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Fiction. Mystery. Suspense. Thriller. HTML:Tracy 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 show more 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. show less
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Imprinted There are some strikingly similar themes involving children and parental love between these two terrific novels.
Member Reviews
If there was a way of giving this book more than five stars, I would. It is breath-takingly good fiction.
It works as a satisfying crime novel and as a mainstream examination both of how we live with the consequences of the choices that we make and the mores and attitudes of Britain now and in 1975.
The prose is beautiful. The voice of each character is distinct and believable. Time and place are evoked with an almost clinical clarity. The interior monologues, particularly that of "Silly Tilly" who is slipping into dementia are intimate, accurate and yet easy to read. The shifts along the timeline and between characters' point of view are well crafted so that the reader's understanding of the story and characters of the people evolves show more into something richly textured and authentic.
Despite the gritty nature of some of the themes and the gruesome start to the chain of events that the novel unravels, this remains an optimistic book that can make you laugh as easily as it can make you cry.
Perhaps it's because this book describes my own generation but I felt deep empathy with the newly-retired police woman, coming to terms with the gap between what she wants and where her choices have taken her. Tilly's tale also stays in memory, not just because of the skilful way in which dementia is evoked but because of the betrayals and disappointments that she has endured. "The Kid" Coutrney/Lucy slices her way into the reader's heart with thumbs-ups and star hand waves and tiny trove of perosanl treasures that she lays out like an act of prayer.
The book is full of people who make the wrong decision or trust the wrong person and pay the price. It is a sign of Kate Atkinson's skill that we come to understand and empathise with these people rather than judging them
The back of the book tells me that this is the fourth book featuring Jackson Brodie. but my lack of knowledge of the previous books didn't mar my enjoyment of this one. Jackson is a curious character, a lightning-rod for stange events that he reacts to with remarkable passivity. A man who would like insight into himself but can only find it in the words of his ex-wife. A man who is surprised to find that the company of a dog is good for the soul
This was my first Kate Akinson book, but it certainly won't be my last show less
It works as a satisfying crime novel and as a mainstream examination both of how we live with the consequences of the choices that we make and the mores and attitudes of Britain now and in 1975.
The prose is beautiful. The voice of each character is distinct and believable. Time and place are evoked with an almost clinical clarity. The interior monologues, particularly that of "Silly Tilly" who is slipping into dementia are intimate, accurate and yet easy to read. The shifts along the timeline and between characters' point of view are well crafted so that the reader's understanding of the story and characters of the people evolves show more into something richly textured and authentic.
Despite the gritty nature of some of the themes and the gruesome start to the chain of events that the novel unravels, this remains an optimistic book that can make you laugh as easily as it can make you cry.
Perhaps it's because this book describes my own generation but I felt deep empathy with the newly-retired police woman, coming to terms with the gap between what she wants and where her choices have taken her. Tilly's tale also stays in memory, not just because of the skilful way in which dementia is evoked but because of the betrayals and disappointments that she has endured. "The Kid" Coutrney/Lucy slices her way into the reader's heart with thumbs-ups and star hand waves and tiny trove of perosanl treasures that she lays out like an act of prayer.
The book is full of people who make the wrong decision or trust the wrong person and pay the price. It is a sign of Kate Atkinson's skill that we come to understand and empathise with these people rather than judging them
The back of the book tells me that this is the fourth book featuring Jackson Brodie. but my lack of knowledge of the previous books didn't mar my enjoyment of this one. Jackson is a curious character, a lightning-rod for stange events that he reacts to with remarkable passivity. A man who would like insight into himself but can only find it in the words of his ex-wife. A man who is surprised to find that the company of a dog is good for the soul
This was my first Kate Akinson book, but it certainly won't be my last show less
Absolutely LOVED this one! And I don't usually love mysteries, or 'series' books, and Kate Atkinson's STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG (2010), as one link in her Jackson Brodie books, is both. But it's a multi-layered , mysteries within a mystery, with a group of fascinating central characters. Besides Brodie, a fifty-ish former cop turned PI, who is looking for the birth parents of a client in New Zealand, there is Tracy Waterhouse, a stocky, single, no nonsense,recently retired police officer from Leeds, Yorkshire, where most of the story is set (with frequent flashbacks to 1975). These two are the central figures in a tangled plot that begins in a Leeds shopping mall where Tracy is now employed as head of security. In the same day, she show more acquires - buys - a four year-old girl, and Brodie ends up with a small dog. Both girl and dog were being physically and noticeably abused (in separate incidents) when these two stepped in to stop it. It's complicated, but utterly believable, and the start of such an absorbing mystery - populated with prostitutes, serial killers, crooked cops, TV soaps actors, thugs and gangsters, missing children and more - that I found it hard to put down. And all of the characters are superbly developed, with their own stories, all fitting seamlessly into the main plot. Throughout Atkinson displays a wry, sometimes dark sense of humor in a narrative filled with literary and cultural allusions, not to mention the red herrings that make you think you've figured out "who dunnit," only to leave you flummoxed and still wondering a page - or chapter - later.
I recently read and reviewed TELL IT SLANT a new novel by Larry Baker that pays tribute to the poet, Emily Dickinson. And now, hot in its heels (at least for me), is another novel with a Dickinson-ian title, the exact significance of which I'm still mulling over. But no matter, I guess. To repeat: I loved this book. My very highest recommendation.
- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less
I recently read and reviewed TELL IT SLANT a new novel by Larry Baker that pays tribute to the poet, Emily Dickinson. And now, hot in its heels (at least for me), is another novel with a Dickinson-ian title, the exact significance of which I'm still mulling over. But no matter, I guess. To repeat: I loved this book. My very highest recommendation.
- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less
I am a huge fan of Kate Atkinson in general, but especially of her Jackson Brodie novels. I've rarely encountered a single genre-enmeshed detective story so well written, with such fantastic, well-rounded characters, and with a complex plot that actually comes together completely at the end and leaves me wanting for nothing... much less five of these books all in the same series. Atkinson is a master at her craft. Any living writer out there today should try to be more like her, regardless of their genre (or lack thereof). One point I'll make repeatedly as I review these books is how fascinating it is that aside from perhaps the first in this series, Jackson, the detective in these detective stories, is actually the least important show more character involved. All of the characters around him, what they do, what they've done, where they come from, who they are, are much more critical to each of these individual novels. I read once that traditional martial arts movies only need the barest plot, which is like a clothesline upon which to hang as many action sequences as possible. Well, in these books Jackson serves as the clothesline for all of the other characters' stories. He gets involved, to a degree, but even he isn't always the one solving the mystery or saving the day. It's as if, after the first book, she just needed a common thread to tie them together, and he was willing to play along. Anyway (as I tend to digress...) if you have the time and are interested in superbly written mysteries, give these a try. show less
Whenever I feel that my reading has been a bit esoteric, I reach back to Kate Atkinson and another of her Jackson Brody novels. This is not a knock on Atkinson. Her writing is literary, witty, observational, and empathetic. I’ve come to enjoy her style of introducing random characters and getting into the minds of various people, and then bringing them all together to satisfactory conclusion of an intricate plot. In this case, Jackson Brody begins by rescuing a dog from some oaf, a retired police woman named Tracy rescues a little girl from a drug addicted prostitute, and in a general theme that resonates throughout the novel - no good deed goes unpunished.
The narrative starts to connect when Jackson takes on a case from a woman in show more Australia who’s trying to find out her birth history. She has loved her adopted parents, but now they have died and she’s trying to connect to any origin story that he can uncover. At the same time, the narrative traces back to 1975 when another working girl was found murdered in her apartment by a new detective (that same Tracy Waterhouse) and present in the room of this decomposing body was a little boy. Throughout the novel, we go back-and-forth to the events that unfolded after the discovery of this dead woman and to the events going on in present day in the lives of Jackson and Tracy, and also an aging actress with dementia. The reader gets to know all of these characters and again the writing is both clever and filled in this particular novel with bits of Emily Dickinson allusions. I am destined. I’m sure to read the two other novels in this six novel series. I look forward to completing the Jackson Brody story.
Lines:
The social worker was there (apparently) to help guide him through that terrible year of bereavement which began with his mother dying of cancer and ended with his brother killing himself after their sister was murdered.
Julia had once told him that the ideal partner was one that you could keep in a cupboard and take out when you felt like it.
An old flame flickering weakly rather than burning brightly, denied oxygen by their absence from each other.
It was a woman’s job to try and improve a man. It was a man’s job to resist improvement.
She looked very demure compared to some of the flesh on show, mutton dressed as lamb.
She was the kind of wife you were glad to leave at home.
All whores wanted was money, Barry “explained” to Tracy. Wives made you pay with your lifeblood.
Skinny, midthirties, dyed black hair left over from the previous decade, cut in a bob so sharp that it looked as if it would cut you if you got too close to her. She had a beaky nose that gave her a hungry look. She was the kind who would trample over the bodies of the fallen to get to the story.
Tracy’s farewell piss-up had already acquired legendary status. Everyone liked Tracy, although a lot of them had liked to pretend that they didn’t.
Both men had the doughy faces of people reared on a diet of fat and potatoes and were dressed in leather jackets that had last been fashionable sometime in the seventies, unless you lived in Albania, where they had never become démodé and possibly never would.
A little carriage clock on the mantelpiece struck a tinny-sounding hour and Marilyn Nettles flinched like a woman who had just realized how long it was since she’d had a drink.
Tracy had finally managed to dispense with the awkward burden of her virginity.
He wasn’t what you’d call a catch, but then Tracy wasn’t looking to keep him.
Nice coincidence, although I always say that a coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen.”
This was love. It didn’t come free, you paid in pain. Your own. But then nobody ever said love was easy. Well, they did, but they were idiots.
Jackson didn’t know what ‘it’ was, but that was the point, wasn’t it? That was what solving something was about, it was hunting the ‘it’ down, pinning its arms above its head and making it spill the beans. It was like being in a game, a game where you didn’t know the rules or the identity of the other players and where you were unsure of the goal.” show less
The narrative starts to connect when Jackson takes on a case from a woman in show more Australia who’s trying to find out her birth history. She has loved her adopted parents, but now they have died and she’s trying to connect to any origin story that he can uncover. At the same time, the narrative traces back to 1975 when another working girl was found murdered in her apartment by a new detective (that same Tracy Waterhouse) and present in the room of this decomposing body was a little boy. Throughout the novel, we go back-and-forth to the events that unfolded after the discovery of this dead woman and to the events going on in present day in the lives of Jackson and Tracy, and also an aging actress with dementia. The reader gets to know all of these characters and again the writing is both clever and filled in this particular novel with bits of Emily Dickinson allusions. I am destined. I’m sure to read the two other novels in this six novel series. I look forward to completing the Jackson Brody story.
Lines:
The social worker was there (apparently) to help guide him through that terrible year of bereavement which began with his mother dying of cancer and ended with his brother killing himself after their sister was murdered.
Julia had once told him that the ideal partner was one that you could keep in a cupboard and take out when you felt like it.
An old flame flickering weakly rather than burning brightly, denied oxygen by their absence from each other.
It was a woman’s job to try and improve a man. It was a man’s job to resist improvement.
She looked very demure compared to some of the flesh on show, mutton dressed as lamb.
She was the kind of wife you were glad to leave at home.
All whores wanted was money, Barry “explained” to Tracy. Wives made you pay with your lifeblood.
Skinny, midthirties, dyed black hair left over from the previous decade, cut in a bob so sharp that it looked as if it would cut you if you got too close to her. She had a beaky nose that gave her a hungry look. She was the kind who would trample over the bodies of the fallen to get to the story.
Tracy’s farewell piss-up had already acquired legendary status. Everyone liked Tracy, although a lot of them had liked to pretend that they didn’t.
Both men had the doughy faces of people reared on a diet of fat and potatoes and were dressed in leather jackets that had last been fashionable sometime in the seventies, unless you lived in Albania, where they had never become démodé and possibly never would.
A little carriage clock on the mantelpiece struck a tinny-sounding hour and Marilyn Nettles flinched like a woman who had just realized how long it was since she’d had a drink.
Tracy had finally managed to dispense with the awkward burden of her virginity.
He wasn’t what you’d call a catch, but then Tracy wasn’t looking to keep him.
Nice coincidence, although I always say that a coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen.”
This was love. It didn’t come free, you paid in pain. Your own. But then nobody ever said love was easy. Well, they did, but they were idiots.
Jackson didn’t know what ‘it’ was, but that was the point, wasn’t it? That was what solving something was about, it was hunting the ‘it’ down, pinning its arms above its head and making it spill the beans. It was like being in a game, a game where you didn’t know the rules or the identity of the other players and where you were unsure of the goal.” show less
“A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen.” If you can't buy into that philosophy, the Jackson Brodie novels probably aren't for you. Kate Atkinson is a master at stringing together coincidence after coincidence into a suspenseful narrative. Coincidence usually results in a predictable plot, but the Jackson Brodie novels are anything but predictable. As the coincidences accumulate and seem to point in one direction, the story will take an unexpected turn and go somewhere most readers wouldn't guess. Even though Jackson Brodie goes to some pretty dark places, including within himself, there's quite a bit of humor, and even joy, within the pages of this novel. And a dog and a cute kid. What more can a reader ask for? I show more think Courtney would give this one two thumbs up. Who is Courtney, you ask? You'll have to read the book to find out! show less
Atkinson is a thinking persons writer, who is also not caught up in using big words to discuss big concepts. This is extremely difficult to pull off, as many authors try to either dumb down their ideas to fit a certain reading genre or they inflate their work with self-importance. Atkinson digs deep into the human psyche and weaves tales upon themselves and over again, and everything in her books is connected. There is a reason for everything she does and everything falls into place, one by one, as the story unfolds.
She's also an economical writer, one who will use the right word or phrase at the right now. She doesn't skimp: everything is well placed and thought out. Reading Atkinson is always a great reminder why I love to read: To be show more placed in the story, to witness the characters successes and triumphs, and to feel as though you are not a voyeur, but an eyewitness to the story's tale.
After a long personal hiatus with reading, diving back in with STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG was a joy. Atkinson reaffirms my faith modern literature and makes me hungry for more. show less
She's also an economical writer, one who will use the right word or phrase at the right now. She doesn't skimp: everything is well placed and thought out. Reading Atkinson is always a great reminder why I love to read: To be show more placed in the story, to witness the characters successes and triumphs, and to feel as though you are not a voyeur, but an eyewitness to the story's tale.
After a long personal hiatus with reading, diving back in with STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG was a joy. Atkinson reaffirms my faith modern literature and makes me hungry for more. show less
Another really good book from Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog sees the return of retired, curmudgeonly private detective, Jackson Brodie, in a novel about child abduction and murder which is less about mystery and more about character exploration. Atkinson has such an admirable, deft way of sketching people—whether the characters she creates are sympathetic or not, she writes with such intelligence and such understanding that they all have their own convincing internal life. Sometimes it feels as if she gets carried away with her own creations—one or two of the secondary characters were accorded just that little bit too much space—but even Atkinson's tangents are well-written. The book's ending sets up the scope for two show more or three possible directions in which Brodie could go. I will be interested to see where Atkinson takes him next. show less
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ThingScore 75
“Started Early, Took My Dog” — with a wonderful title from Emily Dickinson, summoning a poem that is as artfully enshrouded as this novel — is... jampacked with echoes, parallels, doppelgängers, sneaky omissions and authorial attempts to mislead. For Ms. Atkinson this is business as usual and often a source of final-act revelatory glee. But it doesn’t coalesce as neatly as this show more series’s earlier installments have. show less
added by Shortride
Kate Atkinson began as a prize-winning literary novelist with Behind the Scenes at the Museum and has, like Michael Dibdin and Ian Rankin before, reinvented herself by using the tropes of detective fiction. She's just as serious and formally interesting as ever, only her novels featuring the ex-policeman Jackson Brodie involve unravelling a couple of murders. With their startling first show more chapters, appealing cast of familiar characters and meticulous observation of contemporary reality they read like Elizabeth George crossed with Elizabeth Bowen.
The fourth, Started Early, Took My Dog is about child abduction, and people who fall through the cracks of modern Britain unless somebody bothers to help. The narrative switches between the 1970s and today with dizzying, at times perplexing, skill. Tracy, its hefty heroine is, like Brodie, ex-police. As a young copper she found a starving, half-frozen child in a flat with his murdered mother. Tracy persists in asking questions, and the child disappears.
Atkinson's detective novels capture the strangeness of modern times, and our supposedly atomised lives, with spiky wit, emotional intelligence and consummate cleverness. All her novels are about the choices that we make and the things we leave behind; about parenthood and the anguish that vulnerability brings. Above all, they scrutinise an England too few literary novelists seem to notice, or care about. show less
The fourth, Started Early, Took My Dog is about child abduction, and people who fall through the cracks of modern Britain unless somebody bothers to help. The narrative switches between the 1970s and today with dizzying, at times perplexing, skill. Tracy, its hefty heroine is, like Brodie, ex-police. As a young copper she found a starving, half-frozen child in a flat with his murdered mother. Tracy persists in asking questions, and the child disappears.
Atkinson's detective novels capture the strangeness of modern times, and our supposedly atomised lives, with spiky wit, emotional intelligence and consummate cleverness. All her novels are about the choices that we make and the things we leave behind; about parenthood and the anguish that vulnerability brings. Above all, they scrutinise an England too few literary novelists seem to notice, or care about. show less
added by VivienneR
So much of the narrative is retrospective or interior that there's not much urgency to unfolding events, however highly coloured. And there's a rhetorical whimsy reminiscent of some of Atkinson's earlier books, a devil-may-care gesturing at the novel's own fictionality, which can leave the characters threatening to float free of our trust in them. But we follow their digressive, meandering show more voices avidly as they circle around their own particular loves and losses, all knitted together with Atkinson's extraordinary combination of wit, plain-speaking, tenderness and control. She's an old hand at paradox now: "All roads lead home," says Julia. "All roads lead away from home," Jackson replies. show less
added by souloftherose
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Author Information
36+ Works 52,463 Members
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 show more 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) show less
Some Editions
Awards and Honors
Awards
Distinctions
Series
Work Relationships
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Started Early, Took My Dog
- Original title
- Started Early, Took My Dog
- Original publication date
- 2010-11-02
- People/Characters
- Jackson Brodie; Tracy Waterhouse; Julia Land; Carol Braithwaite; Linda Pallister; Ken Arkwright (show all 15); Len Lomax; Rex Marshall; Kelly Cross; Courtney; Ray Strickland; Harry Reynolds; Hope McMaster; Brian Jackson; Matilda "Tilly" Squires
- Important places
- Leeds, England, UK; Whitby, North Yorkshire, England, UK; Fountains Abbey, North Yorkshire, England, UK; Merrion Centre, Leeds, England, UK; Headingley, West Yorkshire, England, UK; Leeds Central Library, Leeds, England, UK
- Epigraph
- For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all f... (show all)or the want of a horseshoe nail.
Traditional
'I was just cleaning up the place a bit.'
Peter Sutcliffe - Dedication
- For my father
- First words
- Leeds: 'Motorway City of the Seventies'. A proud slogan.
- Quotations
- "Hoop' is een ding met veren -
dat neerstrijkt in de ziel -
een melodie zingt zonder tekst -
en nooit stopt - met zijn lied -
het zoetste klinkt - in wilde Vlaag -
De storm moet bitter zijn -
Als h... (show all)ij het Vogeltje beschaamt
dat velen heeft verblijd -
Ik hoorde hem in het kilste land -
En op de vreemdste Zee -
Toch vroeg het - nooit - in Extremis,
een kruimeltje - van Mij.
Emily Dickinson, vertaling van Louise van Santen.
You can't change the past, only the future, and the only place you could change the future was in the present.
Josie, his first wife, had once said to him that if ran far enough he would end up back where he started but Jackson didn't think that the place he had started from existed anymore.
Title from the Emily Dickinson poem (656):
I started Early – Took my Dog –
And visited the Sea –
The Mermaids in the Basement
Came out to look at me –
And Frigates – in the Upper Floor
... (show all)Extended Hempen Hands –
Presuming Me to be a Mouse –
Aground – opon the Sands –
But no Man moved Me – till the Tide
Went past my simple Shoe –
And past my Apron – and my Belt
And past my Boddice – too –
And made as He would eat me up –
As wholly as a Dew
Opon a Dandelion's Sleeve –
And then – I started – too –
And He – He followed – close behind –
I felt His Silver Heel
Opon my Ancle – Then My Shoes
Would overflow with Pearl –
Until We met the Solid Town –
No One He seemed to know –
And bowing – with a Mighty look –
At me – The Sea withdrew –
Schrodinger ... and his cat, and anyone else that felt like it, had all climbed inside Pandora's box and were dining on a can of worms.
"Look," Tracy said, taking out a Biro, "let me write down my phone number." - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)And what would happen if he did.
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