By Michele Magwood for the Sunday Times
Career of Evil
Robert Galbraith (Sphere)
****
“I can’t remember ever enjoying writing a novel more than Career of Evil,” writes JK Rowling in the acknowledgements of the book. Robert Galbraith’s world, she says, “has always felt like my own private playground”.
Galbraith is, of course, the nom de plume Rowling chose when she decided to try her hand at crime writing. She wanted the freedom to write in a new genre without the weight of expectation that freighted every word she wrote. So The Cuckoo’s Calling was duly sent out as the work of a new thriller writer, and it was turned down by several publishers before being picked up by Little Brown. It had sold just 1500 copies when one of Rowling’s lawyers whispered the real identity of Galbraith to his wife’s best friend, and the game was up, via a stray tweet. Rowling was livid, sued the lawyer and the friend and donated the undisclosed settlement to The Soldiers’ Charity which, she said, had helped her research into her main character, ex-army officer Cormoran Strike.
In Strike Rowling has created a true original: a former military policeman who lost his lower leg in a car bomb in Afghanistan, now working as a private detective. Big and handsome in a bashed way, he has a great backstory, too. He’s the son of a Mick Jagger-type rock star and a super-groupie who raised him in a filthy squat. It’s not surprising that he found comfort, and an outlet for his innate fury, in the discipline of the military. Strike’s sidekick is Robin Ellacott, who arrived as a temp in the first book and has been training to be a private detective since then. Sharp, strawberry-haired and ambitious, it’s clear the pair are meant to be together, but Robin is engaged to a ghastly accountant and Strike is dating a dull beauty. The will-they, won’t-they tension underpins the plot to a near-maddening extent.
Career of Evil opens in the foetid mind of a serial killer who has just dismembered a young woman. Cut to Robin arriving at the office and receiving a parcel. It’s oddly-shaped – and it would be, as it contains the dead woman’s severed leg, “the toes of the foot bent back to fit”. The murderer has his sights on the ruination of Strike; killing Robin is part of the plan.
Strike identifies four suspects from his past who despise him, and then they’re careening off on a 500-page race to catch the killer, swimming through shoals of red herrings and crossing the country from north to south.
Characterisation is one of Rowling’s great strengths, and the book teems with vivid figures. There’s the shaven, scarred Shanker, friend and informant, with his gold teeth and “fug of cigarette smoke, cannabis and body odour”; there’s the staid policeman’s wife who moonlights as a burlesque dancer; and there’s Tempest, who suffers from the bizarre BIID disorder. People with Body Integrity Identity Disorder believe they are meant to be disabled and fantasise about amputating their healthy limbs.
Throw in acrotomophilia – sexual gratification from having sex with an amputee – paedophilia, rape, mobile crack dens and women being hacked to bits, and it’s evident that the Galbraith novels are getting increasingly dark.
There’s a sense, though, that in her desire to “play” in the thriller genre, Rowling has simply swotted up the conventions – lonely damaged detective shows up inept police, for instance – and spools out a story to fit. She tends to tell too much, rather than show, the writing is often clunky – Robin has a “recrudescence of tears” – the cod “Oirish” and Scottish accents grate and the plot drifts worryingly towards outright misogyny.
Still, Cormoran Strike carries it off on his broad shoulders, and some nifty plotting keeps the pages turning until the killer is revealed. After a cracker of an ending, readers will be looking forward to the next installment. Will they? Won’t they?
Follow Michele Magwood on Twitter @michelemagwood
Book details
- Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith
EAN: 9780751563580
Find this book with BOOK Finder!