Book Review: The Cuckoo's Calling by "Robert Galbraith"
“A brilliant mystery in a
classic vein: Detective Cormoran Strike investigates a supermodel's suicide. After losing his
leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a
private investigator. Strike is down to one client, and creditors are calling.
He has also just broken up with his longtime girlfriend and is living in his
office.
Then John Bristow walks through his door with an amazing story: His sister, the
legendary supermodel Lula Landry, known to her friends as the Cuckoo, famously
fell to her death a few months earlier. The police ruled it a suicide, but John
refuses to believe that. The case plunges Strike into the world of
multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers, and
it introduces him to every variety of pleasure, enticement, seduction, and
delusion known to man…”
It’s interesting to see how opinions about this novel have changed over time. When it was originally released as the debut novel of Robert Galbraith, it was given little attention outside of crime drama genre purists. But the attention given was almost universally positive, to the point where some folks were actually paying attention and wondering how this writer might evolve.
And then the truth came out. This was, in fact, a novel written under pseudonym by J.K. Rowling.
In retrospect, it’s actually not that hard to figure out that it was written by her. There are stylistic uses of language and characterization that feel like a cross between the readability of the Harry Potter saga and her initial attempt at an adult novel, “The Casual Vacancy”. Frankly, this reads a lot better than “The Casual Vacancy” ever did, because it’s not trying to be a satirical sendup of small-town British politics and society. It’s a crime novel, through and through.
Imagine the Dresden Files novels without the magic, told in third person, and it wouldn’t be too far off, in terms of the tone. It’s not saturated in darkness, but Cormoran Strike is not a lovable character. He’s messed up in about a dozen different ways, and while there is that heart of decency at the center of his gruff and combative personality, it’s not a cop-out. Strike is a well-realized character, and this being the beginning of his resurrection, from a certain perspective, there are layers that are hinted at but left for future exploration.
Any good crime thriller is going to be less about dry details and more about personalities and psychological states, and that’s true in this novel as well. I have to admit: while I did consider the possibility of the resolution to the mystery, it wasn’t my high-probability guess. But that’s part of the fun! Minor details combine in a satisfactory way, and it is convincing how those details might have been missed by those looking at them with assumptions in mind.
This is a long book, and when the pieces are still being placed on the board for the reader, there are stretches that seem a bit pointless and tedious. After all, it’s never quite clear what is going to be meaningful or not; this isn’t the kind of simplistic novel where every piece of information gathered during the investigation is relevant. There are a number of red herrings. But the slower passages never approach the tedium that plagued “The Casual Vacancy”, and I was never tempted to set the book aside or otherwise give up on it.
All of which makes the commentary and reviews on the book, following the revelation of Rowling’s authorship, a bit cloying and all too predictable. When the work was being evaluated on its own merits, it garnered praise. A lot of people wanted to see what the next Strike novel from “Galbraith” would deliver. Unfortunately, it also wasn’t selling much; such is life for debut novelists in the current publishing reality.
Now that the truth is out, of course, the book is selling like crazy. And, just as predictably, there are suddenly scathing reviews and dismissals of the work, all based primarily on existing opinions about the author. It’s precisely why Rowling wanted to have a pseudonym to write under in the first place. When it became about her, and not about the quality or content of the work, the claws came out.
Luckily, Rowling intends to continue with the Strike character in future novels, regardless of whether or not the pseudonym is applied. Part of me hopes that she will try this sort of thing again, perhaps in the science fiction genre. If “The Cuckoo’s Calling” proved anything, it’s that J.K. Rowling can write something other than Harry Potter.
Released:
April 2013
Price:
$9.99 (Kindle version)
Acquisition
method: Amazon.com
- Solid debut for a crime thriller series
- Compelling and complex mystery
- Well-crafted characterizations
- Some may let the author’s history drive opinions