Televisionary has made me very, very happy today with the news that Matthew Graham and Ashley Pharoah (Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes) are developing a TV adaptation of Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels. The duo will adapt three novels – Case Histories, One Good Turn, and When Will There Be Good News – for the first season of Case Histories, with Pharoah set to adapt the first, Graham to adapt the second, and an as-yet-unnamed writer to tackle the third. The project from Ruby Television and Monastic is set to air in 2011, with production starting this fall.
And as if that wasn’t good enough – none other than Jason Isaacs (Brotherhood) is attached to play Jackson Brodie! Isaacs was most recently in the FOX drama pilot Pleading Guilty (an adaptation of Scott Turow’s novel), which was overseen by Bones creator Hart Hanson, but the project wasn’t ordered to series.
So to sum up: three critically acclaimed novels + two amazing writers + one brilliant actor = HELL YES!
If you’re wondering why I’m so excited, clearly you haven’t seen Life on Mars yet – the U.K. version starring John Simm, not that U.S. re-make atrocity – so rev up your Netflix and get cracking, because the show is fantastic. (John Rogers, one of the creators of Leverage, is also a huge fan and says his show’s style/look was heavily influenced by Life on Mars.)
For more on Case Histories, the book:
Book Jacket:
Investigating other people’s tragedies and cock-ups and misfortunes was all he knew. He was used to being a voyeur, the outsider looking in, and nothing, but nothing, that anyone did surprised him any more. Yet despite everything he’d seen and done, inside Jackson there remained a belief — a small, battered and bruised belief — that his job was to help people be good rather than punish them for being bad.
Cambridge is sweltering, during an unusually hot summer. To Jackson Brodie, former police inspector turned private investigator, the world consists of one accounting sheet — Lost on the left, Found on the right — and the two never seem to balance.
Jackson has never felt at home in Cambridge, and has a failed marriage to prove it. Surrounded by death, intrigue and misfortune, his own life haunted by a family tragedy, he attempts to unravel three disparate case histories and begins to realise that in spite of apparent diversity, everything is connected…
Winner of the Saltire Book of the Year Award and the Prix Westminster.
You can read an excerpt here.
Critics say:
“Not just the best novel I have read this year … but the best mystery of the decade. There are actually four mysteries, nesting like Russian dolls, and when they begin to fit together, I defy any reader not to feel a combination of delight and amazement. Case Histories is the literary equivalent of a triple axel. I read it once for pleasure and then again just to see how it was done. This is the kind of book you shove in people’s faces, saying ‘You gotta read this!’ ”
– Stephen King, for Entertainment Weekly
“To read it is to enter a hall of mirrors … Part complex family drama, part mystery, it winds up having more depth and vividness than ordinary thrillers and more thrills than ordinary fiction … A wonderfully tricky book.”
– The New York Times
“Her best book yet, an astonishingly complex and moving literary detective story that made me sob but also snort with laughter. It’s the sort of novel you have to start rereading the minute you’ve finished it”
– The Guardian
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