But in those first three books, she was also creating an individuated form for each novel. If you've read the rest of Atkinson's non-Jackson Brodie fiction, starting with her stunning debut, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, you can see how they mirror such playful inventiveness.
One of the other characters is an elderly actress called Tilly who's got a job playing the mother of a TV detective in a series somewhat like Heartbeat in which Jackson's former partner Julia also makes a brief appearance. Brodie and another former detective bump into each other, each unaware that the other holds the key to the case they are both working on, one of them having kidnapped a child, the other having kidnapped a dog. Their investigations run on parallel tracks. In Starting Early, for example, there's not only Jackson Brodie on the case but (unknown to him) another private detective with the suspiciously similar name of Brian Jackson.
The posh word for this is metafiction, and the reason she can't just marry off Jackson to wife number three and shift him off to solve a case in, say, Tuscany is that this just wouldn't be enough. The point – and I'll drop the metaphor in a minute – is that a Kate Atkinson novel isn't bluntly direct but contains similarly skilfully controlled games within games.
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