The Cuckoo’s Calling

When I first heard about this assignment I instantly thought I should read a book by J.K. Rowling. The Harry Potter series has always been near to my heart so I felt like reading an another novel by her. Originally I chose The Casual Vacancy but I changed my mind quite quickly as I got a new crime novel by this praised new author called Robert Galbraith for christmas. It was later revealed to me that the book was actually written by none other than J.K. Rowling under the Galbraith pseudonym. I was instanly in love.

The Cuckoo’s calling is the first part of a series about an English private investigator called Cormoran Strike. The thing that separates him of the general ”detective type” is the way he’s presented in the story. The usual kind of a private investigator is quite noble and aristocratic, such as Sherlock Holmes, but in this case the main character is kind-of vulnerable, worn-out and dirty. In addition to him being a little messy, having a poor sense of style, a bad hairdo and a lot of financial problems he has even lost his leg in a battle in the Afghan war. All this together and a little bit of irritation between his skin and the prostesis, plus a recently broken engagement with his girlfriend, gives a pretty good image of the character. He is teamed up with his temporary secretary Robin Ellacot, a 25-year-old newly engaged Yorkshire girl, who has recently moved to London since becoming engaged. She is very interested in assisting a detective and turns out quite clever and comptent for the job.

In the beginning of the novel Strike is hired by a lawyer, John Bristow, who wants Strike to take a closer look to the death of Lula Landry, his adopted sister. Landry was a very succesful supermodel who was considered to have committed a suicide by jumping off a balcony in the ”better” side of London. Bristow refuses to believe that his sister took her own life and wants Strike to investigate the case more thoroughly. At first Strike seems sceptical about the case as it has recieved huge media attention but as he dives deeper into the case he founds out very crucial things about the young model’s death. And as the plot thickens Strike has to interview several people from Lula Landry’s life including her friends, brother, uncle, bodyguard and personal driver. The more he digs in to the world of the supermodel the more complicated the plot seems to be. Depression, drugs, poor relationships, stressful job and a multi-million inheritance were on this poor model’s shoulders. No wonder it seems that she killed herself. And yet, Strike has to try to believe Bristow and find out if the death was actually a murder, even though his only motive seems to be the double salary he’s getting from Bristow, due to his financial problems.

The language of the book was quite typical English with a few exceptions of for example the Cornish accent of Cormoran Strike and the speech patterns of different characters in general. The way Galbraith/Rowling made the characters seem more realistic and authentic was also very impressive. I especially loved the little details in the speech of the characters. For example ”how do you do” changed into ”how d’you do” etc. Lovely isn’t it?

And now to the critical part. The one thing I found somehow annoying whilst reading was the fact that every interview seemed to follow the same kind of a pattern; the detective is located in a restaurant (or a bar) and the person to be interviewed arrives at the scene. The questions are usually about the night of the death or the day before. It almost felt like Rowling was trying to get rid of the Harry Potter -type of ”monotonous” storytelling and move on to more complex dialogues. Even though J.K. Rowling is one of my favorite authors I must say that I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I enjoyed her other works, but still the book was pretty addictive. For real it was easy to read 70 pages a day without getting bored or falling asleep. Trust me I’m a slow and a lazy reader.

For the first work of crime fiction by J.K. Rowling this book was well executed. Soon after publishing The Casual Vacancy there suddenly started to be a lot of fuss about her writing a crime novel. Now that she has done it under the pseudonym, that was later revealed, I think that it couldn’t have impacted the public better, at least from a profitable point of view. In this case Rowling was truly a master of surprise and totally baffled her readers with this brief but neat vanishing trick.

From the deadly fall off the blacony to the poor father-son relationship between Cormoran and his dad, the story was an engaging, unique and thrilling reading experience. It would’ve been almost excellent without these small annoying repetitions and patterns it followed (still very usual in crime fiction). Nonetheless it was a story well-told and to be honest I’m looking forward to reading the sequel. Marvellous work J.K. Rowling, marvellous work indeed.