You
could do much worse than read Robert Galbraith’s The Silkworm, the second novel in his Cormoran Strike series.
It's a good summer read, a well-done page-turner that skates
along, smooth and sophisticated. It absorbs and amuses without demanding too
much or too little.
For
his second case, Strike, a harried detective whose recent success (told in The Cuckoo’s Calling, unread here) weighs
on his large shoulders, is hired to track down the notorious, and missing, highbrow
novelist Owen Quine. Just before his vanishment, Quine submitted for
publication a scandalous roman a clef that
obscenely slandered a whole host of egos populating the upper floors of London’s
highbrow literary world.
Not
surprisingly, Quine meets a very unpleasant fate, vividly reflected in quotes from
violent Jacobean tragedies that are laid in at the beginning of every chapter. In
addition to a well-exsanguinated corpse, we’re taken on an amusing, colorful
tour of modern literary London, a cruel country rife with cutthroat
competition, seething resentments, and grudges going back to the halcyon days
of printed books. Everyone’s a suspect as it should be, even Quine himself. The
literary world here is the perfectly circled firing squad. (“What am I doing in this novel-writing
business?” I asked from time to time. My library job started looking
better with every page.)
As
often happens, the mystery and its solution aren’t terribly compelling, at
least to my weathered eyes. Galbraith also commits that annoying, blatant cheat
where he conveniently kicks the reader out of the room so the detective hero can
spring his “surprise” on both villain and readers.
And
despite the crimson quotes from Jacobean plays, little blood is spilled beyond
the central murder. Jacobean tragedies brim with eye-popping violence (if you
like your bleeding bodies in a pile, you should check them out), but
Galbraith declines to let much gore seep onto his pages. Most of the violence
happens to pride and reputation; most of the hacking the work of no-talent
writers.
I
really enjoyed Galbraith’s deft skewering of today’s highbrow literary scene; a
series of jibes and jabs by a “downstairs” author at those toffs living “upstairs.”
“But writers are a savage breed,” one suspect tells detective Strike. “If you
want lifelong friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to
kill. If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory
in your every failure, write novels.” (And no doubt I’ve spread a bit of cheer
in the world.)
The
prose stumbles a little, but the characterizations are funny and pungent. So is
the atmospheric sketch of England in winter: hard, relentless, bitter, a
convincing obstacle to solving the mystery and bringing the villain to justice.
It felt cold.
With
Cormoran Strike, Galbraith looks to be trying to strike a balance between the predictably
invincible and the gruesomely sentimental. A lot of modern detective heroes, it
seems, are depressive knights murping about in Philip Marlowe’s heavy armor, mired
in past trauma, hopelessly sensitive, understanding, gloomy, and in mourning for
the fallen world. You want give them a good slapping. (If it’s all that hard to
take, why not quit and be a monk? The detective biz ain’t for saps, bub.)
Strike
bears a doughy resemblance to Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op, a man not
prone to self-pity. He’s been traumatized all right (he lost a leg in
Afghanistan, after all), and he even he has a lost love, like copper on his
soul. But Strike never seems bitter or wholly defined by tragedy. He’s an
action hero dashing to the rescue on a prosthetic leg, and that provides enough
immediate frustration without fulminating over what can’t be undone. In the best
stiff-upper-lip tradition, Strike “gets on with things.” He’s a portrait of
human resilience, a precious quality.
With
his second novel, Robert Galbraith has proven himself a more than entertaining
genre novelist. Unlike Cormoran Strike, he can well stand on his own two feet
and should now stop telling everyone he’s J.K. Rowling. As I’ve said before, if
I thought that kind of stunt worked, I’d be passing myself off as Stephen King
right now.
Thomas
Burchfield recently finished his novel Butchertown, a 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up. He lives in Oakland, CA with his wife Elizabeth.
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