The question is, what to read next?
I find the Jackson Brodie novels a little bit of work, but a good kind of work. Atkinson writes these in a circular fashion, where one doesn't so much follow the plot as follow the characters in their individual narratives, a sort of literary quadrille where you have to keep your eyes closely on everyone for fear of heading off in the wrong direction and throwing the whole dance out of whack. None of the characters are simple, no matter how minor. And no character is all that minor. No wonder I love her work.
Finishing off a Brodie, therefore, Big Sky in the case at hand, causes one to take a deep breath. One is always reading a book: there is no discernible gap between ending one and starting another. But the book that gets started has to contrast in a good way with the book just finished. Normally I wouldn't go for a mystery to follow a mystery; I like to shake things up a bit. But going through my unread Kindle books (my metaphorical nightstand), nothing jumped out. SF as a genre was out, because I'm still listening to Chambers's Record of a Spaceborn Few. A nonfiction title might make sense, but I just wasn't in the mood. In these situations, there are two possibilities. The first is to pull something out of a short story collection. Even if the genre were still mystery, the commitment is so short, usually a single sitting, that the potential genre conflation is not particularly problematic. The second option, the one I took, was to grab a Roderick Alleyn novel. In fact, I have a whole folder of nothing but Ngaio Marsh, as these were practically being given away for a while on Kindle daily deals.
So why Marsh and Alleyn, obviously dead center in the detective mystery genre, to follow the Atkinson detective? Well, here's the thing about the Alleyn novels. If Atkinson is choreographing a quadrille, Marsh, although juggling plenty of characters, maps out a step-by-step marching narrative in which it becomes almost a surprise when the enterprise turns into a detective story. She creates a setting and fills it with characters different from story to story, and then lets those characters go about their rather unified business—putting on a performance, moving from New Zealand to England, whatever—for roughly about half a novel. And then something goes horribly wrong, as we theme park fans like to say, and she brings in the series regulars of C.I. Alleyn and D.I. Fox, and maybe Troy (artist spouse) and journalist Nigel Bathgate, and the mystery is now pursued most intricately. For me, it is the first half of these novels, which read as simply mainstream period tales, that are the best part, and which remove it from the curse of genre, and thus allow it to follow straight on the heels of a previous mystery without a great collision.
As noted previously, the Marsh chosen was Surfeit of Lampreys. I read it pretty quickly, and then, well, there we were again, having to pick another book. For a few days I took the other option and read some SF stories. And then, wanting something to last for more than a single sitting, I riffled through the Kindle once again and turned up P. G. Wodehouse's Psmith in the City. There's a little more cricket than I can follow easily—pretty much any cricket is a little more cricket than I can follow easily—but then again, it's Wodehouse, and one bears with it. Old Plum never fails to satisfy; I've read all the Jeeves and Woosters, and many of the Blandingses, on paper and then in audiobooks, and even enjoyed them in dramatizations. (The Fry and Laurie Jeeveses seem to be unaccessible on my streaming services, but Amazon has a quite enjoyable Blandings series to make up for it.) (And speaking of Fry, oh, well, I'll save that for another time.)
And thus the great conundrum of what to read next is, for a few moments, solved. Of course, in a day or two we'll have to go through the whole thing again. So be it.
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