books covering five years, he has been through several lifetimes' worth of ordeals (winning and losing a fortune, marrying a grifter, barely surviving a train crash, to mention just a few). Jackson is "off the grid" now, semiretired, picking up jobs that mostly involve looking for people, though "not necessarily finding them." His current assignment is to trace the biological parents of a woman named Hope McMaster, adopted back in the 1970s when she was 2 by a British couple who promptly moved their little family to New Zealand. (He's also hoping to find his second ex-wife, the one who "had taken him for the longest of cons - seduced, courted, married and robbed him blind.") Hard-won clues soon lead Jackson to the door of Tracy Waterhouse, one of those two unlucky West Yorkshire officers whose 1975 flashback opened the book. But she isn't at home, and Jackson isn't the only person looking for her. Precisely where she is and what she's doing is another of the book's many mysteries. Not long retired from the force, she now works on a security detail at a local shopping complex. Doing her rounds one day, she encounters a woman she knows from her police days (a "prostitute, druggie, thief, all-round pikey"), who has in her clutches a screaming child. Tracy follows the pair to a bus stop where, inexplicably - "Tracy didn't know how it happened" - she offers to buy the child for £3,000. The woman accepts. Jackson can't find Tracy because she's trying not to be found. She's hiding out with her new acquisition, a little girl named Courtney, making plans to change their identities and take flight as "Imogen Brown and her little girl, Lucy." She imagines "walking hand in hand with the kid into a clean, untarnished, white future. She would make up for all the other lost kids. One fallen fledgling popped back into the nest." Good-hearted Tracy: over 50, overweight and in over her head. She tells herself she's rescuing Courtney, and perhaps she is. But Courtney's true identity is hazy, and as some 35-year-old questions begin to be answered troubling parallels emerge. Decades from now, will the anguish of Hope McMaster, the woman Jackson is tracing - the woman with "the black hole at the beginning of her life" - repeat itself for Courtney? Is Tracy trying to save a mistreated little girl or herself? Atkinson's characters tend to have bleak pasts, which she mines most expertly, if sometimes to the point of distraction. Jackson, as we learned in "Case Histories," has never recovered from his sister's unsolved murder. It chases him through all these novels, fostering his intensity and his protective concern for women. (Like the matter of Courtney's questionable identity, Jackson's personal cold case seems to warrant its own book.) Tracy's childhood wasn't so much traumatic as bare and unloving, precisely not what she has planned for Courtney. As for Tilly . . . Wait, Tilly? Who's Tilly? Tilly is an elderly actress playing a role that's largely peripheral to the book's central mysteries, but which taps into its themes of loss and regret. Like so many of the women in these pages, Tilly is mourning a lost chance at motherhood, in her case because of a miscarriage "back in the Soho days." (There's a passing reference to a woman who has "no kids, by choice," but she's "hard-nosed" and likes her "lifestyle" too much.) Past sorrows are coming back to life for Tilly, even as the present is disappearing, falling through the cracks in her mind. Atkinson conveys Tilly's dementia through an intense stream-of-consciousness narrative in which thoughts slide hither and thither, from Tweets to Tweety-pie, billabong to billy, coddled eggs to coddling a child. ("'Coddle' was a lovely word, like cuddle. If Tilly had a little girl to look after she would coddle her.") It's during one of those many bewildered moments (she's in a mall, disoriented and suspected of shoplifting) that Tilly chances upon Jackson, who lends her a comforting hand. "So nice," she thinks, "to encounter a proper gentleman these days." Women of every age are drawn to Jackson. And he certainly does have an air of the strong, silent, poetry-loving (Emily Dickinson!) British detective about him. He's far too irreverent to wear Adam Dalgliesh's shoes, of course, but that only adds to Jackson's appeal. Consider, for a moment, how he puts his newly discovered violent side to use: by slugging a mean, tattooed, barrel-chested thug in order to rescue a small dog, that's how. Rescuing dogs, children and little old ladies? Isn't Atkinson starting to lay it on a bit thick? Sure. But it's terribly charming. Alison McCulloch, a former editor at the Book Review, lives in New Zealand.
Guardian Review
Two ex-coppers make impulse decisions one day in Leeds. One is Tracy Waterhouse, now a security guard, who offers a junkie pounds 2,000 for the little girl she is yelling at. The other is Jackson Brodie, Atkinson's melancholic private investigator, who grabs a mistreated dog from its owner. The heart of the detective story is Leeds in the 1970s when Tracy was a young copper and Peter Sutcliffe was beginning his killing spree, but the soul of the narrative lies in Atkinson's bleak but witty descriptions of an atomised, contemporary Yorkshire where Tracy feeds her loneliness on Gregg's sausage rolls and Brodie is only comfortable in featureless hotels or the car that takes him from one dead-end clue to another in search of a client's birth parents. Lost and stolen girls are the common feature that inevitably bring Tracy and Brodie together. Atkinson uses the crime genre as the loosest of devices, but it is Brodie's fondness for Emily Dickinson that provides the leitmotif: "Tell all the truth but tell it slant . . ." - Isobel Montgomery Two ex-coppers make impulse decisions one day in Leeds. One is Tracy Waterhouse, now a security guard, who offers a junkie pounds 2,000 for the little girl she is yelling at. The other is Jackson Brodie, Atkinson's melancholic private investigator, who grabs a mistreated dog from its owner. - Isobel Montgomery.
Library Journal Review
Investigator Jackson Brodie just can't seem to stay retired. His fourth outing has him tracking down the birth parents of his latest client. Along the way, he rescues a dog, which has its own problems. Add to the mix a retired childless ex-cop who buys a toddler from a junkie. It's complicated, but narrator Graeme Malcolm masterfully handles the material. (LJ 7/11) (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1975: 9 April Leeds: 'Motorway City of the Seventies'. A proud slogan. No irony intended. Gaslight still flickering on some streets. Life in a northern town. The Bay City Rollers at number one. IRA bombs all over the country. Margaret Thatcher is the new leader of the Conservative Party. At the beginning of the month, in Albuquerque, Bill Gates founds what will become Microsoft.At the end of the month Saigon falls to the North Vietnamese army. The Black and White Minstrel Show is still on television, John Poulson is still in jail. Bye Bye Baby, Baby Goodbye . In the middle of it all, Tracy Waterhouse was only concerned with the hole in one of the toes of her tights. It was growing bigger with every step she took.They were new on this morning as well. They had been told that it was on the fifteenth floor of the flats in Lovell Park and - of course - the lifts were broken. The two PCs huffed and puffed their way up the stairs. By the time they neared the top they were resting at every turn of the stair. WPC Tracy Waterhouse, a big, graceless girl only just off probation, and PC Ken Arkwright, a stout white Yorkshireman with a heart of lard. Climbing Everest. They would both see the beginning of the Ripper's killing spree but Arkwright would be retired long before the end of it. Donald Neilson, the Black Panther from Bradford, hadn't been captured yet and Harold Shipman had probably already started killing patients unlucky enough to be under his care in Pontefract General Infirmary.West Yorkshire in 1975, awash with serial killers. Tracy Waterhouse was still wet behind the ears, although she wouldn't admit to it. Ken Arkwright had seen more than most but remained avuncular and sanguine, a good copper for a green girl to be beneath the wing of. There were bad apples in the barrel -- the dark cloud of David Oluwale's death still cast a long shadow on police in the West Riding, but Arkwright wasn't under it. He could be violent when necessary, sometimes when not, but he didn't discriminate on the grounds of colour when it came to reward and punishment. And women were often slappers and scrubbers but he'd helped out a few street girls with fags and cash, and he loved his wife and daughters. Despite pleas from her teachers to stay on and 'make something of herself ',Tracy had left school at fifteen to do a shorthand and typing course and went straight into Montague Burton's offices as a junior, eager to get on with her adult life. 'You're a bright girl,' the man in personnel said, offering her a cigarette. 'You could go far.You never know, PA to the MD one day.' She didn't know what 'MD' meant. Wasn't too sure about 'PA' either.The man's eyes were all over her. Sixteen, never been kissed by a boy, never drunk wine, not even Blue Nun. Never eaten an avocado or seen an aubergine, never been on an aeroplane. It was different in those days. She bought a tweed maxi coat from Etam and a new umbrella. Ready for anything. Or as ready as she would ever be.Two years later she was in the police. Nothing could have prepared her for that. Bye Bye,Baby . Tracy was worried that she might never leave home. She spent her nights in front of the television with her mother while her father drank -- modestly -- in the local Conservative club.Together,Tracy and her mother, Dorothy, watched The Dick Emery Show or Steptoe and Son or Mike Yarwood doing an impression of Steptoe and his son. Or Edward Heath, his shoulders heaving up and down. Must have been a sad day for Mike Yarwood when Margaret Thatcher took over the leadership. Sad day for everyone. Tracy had never understood the attraction of impressionists. Her stomach rumbled like a train. She'd been on the cottage cheese and grapefruit diet for a week.Wondered if you could starve to death while you were still overweight. 'Jesus H. Christ,' Arkwright gasped, bending over and resting his hands on his knees when they finally achieved the fifteenth floor. 'I used to be a rugby wing forward, believe it or not.' 'Ay, well, you're just an old, fat bloke now,' Tracy said. 'What number?' 'Twenty-five. It's at the end.' A neighbour had phoned in anonymously about a bad smell ('a right stink') coming from the flat. 'Dead rats, probably,'Arkwright said.'Or a cat. Remember those two dogs in that house in Chapeltown? Oh no, before your time, lass.' 'I heard about it. Bloke went off and left them without any food. They ate each other in the end.' 'They didn't eat each other,' Arkwright said. ' One of them ate the other one.' 'You're a bloody pedant, Arkwright.' 'A what? Cheeky so-and-so. Ey up, here we go. Fuck a duck, Trace, you can smell it from here.' Tracy Waterhouse pressed her thumb on the doorbell and kept it there. Glanced down at her ugly police-issue regulation black laceups and wiggled her toes inside her ugly police-issue regulation black tights. Her big toe had gone right through the hole in the tights now and a ladder was climbing up towards one of her big footballer's knees. 'It'll be some old bloke who's been lying here for weeks,' she said. 'I bloody hate them.' 'I hate train jumpers.' 'Dead kiddies.' 'Yeah. They're the worst,' Arkwright agreed. Dead children were trumps, every time. Tracy took her thumb off the doorbell and tried turning the door handle. Locked. 'Ah, Jesus, Arkwright, it's humming in there. Something that's not about to get up and walk away, that's for sure.' Arkwright banged on the door and shouted,'Hello, it's the police here, is anyone in there? Shit,Tracy, can you hear that?' 'Flies?' Ken Arkwright bent down and looked through the letterbox.'Oh, Christ--' He recoiled from the letterbox so quickly that Tracy's first thought was that someone had squirted something into his eyes. It had happened to a sergeant a few weeks ago, a nutter with a Squeezy washing-up bottle full of bleach. It had put everyone off looking through letterboxes. Arkwright, however, immediately squatted down and pushed open the letterbox again and started talking soothingly, the way you would to a nervy dog. 'It's OK, it's OK, everything's OK now. Is Mummy there? Or your daddy? We're going to help you. It's OK.' He stood and got ready to shoulder the door. Pawed the ground, blew air out of his mouth and said to Tracy, 'Prepare yourself, lass, it's not going to be pretty.' Excerpted from Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
