The Patrick Hamilton Appreciation Society discussion

David recently posted....


I like Kate Atkinson, she plots well - especially in her Jackson Brodie private gumshoe novels - creates formidable characters, and provides laughs. Interviews with her are always interesting.

Her new Shades Of Gaiety is reviewed in Strong Words:

“In 1926, eight years after The Great War turned the lights out on several tottering empires, one is still in formidable shape: that of “Old Ma” Nellie Coker, empress of all that matters on a map of Soho nightclubs. There are plenty of other distractions for the forces of law and order too, as a series of “baffling murders…unexplained random attacks on innocent passers-by” is keeping Scotland Yard in reasons to look perplexed (the popular press suspects the curse of Tutankhamun.) And there’s been an alarming trend of young women entering the dancing girl trade, sometimes at Coker-owned locations, and disappearing off the face of the earth. Seeking two such missing people, a woman has been sent to infiltrate a Coker club using the skill of her “naturally invisible” profession - she’s a librarian.”

Several boxes ticked by the sound of it.

Thanks David


I’ve never read any Kate Atkinson

Indeed I had her pegged all wrong by the sounds of things

Where should the newbie start?

Is it Case Histories (Jackson Brodie #1) ?


Shrines of Gaiety sounds very promising - it’s on the list

Thanks again David

You post, we take heed

David again...


Had I not come across the Jackson Brodie volume set during the Edinburgh Festival (One Good Turn) which was on the shelves of a holiday cottage in East Yorkshire in 2013, before I’d even heard of her, I think her books’ ubiquity and her ‘best-seller’ status would have likely put me off. It was a very good read though, and I have read and listened to probably around 50+% of her output. It seems that her ‘series’ books stand up individually. Indeed the Brodie volumes reference his back story to such an extent that the order in which one reads them matters not a jot. My favourites of those have been Started Early Took My Dog (I can’t resist a book with a Border Terrier on the cover) and Big Sky. Her other trilogy A God In Ruins/Transcription/Life After Life is very good too, the third-named recently serialised by BBC TV, probably the best, time-shifting from 11.02.1910 (remembered because I share that birthday) to the Blitz, and one of Hitler’s mountain retreats, through a series of Sliding Doors moments. My library has a stock of them in audiobook, and that is a wonderful medium to extract maximum enjoyment from them.

I'm now underway with my first Kate Atkinson and the book that David mentioned in his first post...



Shrines of Gaiety (2022)

I'm eight chapters in and thoroughly enjoying it so far. Thanks David.




The #1 national bestselling, award-winning author of Life after Life transports us to the dazzling London of the Roaring Twenties in a whirlwind tale of corruption, seduction, and debts that have come due.

1926, and in a country still recovering from the Great War, London has become the focus for a delirious new nightlife. In the clubs of Soho, peers of the realm rub shoulders with starlets, foreign dignitaries with gangsters, and girls sell dances for a shilling a time.

The notorious queen of this glittering world is Nellie Coker, ruthless but also ambitious to advance her six children, including the enigmatic eldest, Niven, whose character has been forged in the crucible of the Somme. But success breeds enemies, and Nellie’s empire faces threats from without and within. For beneath the dazzle of Soho’s gaiety, there is a dark underbelly, a world in which it is all too easy to become lost.

With her unique Dickensian flair, Kate Atkinson gives us a window in a vanished world. Slyly funny, brilliantly observant, and ingeniously plotted, Shrines of Gaiety showcases the myriad talents that have made Atkinson one of the most lauded writers of our time.