Hence, Atkinson’s detective fiction series examines in detail the assemblage of a neo-patriarchal network supporting not only inequality but also gender violence. However, social justice, the necessary outcome of this “humanistic” plot, is always denounced and never achieved, and a form of vigilante justice (taking the law in one’s own hands to punish criminals) is established. It seems evident that Jackson Brodie is created as the agent of change around whom closure, in traditional terms, is reached. 3 The specificity of Atkinson’s commitment to this trend stands out in her portrayal not of the female detective/sleuth Muller signalled as rising at the end of the twentieth century, but of a male one.
2 Her use of the genre places her in this contemporary revision which was labelled as “humanistic crime fiction” by Marcia Muller in 1995 (although probably the term “empathic” is much more appropriate), containing a specific formula in which social critique is placed within the plot. In the latter, Kate Atkinson loosely employs the genre of detection, moving between the tradition of crime fiction and what Joyce and Sutton ( 2018) define as “domestic noir”, to create multiple mysteries all of them tied together and brought to closure around the figure of a detective. 1 Atkinson’s work, up to now, can be divided into two distinct plot schemes: those novels with a young female protagonist, with the exception of A God in Ruins (2015), a prequel to Life After Life (2013) and the detective fiction featuring Jackson Brodie and spanning 2004–2019: Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will There Be Good News, Started Early, Took My Dog and Big Sky. Since the publication of her first novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum in 1995, it could be contended that Atkinson’s narratives are concerned with the representation of all the issues that women face just because of their gender, starting from neo-patriarchal norms and values still embedded in current society to the most brutal and physical form of gender violence: death.
British novelist Kate Atkinson, author of the Jackson Brodie series, has shown her commitment to both popular genres and feminism.
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