words in scarlet ink

As I mentioned in another post, I’ve been on a bit of a J.K. Rowling kick this year.

I listened to all the Harry Potter books on audiobook, and listened to The Casual Vacancy as well as The Cuckoo’s Calling. I also listened to The Silkworm. It’s the second novel she published as ‘Robert Galbraith’ and it’s the second murder mystery featuring PI Cormoran Strike.

Now, I enjoyed The Cuckoo’s Calling a lot, but was skeptical about The Silkworm, only because I was curious to see if Rowling could keep it up.

I’m just not going to doubt her anymore. There’s no point. I really, really enjoyed The Silkworm. In addition to being a solid mystery story, it was a sharp witted critique of the publishing industry.

The story surrounds the disappearance of Owen Quine, an author who wrote one critically acclaimed book a long time ago and has written mostly garbage since. He is later found dead, but Cormoran Strike is hired by Quine’s eccentric wife, Leonora, to find him and bring him back. He’s disappeared before, having affairs and being something of a douche, leaving his wife to take care of their intellectually disabled daughter, Orlando. He did love his daughter tremendously, and seemed to stay in his marriage for her sake.

Leonora becomes the prime suspect in Owen’s murder – basically because he’s a huge jerk to her, but Strike becomes convinced she didn’t do it, and keeps investigating in spite of being told to back off by the police.

We meet some other people in this book, and I think they were parodies of real people. They were over the top, awful caricatures of human beings, and so many stereotypes were employed you had to assume Rowling did it on purpose. Between Liz Tassel (the chain smoking literary agent whose career went down the toilet years ago) and Daniel Chard (the not-so-secretly-gay publisher who seemed to have a taste for barely legal men) and Michael Fancourt (the successful “literary rebel” who maintains literature should provoke social discussion but is actually using that as a cover to be a raging misogynist), they would be awful stereotypes if they weren’t so detailed.

One of Rowling’s greatest strengths – from the Harry Potter series to The Casual Vacancy to these Cormoran Strike novels – is the world she creates with details, allusions to other things. It’s all these little things that make her characters real people instead of horrendous stereotypes – little twists that make them interesting. My favorite example is Hermione Granger in the HP books. She is a bookish know-it-all, but while she is a raging nerd, she is also quite in tune with her emotions and isn’t socially inept (as many other bookish characters are described in other stories). Further, she’s doesn’t hide behind her books, she uses what she learns in them quite well – she isn’t just an academic, she’s a practical, pragmatic girl who saves her two friends over and over again. She’s just different enough to be interesting.

This is what happens in The Silkworm – details, details, details.

Anyway, the investigation is further complicated by Owen’s last manuscript called ‘Bombyx Mori,’ which appears to be a thinly veiled allegory about Owen and the other literary characters in the story.

Also in the story is Strike’s assistant, Robin, my latest favorite female character of Rowling’s, who is quite smart and a decent investigator in her own right. There is a lot of tension between them because Strike treats her like a secretary for a good portion of the book, brought on by the fact that he knows Matthew, Robin’s finace, would give her a hard time if she was doing anything else. Robin eventually is able to overcome this and join in the investigation more actively.

At this point, it’s clear that Strike is battling a growing attraction to Robin, who he thinks the world of because of her work and her brains and her guts. Strike’s former fiance is also still tormenting him from afar, marrying the old college boyfriend she originally dumped for Strike 15-20 years earlier and sending him messages, to which Strike vows not to respond.

I found the ending of this mystery particularly satisfying as well. I have a problem with mysteries – I tend to guess the end. I didn’t guess the end here, which makes me super happy.

So! J.K. Rowling has another good read out. The Silkworm is even more interesting in The Cuckoo’s Calling, I think. I’m very excited about the next Cormoran Strike story, which I hope comes out next year. Rowling says she has planned out a lot of Strike’s stories, and with the first two being very good, I think we can eagerly anticipate the rest.