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There's A pithy quote by British writer Kate Atkinson from the Observer a few years ago: "On the whole, apart from the war, violence, aggression, drunkenness thing, men are much better behaved [than women]." But read her novels, and you will find a line-up of men who are not much better behaved. Quite the contrary - her men often seem to specialise in the "violence-aggression-drunkenness thing" plus a cheating-stealing-killing thing to boot. Yet Atkinson has no recollection of saying those words, let alone believing them.
"You know, interviewees tend to lie a lot, so then you have your lies quoted back to you," she chortles down the phone from Edinburgh. "I appear to have built up this reputation for being anti-male but I'm not at all. I think women can be their own worst enemies, by a million miles."
On the evidence of her books, including the latest, When Will There Be Good News?, her argument doesn't quite stack up. The third novel featuring private detective Jackson Brodie and DCI Louise Monroe opens with a shocking incident which occurred 30 years earlier. A single mother - the "bastard" husband has gone off with another woman - is on a picnic in the countryside with her three young children and the family dog. A man approaches them, moving very fast, making a strange sound. When the dog tries to block the man, he kicks it so hard it sails, screaming, through the air. Then he stabs the entire family except little Joanna, who runs away and hides in the wheat until the police find her later that night.
Thirty years on, that little girl has grown up and become a doctor and, for complicated reasons, her path converges once more with the man who'd found her in the grass, Jackson Brodie, when he was a young cop. The man who killed her family, Andrew Decker, is also about to resurface after many years in jail. The outcome is far more complex than you could ever imagine.
Atkinson never makes it clear in the book why Decker committed those murders because, in real life, random murders often don't have motives that go anywhere near logic.
"I have a friend whose sister was murdered," she says. "The guy was caught, he pleaded guilty and they said to him, 'Why did you do it?' He said, 'I don't know.' I thought that was a fairly typical response. They are sent to prison with no counselling and they'll be out in 15 years and it is so strange. There's obviously some kind of rage inside."
She refers to a high-profile case in Britain, the random murders in 1996 in a country lane of Lin and Megan Russell in which the family dog was also killed. The younger daughter, Josie, survived. "There is something particularly poignant about the dog, I think. Josie Russell talked about the murders on the 10th anniversary and she said the father still missed the dog. I thought that was so sad."
Gruesome as this all sounds, Atkinson's writing has a light touch, with a mordant sense of humour and attention to characterisation and internal thinking which elevate her work way beyond the thriller genre. Her debut novel, Scenes From Behind the Museum, won the Whitbread Prize in 1996 and she has since published a collection of short stories and four novels.
Case Histories and One Good Turn also feature Brodie and Monroe, but she has noticed - as if she had nothing to do with it - that in this latest one, "Louise has become much more aggressive", while Jackson - who has money - has made a bad call by getting married to a much younger woman he hardly knows. "He's an idiot. Of course he's an idiot!" she snorts. "He's a middle-aged man!"
By the end of When Will There Be Good News?, Atkinson has sorted the Jackson situation out but, without giving too much away, it may not be the end of that relationship. "Jackson's marriage was going to be an entire book but it got reduced," she explains. "Perhaps his missus is still out there. One of my favourite films is Black Widow, I wanted to do that as a book but it wasn't fitting in with what I was writing so I feel the Black Widow is out there. Maybe he is lucky he escaped with his life. I felt he needed a wake-up call. He was becoming a miserable middle-aged man. He needed to go through something transformative and cleansing."
The only child of a couple who ran a surgical supplies shop in Dundee, Atkinson says she was a solitary child who buried herself in books. "We didn't have any books, nobody did, you went to the library. I was an avid reader and I got an adult ticket sooner than most of the other kids. I think only children read more than children with siblings. I was the kind of person who at the age of 13 had read all of Jean-Paul Sartre. I didn't understand it but I'd read it.
"I always said to my daughters that if you read more, you'd have more general knowledge. My father was blind and he had been an avid reader until he lost his sight. That is the most terrifying thing to me. What do you do if you can't read?"
Now aged 57, Atkinson went to university in Dundee, married young, then was failed for her doctorate on the American short story, a hurdle she now believes helped her on to the path of writing. She moved to Edinburgh 13 years ago, where she lives alone near her 84-year-old mother, her two daughters and grandchildren.
Unlike characters created by some of Edinburgh's other high-profile writers - Ian Rankin's Rebus, Alexander McCall Smith's Mme Ramotswe, "let's not forget J.K. Rowling," she adds drily - Atkinson has no desire to see her creations anywhere except on the pages and in her mind. Interestingly, she has no visual picture of what they look like.
"I never see them actually. I can see Louise a bit more clearly because I know she's the same as Dr Hunter, small and slim, but features and things like that, the colour of people's eyes, the shape of their mouths, the kind of stuff you get in some books, I find that very off-putting because if you are writing I think you start to lose the character.
"It's very alarming that something might be filmed, for example, because that character becomes that actor and you've lost that nice muddiness around the edges. I'm a big Lee Child fan, I have read him from the beginning because we share an editor. Jack Reacher is the ultimate male hero and for years I've not thought about what he looks like except he was dark. Then the book before last, Lee suddenly mentions his blond hair and I was, like, 'Nooooo'.
"When they made the Rebus series for TV, especially the first Rebus [actor John Hannah], well, God, he's a very good actor but so miscast."
As already hinted, Atkinson's books invariably feature animals - mainly cats, dogs and birds. Aside from the little dog who was killed at the beginning of When Will There Be Good News?, Dr Hunter has a huge German shepherd - for a good reason - called Sadie, while another character, a teacher called Ms McDonald who is dying of cancer, has a small, elderly mutt. These details prove to be important to the plot.
"There is a lot of bird imagery in this book I've noticed," she says, "and there's always a dog, I can't keep the dogs out. I have always had a cat but I feel so sorry for them when I go away and I go away a lot. That's the reason I don't have a dog, they are much more difficult to leave and the trouble with dogs is that they shit a lot," she adds, laughing. "I would love to have a dog - I think that's why my books are full of dogs."
One of her most memorable characters was Gloria, the cunning - as it turned out - middle-aged housewife of her most recent Brodie-Monroe novel, One Good Turn. Gloria has always wanted a pet but her ghastly property developer husband has crushed her dreams in general and, more specifically, is cruel to animals. With Graham disposed of, Gloria will make a glorious return, says Atkinson, to the warpath against people who are unkind to animals. This is delicious news. "Hmmm," says Atkinson in a satisfyingly curdled tone. "Gloria is thinking a lot about cruelty to animals. She may be doing something about that sooner than I think. She's got time and money on her hands."
Be afraid, nasty animal abusers. Read One Good Turn and ponder the fate of Gloria's amoral husband. "I think people are quite capable of calculated murder," says Atkinson, quite calmly. "You sort of look around and think, 'Really, does that person need to live?' Before the Married Women's Property Act of 1882, when you had no rights, what would you have done? You can't leave because they've taken your money, your children, so you would kill. Gloria's just reverting to the Victorian poisoner, ha ha ha."
When will There Be Good News? also features two more unforgettable creations: orphaned siblings Reggie and Billy. Reggie, a bright and enterprising teenage girl, is taken on as nanny by Dr Hunter, while Billy, also enterprising but not so bright, is a little thug. Right towards the end, in a chapter called "God Bless Us, Everyone", Billy is roaming around Edinburgh on Christmas Day cursing "Edinburgh, Scotland, the Earth, the universe". Then he drops a bombshell.
"Ha ha," laughs Atkinson. "I suddenly thought that Billy needs to be in there, he's such a Dickensian character. There are so many Billys in Scotland."
It's also amusing that Monroe, who has married a man when it has long been obvious she and Brodie are made for each other, is going to therapy where the psychologist tells to lock up her unhealthy, negative thoughts. However, when she attempts this feat, Monroe finds that she hasn't got anything positive left in her psychic reservoir. Surely Atkinson can bring the two angry fighters for justice together in a future book?
"I know, it's just like Middlemarch, isn't it? Although I keep saying this is a trilogy and this will be the last book, there are other Jackson books to come. There will be Jackson in Paris, so perhaps Louise is going to resurface in Paris too. I suspect their relationship will always be frustrating on both sides."
With men like Dr Hunter's feckless husband and a loose cannon called Needler who obsessively wants to wipe out his entire family, Atkinson is a first-class portrayer of men as shits.
"I am fascinated by these cases in the newspaper about domestic violence," she says. "We have a lot of them and I suspect you do too. It's a very atavistic thing, quite tribal - women as property. The family belongs to a man and he has all rights over them, including killing them. I find it interesting that a woman doesn't figure as a person in that kind of thinking.
"I notice these stories and I am constantly saying, 'Oh that's good, I wish I could write that down if I had a notebook chained around my neck.' Anything in the media is heightened and framed, it's already a story, so you notice it and things people tell you as well. There is nothing more astonishing than human behaviour."
But at least she, as a writer, can fight back via her characters. "I am worried Louise is going to become a vigilante," she laughs, "but that's Gloria's job."
* When Will There Be Good News? (Doubleday $36.99) Kate Atkinson will appear in conversation with NZ writer Stephanie Johnson at a Dymocks-NZ Herald lunch at the Hyatt Regency Hotel on September 10.
