Black crows and red blood on white snow

KATE ATKINSON is one of my favourite authors. At first, I mistook her for Margaret Atwood – I don't have a brain for names. Her first books were literary and award-winning, such as Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Human Croquet, and Emotionally Weird. When she ventured into crime fiction, I was delighted. We had a strong literary voice, a wicked sense of humour, and a brilliant head for storylines now. Oh, and the characters stayed with you forever. More literary writers absconded to the crime genre, such as Susan Hill. And some crime or psychological thriller writers like Agatha Christie and Ruth Rendell are simply so excellent that genre is a mere afterthought.

I've read all of Atkinson's books. Her character Jackson Brodie is an old friend of mine, as he is to the rest of the world. He's older, damaged, and incredibly empathetic. He gets quite personally involved in cases. He takes shortcuts and bends the rules to rescue people and has no patience for procedure. He's a mensch and it's nice to hang out with him, even though he constantly comes up short.

In Death at the Sign of the Rook, Brodie reappears. He is a private detective and is asked by twins, a brother and sister, to investigate the disappearance of their late mother's valuable painting. It is believed to date back to the Renaissance and is a portrait of a woman with a kind of mongoose on her lap. The painting disappeared along with their mother's caretaker, Melanie. They have no provenance (documents to substantiate the purchase of the painting) and therefore they avoid the real police.

It's pleasant to look at the world through Brodie's eyes, to pass time in his quirky head: “It wasn't the siren call of a toasted teacake that drew him so much as the promise of order, of sanctuary even." Jackson, we know from previous books, has an interesting ex, a son and a dog that he gave up to her when he moved on. He is restless and good at moving on.

There is a second storyline with similarities to the first: Burton Makepeace is an estate where the eccentric Lady Milton and her spoiled children live. Lord Milton recently died mysteriously, and Lady Milton suspects he had been poisoned with mushrooms. She is a refreshing character too. She was the fifth daughter of an earl, “very low down the pecking order when it comes to inheriting" and as a young girl was more or less forced to marry Johnny Milton, a nobleman with a castle. She loved dancing while he seemed to have two, sometimes it felt like three, left feet. She married the lovely house, she realised. He was never particularly interested in the physical side of marriage, especially when they already had two children and heirs. She did have a third child from a charming swindler and that boy, Cosmo, is a good-for-nothing layabout with a head full of money-making schemes.

She doesn't much care for her daughter, Arabella:

There was something irredeemably coarse about Arabella, not just her size and her awful dress sense, nor even her gruff manner. It was an abrasiveness, a certainty about her own opinion that was unsettling. She would be a good person to send into battle, like a tank. Arabella had produced twin girls, Flora and Faye ... “Flora and Fauna” Lady Milton often found herself accidentally calling them.

She doesn't actually love any of her children and prefers her housekeeper/companion, the charming Sally. Then Sally disappears, and so does a valuable little painting. Ring a bell?

Jackson's reluctant sidekick, Reggie Chase, is also a delightful character. She's a policewoman; intense, short and angry. Her brain is a sponge for trivia and the origin of words, which she likes to educate everyone around her about. She is adept at oriental martial arts. She is fond of details and principles, unlike Brodie who believes that the end justifies the means.

Lady Milton's sons open the castle to the public, plan all sorts of curio shops and tea rooms, and organise a game weekend where amateur detectives can come and sleuth while a theatre troupe stages a murder at the mansion. At great expense, of course. The weekend guests are snowed in and Chase and Brodie also end up in their midst, along with an atheist priest who tackles everything on earth like a moral dilemma and is more indecisive than Hamlet. It doesn't stop at pretend murder.

Jackson sees connections, as one of his talents. I can't reveal more, but it's a thrilling and hilarious ride. Atkinson is like the older British women writers Iris Murdoch, Alice Thomas Ellis, Penelope Mortimer and Co: She has a deadpan eye and a subversive sense of humour. There are gems like: “If they would all sleep all the time she wouldn't mind being their mother." There are delightful descriptions like Chase hiding in the pantry and looking around her:

On one side, the Stilton was neighboured by a rather stagy roasted chicken that indeed looked more like a stage prop than actual food. On the other side was a big leg of cured ham. A small, delicate trotter remained attached to the leg, as if to authenticate its origins. Provenance, Reggie thought, a word Jackson was obsessed with.

There is, as with Iris Murdoch, a large cast of eccentric characters to entertain the reader. I highly recommend it.

Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson was published by Penguin Random House SA and costs R405 at Exclusive Books.

What are we listening to?

Jackson Brodie Soundtracks: 

♦ VWB ♦

BE PART OF THE CONVERSATION: Go to the bottom of this page to share your opinion. We look forward to hearing from you.