Cover blown, Robert Galbraith is Rowling
LONDON: Harry Potter author JK Rowling has been revealed to be the secret author of crime novel The Cuckoo’s Calling, which was published to rave reviews in April under pseudonym Robert Galbraith.
Her cover was blown by UK’s Sunday Times, which carried out an investigation after becoming suspicious that such an “assured” piece of writing could not have been the work of a first-time novelist. The clues that pointed to Rowling’s authorship were that she and Galbraith share an agent and editor, and the book was published by Sphere, part of Little, Brown, which published Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy last year.
“I had hoped to keep this secret a little longer because being Robert Galbraith has been such a liberating experience,” the 47-year-old said. “It has been wonderful to publish without hype or expectation, and pure pleasure to get feedback under a different name.”
The novel follows the probe into the death of a model in London by protagonist Cormoran Strike, a troubled war veteran.
Galbraith was said to be a retired military policeman and a married father of two. Following publication, one reviewer had described it as a “scintillating debut novel”, while another called it “astonishingly mature”. The novel had sold around 1,500 copies in hardback since publication. But it shot up the bestseller charts after Rowling was named its author. She has already written the second novel in the series, due for publication next year.