As I’m writing this I am waiting for delivery of the new J K Galbraith novel, The Running Grave.
It is publication day.
I do not read many crime novels, who-done-its, what-have-you. But I do read these.
As we well know the author pseudonym hides J K Rowling as true author.
This brings in precedent, skill level, and imaginative range.
There have been six previous Cormoran Strike novels – today will be the seventh. In order
Cuckoo’s Calling
The Silkworm
Career of Evil
Lethal White
Troubled Blood
The Ink Black Heart
The Running Grave
Each book has grown both in length, and emotional complexity. Having written that the whole series started with quite a bang: Cuckoo’s Calling, dealing with celebrity death, was complex enough.
Structrally this book inched towards its resolution much like a John Le Carre, carefully testing each clue, hypothesis.
It is worth your while to read the books rather than rely on TV adaptations – you’d be surprised (dismayed ?) on how much is lost to the medium, which comes down to, let’s face it, what is presumed of our attention spans.
The books are securely based on gripping crimes, with strong characters, outwith the two main ones of Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott. They deal with work frictions, London-centred living conditions, but also the major problems of an endemic misogynist society. We see the workings of this from the inside, with the basic everyday assumptions and presumptions, the not out-grown generational habits of thought and attitude, like a dead weight on everyone.
On-off personal relationships, the loneliness of the single that big cities foster and fester, hamper and sometimes spur investigations.
The past repeats its terrritorial demands – Cormoran Strike’s leg injury increasing restricts his investigative work; Robin Ellacott’s post-traumatic-distress takes its toll on her.
From which we should perhaps read that we all have our limits, and must respect them.
Romance.
Yes, this is the major drive through the books. Relationship breakdowns:
Cormoran and Charlotte, Robin and Matthew. But the big one is Cormoran – Robin.
How could it possibly work ?
Should it work ?
This is my major quibble with the books: it is the main hook for many readers, for me… I wonder if it’s necessary at all.
But then, the books deal with the uncomfortable, the seemingly unnecessary, the quibbles of our lives that nibble at us while we attempt the big things.
And the detective agency has been very successful in solving crimes – some very cold cases, some very high profile, some downright nasty and brutish.
That’s what I enjoy so much about Lethal White – not only is about a fictional high-profile member of the English Parliament, but it takes inside Westminster, its creaky little offices, as well as family estates.
Career of Evil on the other hand showed us the inner rooms of Edinburgh Castle, as well as the wee back streets of Melrose in the Borders (Thomas the Rhymer-town). You will not see any of this though in the TV adaptation.
It will be very interesting to see how Ink Black Heart is televised – a lot of important information occurs on gamer’s messaging boards, and direct messaging.
This book has some of the author’s best writing, to date. It is well worth the read for that.
There has been an argument that the books follow the now famous pattern of the Harry Potter novels: the ring structure, each book echoed in its companion book, The Philosopher’s Stone with The Deathly Hallows, The Chamber of Secrets with The Half-Blood Prince, The Prisoner of Askaban with The Order of the Phoenix, and the central one, the big reveal of the emergence of Voldamort in The Goblet of Fire.
I did wonder, myself, because the bleakness of Career of Evil could be nicely balanced with the dark moodiness of Troubled Blood.
So if this is true, then Lethal White is the crux novel. Do we read here, then, that moral corruption begins at the top, with the Government?
Or, is it, and this is the one I go with, the democratic view, that all people are liable to corruption, that it can reach from the past, but that we have the choice to change, to stop it right there ?
Apparently, following publication of Career of Evil, J K Rowling said in interview she had plans for a further ten books. There goes your nice patterning.
This genre of novels must surely be the earliest example of interactive writing.
Its history is fascinating, taking in not only The Sherlock Holmes stories, but Edgar Allen Poe. His Murder on the Rue Morgue is very suggestive of ring-pattern form, as well as ingenuous puzzle-making. Arthur Conan-Doyle has his famous detective face up to the puzzle-solving techniques of Edgar Allen-Poe (he dismisses them, but it sounds too like jealousy to me) in his, I think, first Holmes’ book, A Study in Scarlet.
And we have The Woman in White… we can back and back, depending upon your definition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_fiction
A knock at the door. This must be the book.
michael9murray 