Career of Evil is the novel its author most enjoyed writing. Which is weird, firstly, as Robert Galbraith acknowledges, because of the macabre subject matter, and secondly because Robert Galbraith is, in fact, J K Rowling, as everyone except me seems to know already.
I am a Harry Potter buff, not a crime thriller reader. Serial killers aren’t my thing, still less serial killers who specialise in hacking off women’s body parts to put in the freezer and masturbate over.
But each to her own. I’d never have identified JKR’s hand in this Cormoran Strike novel — the hero being an Army veteran with a prosthetic half-leg and a bad junk food habit — though the name does bear out the iron rule in Victorian shockers that detectives must have a single syllable surname, as in Sexton Blake or Sherlock Holmes.
But J K Rowling under any guise is pre-eminently a storyteller and even for a non-serial killer fancier, this one gripped.
I was, in the Harry Potter books, always surprised by the plot turns and the baddies; the same with this. There were fewer surprises when it came to the human interest side of things — Strike has an assistant who’s way more fun than his beautiful girlfriend, so we can see where that’s going, though I wish it were true in life that men would forsake a beautiful girl in favour of a feisty one; this may be where the author’s real sex shows.
You wouldn’t read this for style, mind you, but that’s not the point. The action switches between Denmark Street and Catford, with an improbable interlude in Le Gavroche; and it won’t, I may say, do much for Catford. The great thing is that this is rather a moral tale; it’s depravity inside a recognisably moral universe, and, notwithstanding a few mutilated corpses on the way, the proper order of things is reasserted at the end. Which, as far as I’m concerned, is the sole point of a crime novel.
Thank you, JKR.
