A little while ago, I was delighted to be
asked by the big Harry Potter fan website, Mugglenet Academia, to do a podcast about
Harry Potter as detective fiction. For
anyone who, for some inexplicable reason missed it (I know, I know; the car
needed washing, the cat needed feeding, the telly needed watching) or who wants
to refresh their memories, here’s the link
I’ll just go off and entertain myself for
an hour while you listen.
OK? Nice to be back. Anyway, as I was saying, the point I was
making, as a massive fan of Agatha Christie et
al, (and al’s a really nice guy when you get to know him) that deep beneath
the wizarding skin of Mr Potter lies Hercule Poirot. Think of it as finding your inner
moustache. Or, if you’re feeling inclined to be more a Miss
Jane Marple, your inner knitting needles.
(Incidentally, did Miss Marple ever finish anything she knitted? She always surrounded by balls of wool and,
occasionally, when in the heat of explanation, will drop a stitch, but never
seems to be able to bring herself to cast off.)
Well, now it can be told. And has been,
lots. Last weekend the news broke that in
addition to writing The Casual Vacancy
JKR has also written The Cuckoo’s Calling,
a straightforward detective story. Naturally I nipped onto Amazon straight
away and ordered a copy. It arrived this
morning and I can hardly wait to dive in. It has a satisfying chunky feel and the set-up sounds classic (A troubled model falls to her death. Her brother has doubts she committed suicide and calls in private investigator Cormoron (what is it with birds, I wonder) Strike...) As everyone knows by now, she wrote it under the pen-name of Robert
Galbraith, apparently to see what would happen if she wrote a book with all the
bally-hoo associated with writing as JKR.
I could wish she’d chosen a different pen-name; Dolores Gordon-Smith
would’ve worked really well as a pen-name, for instance, but the saddest words
of tongue and pen are only these, it might have been, so to speak, to add a bit
of poetry and culture.
She might – and did – want to remain anonymous,
but I can’t help feeling that somebody somewhere knew Robert Galbraith was a
mere figment of the imagination. It was
reviewed in the Daily Mail and The Times and that doesn’t happen by
chance. Mysterious, eh? The plot thickens...
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