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The British writer Kate Atkinson has had a rich and varied career since her debut novel, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum,” won the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 1996; her 14 subsequent books have included story collections, historical fiction and an inventive speculative novel, “Life After Life,” that won the Costa Novel Award and landed on the Book Review’s recent survey of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.
But she may be best known for her Jackson Brodie series of crime novels, which began with “Case Histories” in 2004 and was later adapted into a British television show. The sixth book in the series, “Death at the Sign of the Rook,” has just been released, and from the title to the plot to the cast of characters it pays winking homage to the golden age of English cozy mysteries. Atkinson visits the podcast this week to discuss her new novel, and tells The Times’s Sarah Lyall how she approached her tribute to an earlier era.
“I wanted to take all of those stock characters and then do something different with them — make them human, I suppose, make them much more like real people than just those ciphers,” Atkinson says. “It’s a very self-referential book, much more than I would normally do because I just felt it was a slightly unhinged book and it could carry that kind of, not exactly irony, but just knowingness.”
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The post Kate Atkinson on the Return of Her Detective Hero appeared first on New York Times.
