Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson

Doubleday

Review by Walter Cummins

Kate Atkinson’s title for her sixth Jackson Brodie detective novel, Death at the Sign of the Rook, offers a broad hint that she is about to play games with the genre of the British country house mystery. She quickly enables all the tropes—the estate with a deer park, the multi-room manor house—Burton Makepeace , the haughty aristocratic owner, her unappealing children, servants, the addled vicar, his handful of congregants, a war-wounded major, an escaped dangerous murderer, and various locals. She even mocks the authors of the kind of novel she is in the midst of writing, attributing people and plot lines to a Nancy Styles, the late author of “cosy” mysteries. She does invent a few new types, especially the seeming con women, or is it just one woman, who steals what might be priceless art. It’s obvious that Atkinson is amusing herself and her reader. But she gets away with it by transcending the cliches with an inventiveness that makes the types fresh and with the clever intertwining of multiple plot threads.

She even introduces a play within a play variant with a troupe of actors in the manor house performing a theatrical murder mystery based on a Nancy Styles plot. What is real and what is fake becomes a comedy of errors, What is an actual body or a prone performer? What corpse is a murder victim or just a dead person? What is a real gun and what is a prop? Who is a real vicar and who an actor? And on and on.

Atkinson is able to skewer a character with a detail or two. Lady Milton, who considers “absence the foundation of a good marriage,” also can’t keep track of her three children: “Lady Milton tended to lose count once they were over thirty. Even before that, to tell the truth.”

Simon Cates, the vicar of sparsely attended St. Martins, didn’t believe in God, but “no cock had crowed. The sky hadn’t fallen in, the devil hadn’t come calling for his soul.” He worries about animals more than people, leaving the double doors of the church wide open hoping that a deer would wander in.

Ben Jennings, the very handsome major, who had lost the Leg to an exploding IUD in Helmand province, is depressingly obsessed with the loss but finds no sympathy from his family, who “all spent an extraordinary amount of time straightening their backbones and stiffening their upper lips” and who offer no more compassion than “Pull yourself together.” Lost in a snowstorm with a small dog bundled under his jacket, he also “never left home without a torch, a knife and a length of thin rope in his pocket.” These objects turn out to be crucial at climactic moments in the plot.

Even though this is designated a Jackson Brodie novel, with the focus on Atkinson’s new inventions, his presence is limited, though important during the final panoply of adventures. It’s as if she assumes her readers are familiar with the previous five Brodie novels and know all about his background and relationships. The one with an actual police officer, Reggie (Regina) Chase, a reluctant partner, established in the previous novel does matter significantly in the dynamics of this plot.

The Dramatis Personae who will perform “Death Comes to Rook Hall” enter the novel around two-thirds in, once the unknowns of the missing art works and possible theft have been established, along with central characters in the “real” world of the novel. At this point they are joined by their acting counterparts and a tiny audience who made it through the dense snow storm.

With everyone assembled, the novel takes on the characteristics of a French farce, aided by the many rooms of Burton Makepeace—Blue Room, Yellow Room, Red Room—and various pantries for bodies to be stowed. These rooms offer many doors to be opened and closed, passages for trapped people and performers to disappear from one place and reappear in another. Gun shots, real bullets and blanks, resound. Some blood is real, some fake. The pace is frantic, the blunders and confusions cleverly comic.

Eventually, as expected, all is resolved, the art thief—perhaps the most appealing of the characters—identified, even if no one is sure of their name, and allowed to abscond by Brodie. “So much excitement for one evening! An escaped prisoner shooting at people (at her!) and the vicar succumbing to a heart attack. Lady Milton hadn’t enjoyed herself this much in years.”