The Strike Novels: Robert Galbraith
I feel I should have bookish indigestion having just read the first four Strike novels in very quick succession. However, I don’t. Instead, I feel replete, a very full, satisfied feeling as though I had just eaten an excellent meal. That surely must be the sign of some great writing.
It is quite well known that Robert Galbraith is a pseudonym for JK Rowling and maybe the change of branding simply helps separate the phenomenon of Harry Potter from this highly successful series of detective novels all featuring Cormoran Strike.
Strange name isn’t it? Obviously purposely so and there are also several unusual characteristics. I feel I would quite like to sit down and describe myself a detective! Would he also be an accomplished artist I wonder? Think of Simon Serrailler in Susan Hill’s books, or maybe he would have a penchant for poetry as does Adam Dalgliesh in the books of PD James. I don’t see myself creating a very disreputable character. Ian Rankin’s John Rebus is very much a rebel with a host of personal problems. He is dour, determined and very world-weary. It shows the author’s skill I think that Rebus is still somehow very appealing. But, as for Jackson Lamb in Mick Herron’s series of books about ‘Slow Horses,’ (straying into MI5 territory here rather than straightforward detectives) well, no, I don’t think I’d be very good at conjuring up such a slovenly, crude and offensive figure. Interesting character though, no doubt about that. Alexander McCall Smith has said that he didn’t feel he could create anyone who was particularly disreputable or evil and I feel the same. Thus, I think my detective would be called Giles Becket, and he would be a competent cellist, playing deep into the night to relieve stress and solve details of difficult cases. I haven’t as yet thought about his backstory!
Anyway, back to Robert Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike. We are presented with a military veteran who had served with the Special Investigation Branch in Afghanistan until an explosion resulted in an amputation of the lower part of one leg. Once medically discharged he set up his own private detection agency, a business which struggles for many reasons. Goodness, the author had fun working out the early part of his life. The son of a famous and rich rock star; a father Cormoran hardly knows. His deceased mother was a model and supergroupie who led an unstable and nomadic life after her brief affair. Her son’s school life was not so disrupted though that he couldn’t manage to get a place at Oxford!
In the first novel, ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling,’ we are also introduced to Robin Ellacott who enters Strikes’s life as a very temporary temp and goes on to become his business partner. You guess correctly from early on that this is going to be a slow-burn type of romance. Indeed, by the end of book 4 very little at all has happened in that direction! I find Robin a pleasing character, who, once rid of an aggravating and arrogant fiancé, shows herself to be strong and feisty and up to any task demanded by this agency, which is set in scrappy upper rooms in Denmark Street off Charing Cross Road in London.
Apart from the detective work involved in the death of a famous model, which Strike realises is murder, not an accident or suicide, thus making him unpopular with the police who dislike a private detective getting there first, the tension comes from the personal relationships of Strike and Robin. Strike is licking his wounds after the end of a long and tumultuous on-off romance with the highly volatile and manipulative Charlotte Campbell. She is beautiful and aristocratic and Strike never seems totally sure that he is over her. Robin has her own problematic backstory that affects her ability to trust any man.
The frisson between these two characters is there all the time; it is constant…and it certainly keeps you turning the pages. Satisfying reading. Start from the beginning.