If evidence of his intelligence depends on everyone else’s total ineptitude, it’s not really intelligence. The problem is that the character of Brodie is conceived very narrowly. If he was a woman, it would be an outrage but he’s not, so it’s quite good fun.”įun, indeed, but not much help to whatever plot writer Ashley Pharoah, co-creator and writer of both Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes, is trying to resurrect from Atkinson’s books. These efforts had him frequently stripped to the waist, a production choice that left the UK’s Guardian reviewer writing, “Phwoar, pecs and tattoos…. He also handled action sequences well, whether he was pounding the streets of Edinburgh on lengthy runs or digging for 30-year-old corpses or mixing it up with local low-lifes. He was even brooding energetically, which is just as well, as he spent a lot of time in sullen contemplation - about his ex-wife, his daughter, his cases, and his past - while listening to weepy alt-folk-rock. In the first episode, which aired this past Sunday on PBS (the next two will air on 23 and 30 October), Jason Isaacs attacked the role of Brodie with the pent-up energy of someone who has spent far too much time in fancy dress as Lucius Mallfoy. Despite lively acting, splashy production values, and rich source material, Case Histories offers precious little genuine detection and a lot of aimless jumping around from case to case and client to client. And with that, he becomes just one more private ‘tec with a wobbly personal life, no head for business, and, of course, the Dark Tragic Secret that has haunted him since childhood. The BBC adaptation of Atkinson’s novels turns Brodie into a conventional private eye, fixed in an office, with a bolshie assistant and a nice view of Victoria Street. Existentially adrift, he temporarily touches other people’s lives, but is never fully bound to them. Her protagonist, Jackson Brodie, who mooches off the page as a kinder, gentler, but no less determined, Jack Reacher, is an essential part of her alchemy. Her skill goes a long way toward disarming the reader’s nagging disbelief that quite so many coincidences would occur in quite so many disparate lives. The charm of Kate Atkinson’s genre-bending crime novels lies in their balancing of the body blows and the grace notes of chance.

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