Ever since one realised that J.K. Rowling was actually Robert Galbraith, the temptation to draw parallels with Harry Potter has been irresistible—not of course the story unless you count Scotland Yard as a kind of Hogwarts, but the surroundings; London as a kind of battered Diagon Alley where the spiritually maimed hero runs fuelled on pints of Doom Bar, haunted by his past and a stump that aches instead of a scar.
For a man with one leg, the opening of A Career of Evil catches Galbraith’s detective Cormoran Strike wrong-footed: a leg in a cardboard box delivered into the hands of his strawberry blonde secretary Robin. And so begins the lurching tale of a search for a man with a knife that has its roots in Strike’s past—the cardboard box contains the lines of a song which links Strike’s dead mother with the beautiful supergroupie, Leda. What adds to the tension is the fact that Robin is under threat.
The vulnerable Robin’s relationship with her fiance Matthew has almost reached breaking point in this latest adventure. Regular readers of the series by now will be wondering whether the anticipated marriage will go through or whether it’s Strike who will win Robin’s heart in the end. The relationship between the two and Matthew’s sulks form a parallel to the hunt for the serial killer and, on occasion, an unnecessary distraction.
Galbraith gives you four men and clues that could fit any of them. One suspect made headlines for cutting off his enemy’s penis, another is a violent paedophile, one may have murdered Strike’s mother and the fourth, a Scottish ex-army man, is a perfect savage. Strike has not met any of them in years and isn’t quite sure whether he would recognise them if he met them again. Despite that, going by records and experience, both Strike and Robin have their favourites among the four. However, a serial killer with a knife and a refrigerator borrowed right from Idi Amin is bound to evoke the original sadistic killer—Jack the Ripper. Indeed, three quarters through the novel, the press starts calling him the Shaftesbury Ripper. Not that it helps the reader guess who he is, though the roses sent to Robin quite obviously do not come from Matthew.
The world that Galbraith describes in this portmanteau novel is populated by the beauty of the English countryside, the blue sea of Cornwall (so admirably mined by Daphne Du Maurier) and those pebble-dashed homes of small towns on the edge of a grim nowhere, reminding us why some of the world’s best murder mysteries took place in England. Though the immediate murders take place in the seamy underbelly of London populated by women who get drunk, lurch through the streets, vomit and run into a killer’s knife—mainly prostitutes, which means that way back in September 1888, the Ripper had the plot just right.
If you want to look for comparisons with the classics of the murder mystery world, Galbraith probably comes closest to Elizabeth George in volume and detail—lean, mean writing it is not. Interestingly, the book stops for a moment, allowing the reader to think everything is over and then starts it again just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water. As to the real ending, the ‘romantic’ ending which turned into something like Lorna Doone, quite obviously Strike will strike again and it will be interesting to see how Galbraith unknots the knotty Robin issue later without being too obvious about it. One thing is certain—the author will continue to have fun and sweep readers along.
