I hope Kate Atkinson had as much fun writing Death at the Sign of the Rook as I had reading this latest episode in her Jackson Brodie series.
It’s been twenty years since Brodie first made an appearance as a former soldier and police officer, turned private investigator. Since then we’ve seen that, beneath his tough-guy persona he’s a bit of a softie, unable to say no to appeals for help on behalf of the bereaved, the lost and the swindled.
In his latest outing he’s called in by siblings to investigate the disappearance of a painting from their mother’s house. The Woman with a Weasel went missing on the morning she died; the same day on which her carer Melanie was last seen.. Brodie finds parallels with the theft of a Turner from Burton Makepeace — a nearby stately home — several years earlier. That same night the housekeeper vanished without trace.
Brodie sets off for Burton Makepeace intent on discovering if his instincts are right and the similarity between the two cases is just too much of a coincidence. He arm twists a former colleague, detective constable Reggie Chase, into giving him a helping hand. The pair end up trapped at Burton Makepeace in the midst of a snowstorm, along with a shambolic group of actors who are meant to be staging a murder mystery evening.
If you read the publicity materials for Death at the Sign of the Rook you’ll see it described as a homage to the locked room mysteries popular during the Golden Age of crime fiction. Actually the “locked in” element doesn’t make an appearance until the last third of the novel. Up until that point the novel is mainly concerned with establishing the principal characters and with Brodie’s attempts to piece together the pieces of the puzzle about The Woman with a Weasel.
If you read other Golden Age mysteries you’ll soon recognise that Atkinson is offering up some of the stock characters from those novels — so we get an aged dowager; a vicar; a wayward son and a butler. But here they’re given more substance than usual as if Atkinson is giving a sly wink to the past but then heading off in a different direction.
Time spent with those characters isn’t wasted. They are a joy — my favourite was the Reverend Simon Cate who has a habit of wandering around the graveyard nodding greetings to the occupants to reassure them they have not been forgotten. He wakes one morning to find he’s lost his voice alongside his faith, which is a major impediment when he has to visit parishioners or deliver the Sunday service.
Those scenes are pure farce, setting us up nicely for the full blown farce that ensues when actors, detectives, aristocrats; employees and paying guests are all holed up at Burton Makepeace. A body in the pantry; secret passages; fake deaths and a dangerous escaped prisoner at loose on the moors. You name it; this novel has it all. It’s all highly improbable yet hilarious because Atkinson knows it’s ridiculous yet somehow makes it entertaining.
Death at the Sign of the Rook isn’t high literature by any stretch of the imagination. But if you’re looking for sheer entertainment and a book to cosy up with after the festive slump, this would be perfect.
We're all friends here. Come and join the conversation