Script to Screen: the Origins of Case Histories

"Kate has a very distinctive tone, a comic take on the world with an awful lot of dark, human behaviour in there"

Kate Atkinson had not intended to write these novels within the genre of crime, but the process, she says, happened organically.

"I started off with Amelia, Julia, Theo all of those characters that are in the first book, going on an explorer cruise to the Antarctic, but I'd written about 150 pages and I realised I had developed these big tragic back-stories to do with cold cases, which were far more interesting than the front story. So that's what I decided to investigate. That's how Jackson came about - I needed a detective if I had crimes."

Atkinson's approach to crime writing was unique in that she didn't formulate a plot for Brodie to solve. On the contrary, she allowed the character to 'meander'.

"I invented Jackson from that mysterious place in a writer's brain and set him off," she explains. "It was a case of biting the bullet, because I really like crime fiction but I thought it wasn't my style as I tend to go all around the houses when I'm writing. Crime fiction is a very dynamic thing, but I thought, 'Well I can do it my way.'"

It was the complex character of Jackson Brodie, which Producer Helen Gregory said drew her to the project.

"Ruby Film and TV, who optioned the novels and developed the series for the BBC, sent me the script. I'd already read and loved all of the novels and felt the script had quite brilliantly captured their essence."

Atkinson writes for the characters first with the detective plot growing out of that and for Gregory the opportunity to produce something based on this type of character development was an exciting prospect.

"Kate creates these amazing, original, quite often eccentric and very funny characters," says Gregory, "so there was a great collection of their stories - more character stories than crime plots actually, to translate to the screen."

Changes were made to the original novels in order for them to work on screen, with each novel being represented by two-part adaptations.

"The novels are not structured similarly," says Gregory. "A lot of the time in the novels Jackson's not even a detective, but collides with the stories in the course of the day to day. We've had to re-shape that so he can take on the cases, as opposed to meeting them by accident."

Regardless of technical changes, Gregory had two aims - to capture the mischievous jigsaw puzzle feel of the different narratives into which Jackson fits, and to maintain Atkinson's pervading style, which made the novels such a success originally.

"The key is tone," Helen says. "Kate has a very distinctive tone, a comic take on the world with an awful lot of dark, human behaviour in there. And the cases are tragic but her characters have resilience. There is an amazing humanity and warmth to them. That is absolutely the spirit we've tried to keep."

Jason Isaacs, who plays the lead character Jackson Brodie, praises Atkinson's ability to accept that the translation to TV often incurs some heavy editing of the plot and storylines.

"With the show, the detective has got to be at the centre of the story; he's got to do some detecting. She's less interested in that when she writes; as indeed are the readers, but television audiences want to be. It's a very realistic medium and you have to give people in some ways what they expect and yet deliver it in ways that they don't."

"My novels expose the reality of human nature," says Atkinson. "The darker the better. They are about identity and looking for the self. The books are about survival and that is true of Jackson as well; he is a permanent survivor."

It is this focus that Gregory hones in on from the novels, "I love that it's not a procedural show. The fact that such an emphasis is placed on people, and not process, is what we're about."