Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson
It’s always a joy to read Kate Atkinson’s work. This latest Jackson Brodie adventure struck me as even wiser and more hilarious than the wonderful stories of his previous exploits. Early on, we learn that Jackson, now sixty and a grandfather, has been house-hunting. However, he’s just overcome “several weeks being sensible and mature” and bought a brand-new “rugged, blokey” Land Rover Defender. After all, he reflects, “you could live in a Defender if you had to, “but you couldn’t drive a house.”
Called in after a woman’s death to retrieve a missing painting, Jackson gradually becomes convinced that it was stolen before it was stolen. As he investigates, we learn about the fate of other missing works of art. Jackson is aware that “stolen art functioned as underworld currency, used as collateral by organized crime syndicates, passed around to finance terrorism and drug dealing.”
Such hot properties are often “stored in one of the world’s so-called free ports, in Geneva or Singapore or Luxembourg.” Jackson likens these tax-free havens to “giant upmarket safe-deposit boxes” where nobody asks questions about the contents.
Art is also “kidnapped and held to ransom.” Owners and often insurance companies “quietly paid up in the form of a reward or a finder’s fee via shadowy middlemen who negotiated the painting’s return,” since it’s so much cheaper for an insurance company to “ante up the ‘reward’ money” than…to “pay the millions of their market value.” The thieves win too, as it is “impossible to sell a famous painting on the open market.”
A description of how art can be stolen for ransom also comes up in The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds, by Alexander McCall Smith. It amazed me then and I still find it astonishing.
But informative (and disillusioning) as such details may be, it is the story that charms most greatly. Atkinson’s casual facility with language is showcased in comedic riffs like this one concerning Ben, the ex-soldier who lost a leg in Afghanistan. When he turns up in the snow-bound house as a guest seeking shelter, there’s a Murder Mystery weekend in play. Lady Milton, herself a hilarious caricature, mistakes him for a new member of staff and charges him with “marshalling the guests and showing them to their rooms.” Finding her a hard woman to reason with, he eventually accepts this task. “So be it. Private Dogsbody had been promoted to Major Domo, or perhaps even to General Factotum.”
Atkinson makes the reflections of the head of the travelling players, Titus North, an occasion to swipe at some of the layered ironies of contemporary culture. Titus (real name Nigel Jubb) "used to have a sideline in corporate bonding weekends,” but “he’d inevitably fallen foul of the woke brigade and ended up being cancelled by a large soft-drinks manufacturer.” This setback has driven him back to the safer territory of “borrowed” Murder Mystery plots “set in some mythical pre-war England…where vicars came to tea and jolly girls played tennis and the hierarchy of the class system [is] firmly in place.” Though they don’t like to admit it, “people hanker for this sort of stuff” and you can “get away with a lot in this fictional England without being blackballed.”
Deftly mixing humour with thoughtfulness and consummate storytelling skill, Kate Atkinson has given us another terrific read.