I don’t care for Rowling, but I was also unaware that she’d written this series. Are they interesting? Well-written?
They’re my favorite recent novels. I really like her writing style.
They’re pretty good. The first one was written under a genuine pseudonym and got published on its merits, rather than just because it was a big name author.
The central detective duo are engaging characters with decently fleshed out back stories and inner lives. The first few mysteries are pretty satisfying with reasonably complex plots that are fair to the reader but come with enough misdirection and red herrings to work.
Over time certain less enjoyable aspects become more notable, or at least start to wear more. Rowling is a fan of the transcribed accent - rather than saying e.g. that a character is from Manchester and speaks like it, she will have her lead character say “fucking hell” but her Manchester associate say “fookin’ 'ell”. And after a time that grates. (Indeed, both Strike and Robin - raised in Cornwall and Yorkshire respectively, should have regional accents, but apparently don’t.) A bigger deal is the will-they-won’t-they element, which hadn’t been resolved when I stopped reading. It starts really well - it is both clear that these people find each other attractive and could do really well together, and that there are reasons of both practicality and personality why they won’t do so immediately. You want them to overcome these difficulties. But after a point, it feels like it’s being dragged out.
The biggest problem as the books go on is that they get longer and longer - Robert Galbraith might have needed an editor, but Rowling is to big to have one foisted on her and it really tells. Not just in quantity but also quality. I said the first few mysteries are satisfying - after a point, there are too many plates spinning and too much to keep track of.
There’s quite a grisly element to the crimes - the victims are usually women, the perpetrators usually inadequate men. That’s fine, in that it means the heroes are fighting the good fight, but the point that murder and crime are unpleasant is made pretty clear. (The second novel, which also functions as a satire on teh publishing world is genuinely ugly in places but this is a bit of an aberration.)
To separate the art from the artist, I’d say they were in the higher tiers of detective fiction, worth giving a go, but that they become more work for the reader the longer the series goes on.
I’ve read everything in the series (the most recent book, #8, was released in early September) and agree with this summary.
I enjoy them and look forward to the new ones – I buy/read them as soon as they’re available – but the “will they/won’t they” is well past its sell-by date. And the more you read, some appreciation of the history of the main characters does start coming in handy for context.
I’ll also say that so far I enjoy the C.B. Strike TV series (available on HBO in the States). It’s well-cast, IMO, and I think the books are well-adapted. The series might be more accessible than the books for some.
I love the audiobooks. Narrated by Robert Glennister, who sounds just like a world-weary Cormoran.
My daughter (who, in her defense, hates Rowling’s transphobia as much as I do) recommended the first book to me, and I’ve eagerly awaited each one. They get increasingly graphic and unsettling, but I’d highly recommend the first three to anyone.
I second the audiobooks. Robert Glennister does a wonderful job.
However, The Ink Black Heart in print has simultaneous texting columns that are much easier to follow in a print version.
Yeah, Stanislaus really nails it with this review - I agree with all of it entirely. I’ve stopped reading the series because it’s become too much of a slog, but it’s worth trying the first one to see if you like it.
I’ll say as well that they’re long books, heavy on characters’ personalities, the relationships, and description. You probably already know that Rowling’s plots can be unnecessarily complicated. None of this especially bothers me, but some readers don’t like the series for one or more of these reasons. There’s another group of readers who want a romantic situation to be resolved, but to my mind, the lack of resolution contributes an enjoyable background tension.
The Cormoran Strike books do have a lot of the effective “itchiness” of the JK Rowling writing style: the characters are easy to engage with and you can find yourself really wanting to find out what they’ll say or do next, even if you’re not quite suspending disbelief.
I agree with previous posters, though, that Rowling’s megastar-status immunity from editorial discipline, and the consequent increasing sprawl of the novels, is affecting their readability as well as their plausibility.
When I read the first book, I thought Rowling would be committing harder to her pseudonymous persona of ex-Royal Military Police officer “Robert Galbraith” than she turned out to be. I was expecting a more consistently wry and “blokey” series about a rather beaten-up underdog detective who nonetheless prevails with intelligence and integrity (think John Sandford’s Virgil Flowers or Lawrence Block’s Bernie Rhodenbarr, for instance).
But through the series, the books have got more “chick-litty”, IMO, hybridized with the abovementioned “women’s thrillers” plot lines heavily leaning into the violent-misogynist-serial-killer theme. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of that in its own right, but it wasn’t really what I was hoping for when I first met Strike and Robin. And especially as Strike grows more financially successful and triumphant in his professional status, his resourceful-underdog vibe has substantially diminished.
The books are not an obvious vehicle for Rowling’s personal transphobia, although they do portray a lot of stupid and/or unthinkingly conventional attitudes that could be interpreted as reflections of it, in a “figure in the carpet” sort of way. Most of the portrayals have plausible deniability as reflecting views of a personally somewhat flawed character rather than the author, though.
That said, I have to admit that although the Strike books are still enjoyable (at least in large part) on a basic gripping-readability level, these days I am mostly malice-reading them to snicker at the plot holes and other construction flaws. Rowling has been astutely described as “a good set-builder, but a terrible world-builder”, and this is true even when her novelistic world is the “real world” of 2010s London and environs. Individual scenes are sharp and engaging, but when you step back and think about how it all fits together, the inconsistencies can be a bit ludicrous.
Some spoilered examples:
- Rowling apparently never paused to consider that Strike’s amputated leg being the right leg would seriously impair his legal ability to drive a non-disability-adapted vehicle, as her later plots require him to do. The TV series has had to switch up the left vs. right amputation to avoid portraying Strike as driving illegally.
- In the first novel, how the hell is the murderer supposed to (1) throw the victim off an apartment balcony before the horrified eyes of a young soldier on the next corner who immediately hightails it out of there as fast as he can run, (2) collect some spilled flowers and run downstairs to an empty apartment where he lets himself in and briefly hides out, restoring the flowers to a vase, (3) pull on some disguising garments while he waits for the neighbors in another apartment to run screaming downstairs to tell the security guard about the corpse on the pavement and the guard goes out in the street to look, (4) wait for everybody in the lobby to disperse upstairs so he can get his (middle-aged, unathletic) ass out into the street unobserved, and (5) be caught on security cameras running so close behind the fleeing soldier from step (1) that viewers assume they’re probably together? I mean, that soldier has got to be a mile or more away by the time the murderer starts running.
- In the fourth novel, it evidently takes Robin half an hour between chapters to walk maybe a couple blocks.
- After about the first three books, the Strike agency is employing quite a few people, up to a staff of seven full-time people including partners and subcontractors and administrative assistant, but they still run on maybe three to five clients at any given time, usually on cases that take weeks and months of constant surveillance duty. How the hell are some of these clients paying the tens and hundreds of thousands of pounds that would be required to support these investigations, and why are they impressed with the service they’re getting?
All the Strike books are full of these sorts of plot disconnects that it’s easy to gloss over when you’re in the moment of reading to get to the next interaction or reaction with a PoV character, but they really fall short of basic standards of authorial craft, especially in the detective-fiction genre. JK Rowling just does not care about her narratives making sense in any but the most immediate “vibes-based” plot manipulation form. Very clunky construction with a very effectively engaging surface style that distracts from it.
I really enjoyed the first one, thought the second was decent, and then skimmed to the end of the third one. I don’t even know how many there are now (just looked it up - 8!!).
Great post, can’t argue with any of it. I’ve never understood how the agency can survive on the workload described in the books. It’s absurd.
Another funny Rowling goof: one of the books has Robin arriving late one evening to a London train station, on her way to York. In the next scene, it’s morning and she’s on her way to her parent’s house after being met at the station. You can get a train to York that takes less than two hours; no idea what she was doing all night.
My recollection is that there are other, boring cases (unfaithful spouses and the like, the agency’s bread-and-butter) that we hear about only in passing.
There are, and often for two shifts a day for weeks on end, which would cost thousands and thousands of pounds. Rowling should really mix it up a bit because there a lot of other things the agency could be doing: background checks, uncovering industrial espionage, personal security, insurance fraud etc. etc.. The junior staff at the Strike Ellacott agency don’t seem to do anything but surveill wayward spouses.
Ohmigod, yes, do read that one in print!
I downloaded the audiobook right before a long road trip, and was really looking forward to a new Endicott/Strike book.
The tedious headers were long: “From Joe Shlobotnik to LoveParallelopiped420, September 10th, 11:42 pm, re:PlotPointNumber101”, and took up a LOT of time. I almost gave up.
I would genuinely listen for a good hour or two to the adapters explaining the process of, say, the later series, in which they took a c.900 page book and turned it into just 4 hours of television. It’s not that you don’t notice the stuff that’s been cut if you’ve read the book, because you do, there are whole sub-plots and characters that go missing, but I’d be fascinated to see how they make those decisions.
(Or keep them in but reduce them massively. E.g. in one the book had a running sub-plot about Strike’s latest disastrous relationship, which took up quite a bit of time and did have some connection to the mystery as well as reflecting Strike’s personal growth or lack thereof. In the TV show, that whole relationship was condensed to three phone calls in which Strike explains that he’s late or cancels the date, with the last call being the one where he’s promptly dumped. I don’t think they even cast an actress, it was just Strike talking into a phone. An incredible piece of adaption and one I’d love to be walked through.)
There ought to be, for sure: any competently run agency would be constsnt up processing dozens of cases that take anywhere from half a day to half a week and would be nothing but dull routine. Decent fictional worldbuilding would have built in this rapid turnover of minor cases as a constant background for the agency’s major projects.
But Strike is periodically talking over the caseload with Robin, and it’s always three to five cases that are apparently taking all the time and overtime of these overstretched employees. Repeated references to “if we wrap this case up then we’ll be able to take on this new project” and so on. No sense that this is all happening in the context of ongoing multiple minor cases.
And as noted, many of these cases drag on for weeks and months at a time, which is both not very impressive in terms of getting results, and really pricey for the clients.
“constsnt up”?? Sorry, I think I meant “constantly”.