Strike one!
In which I am quite wrong in real time
Ah, my annual reading accompaniment to Autumn is over, and I am very sad about it.
I am not generally a huge detective novel reader, although of course like many hardcore readers I ploughed my way through approximately 9,340 Agatha Christies the year I turned 13 or so and adored them all. I also have a lot of time for Rebus and agree with many in their assessment that the greatest detective novel of all time is Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, although that is a bit of a cheat, as the detective never leaves his bed and is solving an historical murder
My absolute favourite by miles though is Robert Galbraith’s Strike series. They are unwieldy and long, which suits me just fine as I want plenty of time to go into every character detail, every chip- based meal Strike eats and and every single one of his complicated family and leg management issues.
Galbraith’s absolutely genius with character has a perfect outlet in detective stories: each new witness, suspect and passerby is beautifully drawn in a few strokes- funny, tender, sometimes cruel, like a Tracey Emin drawing- and London is delved into, top to bottom.
The series started in contemporary time, but the characters have stayed in their time and we have raced ahead, so they are only only up to 2016, and it remains a London that still has music shops in Denmark street and people muttering darkly about whether Brexit will be a good idea. Oh, I miss those days. It’s just such a very recognisable city: of long cold walks to suburban underground stations; of exclusive private clubs and underground connections and illegal dog fights and all human life. The cases and plots are always well-put together but it is the vivid world they inhabit that make them such incredibly absorbing and satisfying reading experiences. As I always say when I’m occasionally called upon to teach writing, the best plot in the world won’t save you if people don’t care about the characters, whereas readers always forgive shonky or trope-y plotting if we love the people and world you create. The Strike series gets both things right.
The agonising will they/ won’t they romance between the grumpy limping detective Cormoran and his partner Robin is dragged out to extraordinary lengths in this latest, The Hallmarked Man. Galbraith has obviously absorbed the “never resolve the UST lessons” of Moonlighting, Frasier and The X Files. But even so, one cannot help but desperately long for the happiness of characters you’ve been kicking about with for years. The awful thing about it is that it is due to end next year, with only one more book. I am tempted to relocate it to Edinburgh and fan- fic it in my spare time, so I think it is probably lucky for everyone that I don’t have any spare time when I’m not playing Transport Manager 2 or my stupid bloody harp.
UPDATE! I checked with an *extremely* reliable source and no, they aren’t stopping!!! I don’t even know why I thought that. I am so so happy about this.
I don’t mind either reading or listening to them. Listening makes it last longer and is lovely because we generally take our summer holiday in October (my husband is a marine engineer and spent a lot of years working the summer season, which is why many of the early holiday pictures of our children everyone is wearing heavy jumpers and exclaiming at the unexpected snowstorms outside the windows), so they always remind me of such happy times.
Philip Glenister does the audios and is 99.9999% perfect, except for Barclay who is Scottish, an accent Glenister simply cannot do at all, even whilst his Pat is fabulously brilliant and his Kim even better. There is less and less of Barclay as the series progresses and I had occasionally wondered if it might even be for this very reason; there are not many downsides to being Scottish, that’s for sure, but everyone else on earth immediately doing an ‘och aye the noooo!’ attempt when they meet you is definitely one of them. Stop doing it please it’s very racist and tiresome.
HA omg I just double-checked and the audiobook reader is not Philip Glenister at all, it is ROBERT Glenister, who is someone else entirely!!! I thought it was Gene from Life on Mars, and have done all these years. HA! It is his brother though, that is why they sound so similar. Goodness, I’m being as wrong as Chat GPT today.
Anyway, if I was ROBERT Glenister’s agent, I would charge ninety gazillion pounds to do the next one, as his voice is now so deeply bound up with the stories that booking anyone else simply would not do and would probably cause a riot. Or, well, I suppose Philip could just undercut him. I wonder if Philip can do Scottish?
(As a side- note, incidentally, here in the UK we just had the latest series of the Traitors, a national obsession, and my youngest just absolutely loved Stephen Fry, just adored him, and I couldn’t figure it out, till I remembered that, given I’d already read Harry Potter twice to the first two, I couldn’t handle doing it a third time and outsourced it to Fry. We also got a couple of Alexas and D. figured out how to work them in sync which meant everywhere in the house for two years was Fry’s voice; she’d get to the end, then just begin again. On some very fundamental level, he had imprinted).
Anyway, all the Strikes are completely great but the series highlight is The Running Grave, where Robin has to go undercover in a cult. It is paralysingly, stop-you- in- the- street tense. The Hallmarked Man is also so tremendous I tried to pitch it to the Guardian as one of my top romantic novels of the year, but they weren’t having it. It is, though.
Oh and just to add, the actor Tom Burke is of course totally perfect at portraying him on television but I always prefer reading*, the pictures are better.
And although I am sad it is over... well, something that looks totally fabulous just won the Baillie Gifford Prize. I have never yet been disappointed in a BG prize winner- they award the best non-fiction book of the year, and their taste is generally impeccable. This year it has been won, rather improbably, by the diaries of an 83 year old Australian Woman (How to End a Story by Helen Garner), which means they must be absolutely superb.
That is the joy of books, isn’t it? There is always something new and wonderful just aroud the corner; always something to look forward to.
Author Humiliation of the Week:
At overseas event when I was called over to give a quick interview on national television
Publisher: oh, when *FAMOUS AUTHOR NAME* visited, he told the TV people they had to wait, first he had to sign for His People.
Actually no I still think I was right about this, journos have jobs to do too.
Love,
Jen xxxxxxxxx
*honourable exceptions: the Bridges of Madison County and Arrival.