But the monster, it soon became clear, was the writer child, whose mercilessly observant eye would record all and one day bear witness. Some in the audience had presumed that the “monster” in question would be the badly behaved parent, sibling, other relative or friend who had fueled the writers’ obsessions. His dearest fantasy would be to sit down to an “old-fashioned afternoon tea, prepared by a cozy woman with a mature bosom and spotless apron who said things like, ‘Come on, now, eat up, ducks.’ ” Would it be so awful if, accidentally, Martin had caused the death of a Russian prostitute? And if he had, would his record be cleared because he’d recently foiled a homicide? Would his boyhood humiliation by his bullying, violent father be a mitigating factor? Shouldn’t that get him off the hook? Or at 50 are you a little old to be blaming your parents for the fact that you live in a dream world? In “One Good Turn,” her second thriller and sixth book, the deft and tricky British author Kate Atkinson shows again, in her inimitable bleakly funny way, how much easier it is to explain a death than to solve a life.įour years ago, at a panel in Manhattan called “A Monster in the House,” Martin Amis, Roddy Doyle, Amy Tan and Dave Eggers gathered to discuss the awkward fallout that ensues when you write literature based on personal history. Martin lives in a perpetual swoon, envisioning himself in an idyll of postwar domesticity, with a wife who smells of lilies of the valley, children who make “merry japes” and, on Sundays, a leg of lamb served with gravy and peas and roasted potatoes, followed by a nutmeg-flecked custard tart. Fifty years old and never married, the author of a toothless mystery series about a girl detective named Nina Riley, he owns a Victorian house in Edinburgh that’s as snug as the bear’s hearth on a Sleepytime tea box.

Kate atkinson museum