Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson review - 'offers purring pleasure'

Kate Atkinson | Helen Clyne

Crime novels can be playful, death when it comes in no way harrowing. It's a difficult thing to bring off because, after all, murder is in real life no laughing matter. Still it can be done and it can be a delight. Think of the classic Ealing comedies Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Ladykillers. Kate Armstrong is a master of this sort of thing.

Her new novel opens with an invitation to “A ‘Murder Mystery’ weekend in the charming, atmospheric surroundings of Rook Hall", a great Palladian country house, now a country house hotel. Waiting for the drama to begin, Jackson Brodie, Atkinson's veteran sleuth, no longer in the Force but operating as a private investigator, mutters "Dear God Almighty, if this goes on much longer I'll kill them all myself". The woman who is his sometime sidekick, DC Reggie, says it hasn't even begun yet, and indeed the reader too has to wait quite a while for things to get going.

Happily, however, Jackson has a modest case of his own. He has been called in by an unattractive couple, brother and sister, to investigate the disappearance of a painting. Apparently their late mother's carer walked off with it as soon as the old girl was dead, and promptly disappeared. Why not call the police? Well, there are reasons. Jackson's investigation limps along. Something odd may have happened in the funeral parlour where the old woman's body rested.

Then we switch to the once stately house, Burton Makepeace, where the murder mystery weekend will eventually be staged. It's in a bad way, in headlong decline indeed. Most of the great art collection has been flogged. Johnny, the head of the family, wanders around gloomily. His wife, Lady Milton, seems to be gaga, but is, we find, shrewd, even if her wits are wandering. She loathes her sons, who have horrid plans for the house and the estate, but she enjoys the company of the girl who is her helper. Then the girl disappears, a Turner painting apparently going with her. Is it perhaps the same girl as the one Brodie has been investigating? Whether she is or not, she seems to have vanished in the same way. Reggie who is investigating this disappearance, is not entirely pleased when her old mentor Jackson intervenes.

Burton Makepeace, being a Great House, even if a collapsing one, there is of course an estate with a deer park and a village with a parish vicar. Simon likes his old Norman church but has lost his faith and will soon lose his voice - awkward for a parson. He sometimes thinks he would like to return after death as a tree. There is also a wounded veteran of the war in Afghanistan, Ben, who lost a leg there, and he misses it a good deal more than Simon misses his faith. He lives with his sister, a vet, and her wife.

Much of the comedy is provided by Lady Milton, whose remaining wits are sharper than you might expect. When her husband dies, she insists on his burial in case there's need of an autopsy. It's that kind of place. She often wanders around with a gun. In the great days of Ealing comedies she would have been played by Margaret Rutherford.

Then, just as the the murder mystery weekend begins there comes a great snowstorm, and to complicate matters agreeably, an escaped convict, a killer armed (of course) with a gun. How can it all work out? 

Well, it does so engagingly of course. How agreeable it is to read a novel by a writer who knows just what she is doing and how to do it. Relationships, especially that of Jackson and Reggie, are managed deftly. She needs him of course, but resents him, and likes reminding him that he is no longer "official".

This is the kind of book you will happily read more than once. Novels which read so easily are not always made by easy writing, however. There is solid work here, well-disguised. Jackson Brodie has now starred in a good many novels but, in his sixties, is surely good for a few more. As I said at the beginning, this novel recalls the great Ealing comedies, even echoes them; it offers the same purring pleasure.

Kate Atkinson: Death At The Sign Of The Rook, Penguin, £22. Kate Atkinson is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 20 August