The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Is this J K Rowling’s best work yet?
A new TV drama proves the author is a crime writer of real substance, says Jake Kerridge
In April 2013, a former military policeman called Robert Galbraith published The Cuckoo’s Calling, a mystery novel featuring a private eye called Cormoran Strike. That, at least, was the official story. Three months later, it was revealed that Galbraith did not exist and that the author was J K Rowling. Sales immediately rose 150,000 per cent, Amazon reported.
Rowling had wanted her authorship kept under wraps, but one of her lawyers spilt the beans to an equally indiscreet friend, who revealed the secret on Twitter. Rowling was furious, but had these bigmouths not blabbed, “Galbraith” might have carried on writing in relative obscurity, and I doubt the BBC would have made its new Sunday night crime drama Strike.
It’s the second time Rowling’s non-Potter fare has been reworked for television: The Casual Vacancy, her first novel for adults, was cleverly adapted by Sarah Phelps in 2015.
Strike offers much to enjoy. Tom Burke, as Strike, doesn’t quite have the ursine build or the “high, bulging forehead, broad nose and thick brows of a young Beethoven who had taken to boxing” described in the books. But, as with his roguish but secretly sensitive Dolohov in the BBC’s War and Peace last year, he shows a heart under the tough exterior convincingly.
Burke has genuine chemistry with Holliday Grainger in the role of Robin Ellacott, the PA who longs to help her boss with the sleuthing. Martin Shaw also pops up as a dodgy lawyer, conveying posh and pompous by elongating vowels to the point of dislocation.
Strike isn’t likely to be confused with The Professionals; it’s not big on stunts and car chases. Most of the first episode consists of Strike sitting talking to people in grotty, unforgivingly lit caffs and burger bars. When he does finally decide to chase somebody, he has to stop after a few yards. (He is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, which has left him with a prosthetic leg.)
The three-part series, like the books, is designed not so much to get the viewers’ adrenalin pumping as to make them laugh, think and occasionally shiver. The focus is on everyday worries and ordinary human relationships – notably the blossoming attraction between Strike and Ellacott, much more complex and interesting than the standard ‘will they-won’t they?’. Ellacott may be stalked by a serial killer in one novel in thee sequence, but her worries about her love life and careerr are given equal weight. Rowling did the same thing in Harry Potter: exams, quidditch and mundane teenage arguments preoccupied the characters just as much as battling giant spiders or hunting horcruxe horcruxes. Of course, Ro Rowling created the expansive, magical world of Hogwarts Cast Castle, with its rolling groun grounds and fabulous feasts, when she was a single mother on b benefits. She is not short of a bob or two now and, w with the ability to go wherev wherever she likes in the world world, her imagination seems to have moved toward the insalubrious. She is p perhaps now ready t to draw on mem memories of her own pove poverty to describe the l lot of the dirtdirt-poor Strike, redu reduced to sleeping on the floor of his tiny, smelly office, in a dingy part of Soho that is brought to life with as much conviction as Diagon Alley.
Perhaps the emotional core of the series is Strike’s difficult relationship with his rock star father, which could have much to do with Rowling’s own fears about the damaging effects her fame may have had on her own children. Of course, if she had had her way, none of us would be trying to pick out the autobiographical elements in her crime fiction, or make Potter saga comparisons.
I asked David Shelley, Rowling’s editor at the publisher Little, Brown, why she had taken a pseudonym. “I do know that she wanted to… receive the sort of honest, unbiased feedback from declaring that the book “reminds me why I fell in love with crime fiction in the first place”. I asked her if it surprised her when she found out who Galbraith was.
“It didn’t entirely, because there’s a similarity of technique with the Harry Potter books,” she says. “Jo’s incredibly well-read and she’s like a magpie: she takes the bits that really work in whatever genre she wants to write in. But she synthesises them in a way that’s different, so that she turns them into something completely fresh.”
It’s her trademark mixture of the traditional and the original that has made Rowling’s crime novels such a hit, then. She’s not had unmixed success; I thought Galbraith’s last book, Career of Evil, which took a darker turn with subjects such as paedophilia, was less convincing than the others. (It, too, will be adaptated for the BBC, along with The Silkworm, the second in the series). But Rowling is right to experiment rather than write the same book over and over again: this is what gives the series its momentum.
Let’s face it, Rowling could quite easily be curled up on a beach in the Bahamas with a Dorothy L Sayers paperback instead of slogging away trying to devise uncrackable alibis.
She generously gives the profits from these books to ABF The Soldiers’ Charity. But it’s crime fiction fans who should be most grateful to her.