When Agatha Christie wrote her crime novels they weren’t
seen as classics at the time, so whilst Robert Galbraith's Strike books are not yet deemed classics, is there the possibilty that they might be in the future? I don't know, so I've read them to see whether they are worth the time and effort.
My heart sank when I heard my favourite actor Tom Burke would be portraying the role of
Cormoran Strike in the BBC’s dramatisation of the Robert Galbraith novels. (Robert Galbraith is the pseudonym of J K Rowling. I started reading the Harry Potter novels but gave up part way through book four. The first three were OK, but I did not care for her style of writing and none of her characters appealed to me. I had grown
up reading Ursula K Le Guin who had alread written books about a boy who went to wizard school, and my opinion did the job much better!)
The Cuckoo’s Calling
The first novel introduces us to the private detective,
Cormoran Strike, a war veteran who lost his leg in Afghanistan. Cormoran not
only has the physical wounds of war to deal with, but the psychological issues
too. He has just finished a long and tumultuous
relationship with his girlfriend, he has substantial debts that need paying
off; he has resorted to living in his office and is now down to his last
client. Then John Bristow walks through
his door, and Cormoron’s life is about to change. John’s sister, the beautiful model Lula
Landry had fallen to her death from a balcony months earlier. The police ruled
it a suicide, but John knows differently.
He wants Strike to investigate the glamorous world of modelling, rock
stars and designers, to find out if Lula fell, or if she was pushed.
I was pleasantly surprised reading this novel and how
absorbed I was with the two main characters, Cormoran, and his new assistant
Robin. It seems an unlikely pairing, however, the two characters bounce off one
another and I instantly fell in love with them both; although I didn’t fall in
love with Galbraith’s writing. I enjoy
the author giving sufficient detail to transport you to a specific place; she
really encapsulates what a traditional London pub is like for instance. I like
that she has visualised our modern society, (her comments about fandom especially
struck a chord that made me question and think quite deeply about what she had
written) but I get exasperated that long meandering narratives that
serve no purpose are incorporated. “ ’Is there any chance,’ asked Strike, as
they were momentarily impeded by a tiny hooded, bearded man like an Old
Testament prophet, who stopped in front of them and slowly stuck out his
tongue, ‘that I could come and have a look inside some time?’” It was a cleverly written sentence, but it
served no purpose, it was as if she had had an idea and was so pleased with the
sentence it had to be placed in the novel.
