Kate Atkinson is bookseller gold. Her novels fly off the shelves, are turned into TV series and win awards – or they did until she told her publisher not to enter her for any more. A new Atkinson is very big news in the literary world, especially one as colourful as Shrines of Gaiety, which fictionalises the exploits of the real-life Kate Meyrick, who spent the 20s ruling over Soho’s clubland. It even looks the part, with its stunning floral cover.
In Atkinson’s deft hands, Meyrick becomes Nellie Coker, whose empire encompasses five nightclubs, six children and a stream of expendable dance hostesses: women who didn’t make it on to a West End stage, so found solace in Soho instead.
Fans of Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie, the private investigator who anchors five of her books, will be delighted to know that a Detective Chief Inspector John Frobisher, “currently on loan to Bow Street station, where he had been sent to ‘shake things up a bit’”, is among those awaiting Nellie’s release.
To Frobisher, the Coker empire is a house of cards that he aims to topple. “It was not the moral delinquency – the dancing, the drinking, not even the drugs – that dismayed Frobisher. It was the girls. Girls were disappearing in London. At leave five he knew about had vanished over the last few weeks. Where did they go? He suspected that they went through the doors of the Soho clubs and never came out again.”
In one succinct chapter, Atkinson launches her genre-straddling blockbuster, which combines the colour of a historical drama with the pace of a thriller and the detail of a police procedural. In short, it is crying out to be the next big Sunday night series; there is even a feisty female character in the form of Gwendolen Kelling, a former war-nurse-turned-librarian who goes undercover to help Frobisher infiltrate Nellie’s queendom. I can already see Olivia Colman (Nellie) and Jessie Buckley (Gwendolen) ace the parts.
Yet, as readable and masterful as it indubitably is, Shrines of Gaiety left me slightly cold. It can’t have been the characters, who are all solidly drawn, from flighty wannabe novelist Ramsey, one of Nellie’s sons, to fickle Freda, who quickly becomes one of Frobisher’s missing girls. Nor can it have been the story, which is compelling as the body count mounts and backstories emerge.
No, what grated was the plot. Everything felt too convenient, from Gwendolen’s chance meeting with Nellie’s other son, precisely when in need of being rescued, to the ease with which she endears herself to Old Ma Coker by being – where else? – in the right place at the right time. I kept guessing what was about to happen, which meant there weren’t enough thrills for this to work as a thriller.
Not that this will stop the book’s sure-to-be-soaraway success. Atkinson, who was 43 when she published her first novel, has done enough to delight most of her existing aficionados – and even I will look forward to the inevitable TV adaptation.
Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson, is published by Doubleday at £20
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