Masaryk University

Faculty of Arts

Department of English
and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Bc. Agáta Hamari

Influences of Golden Age and Hard-Boiled

Detective Fiction on “Robert Galbraith”

Master’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Jeffrey Alan Smith, M.A., Ph.D.

2016

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 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently,
using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

……………………………………………..
Author’s signature

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I would like to thank my supervisor, Jeff Smith, for his support and guidance. A big thank you to my
family and Martina, Lenka, and Eliška, my friends. The biggest thank you to Jakub, my everything.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 Introduction ............................................................................................................... 5

2 Detective Fiction ....................................................................................................... 7

2.1 Detective Fiction and Its Beginnings ................................................................ 7

2.2 Detective Fiction of the Golden Age ................................................................. 9

2.3 Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction ......................................................................... 14

2.4 “Robert Galbraith” ........................................................................................... 20

3 The Plots: Summaries and Analyses ....................................................................... 22

3.1 The Cuckoo’s Calling ..................................................................................... 22

3.2 The Silkworm ................................................................................................... 27

3.3 Career of Evil ................................................................................................... 33

4 Characters ................................................................................................................ 38

4.1 The Great Detective ........................................................................................ 38

4.2 The Sidekick..................................................................................................... 44

4.3 The Police......................................................................................................... 47

4.4 The Murderers and Their Motives ................................................................... 51

5 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 55

6 Works Cited ............................................................................................................. 59

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 1 INTRODUCTION

“Death in particular seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a

greater fund of innocent amusement than any other single subject.” This 1934 quote by

Dorothy L. Sayers (qtd. in James) clearly describes the fascination with detective fiction

which persists to this day. Although it could be argued that the fascination is not limited

to the English-speaking population of the world, it is the English and Americans who

have written the best-known detective stories; especially in the so-called Golden Age of

detective fiction and the hard-boiled genre of crime fiction. This thesis will be dealing

with the novels by J. K. Rowling written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, which

is going to be the author’s name used in this thesis. In the three novels, The Cuckoo’s

Calling (2013), The Silkworm (2014), and Career of Evil (2015), there are a number of

aspects which seem to reference the two subgenres of detective fiction mentioned

above, and the thesis will focus on tracing these influences.

In The Cuckoo’s Calling, Galbraith’s Great Detective Cormoran Strike is introduced

and investigates the murder of a famous supermodel which was previously ruled out as

a suicide. The novel seems to follow a classic Golden Age detective fiction pattern,

from its plot and the manner in which clues are presented to the reader to the surprising

ending and revelation of the murderer. The Silkworm deals with Strike’s investigation of

the disappearance of a notorious writer, which later turns into a murder investigation as

well. In this novel Galbraith presents the reader with a closed circle of suspects, which

is another Golden Age device used in his novels. The plot of Career of Evil focuses on a

serial killer who is obsessed with Strike – something that can be seen in Agatha

Christie’s The ABC Murders or as early as the stories of Sherlock Holmes and Professor

Moriarty. However, although the plots of the novels are very much “Golden Age”, the

character of the Great Detective and the circumstances under which he is living seem to

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be influenced much more by the hard-boiled stories of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell

Hammett. There are several other detective fiction stock characters in the novels, too,

and the relationship of the detective with these characters will be examined: most

notably it will be Robin Ellacott, who is Strike’s secretary and subsequently sidekick.

The thesis is, excluding the introducing and concluding chapters, divided into three

chapters. The first chapter focuses on detective fiction as a genre and is divided in four

sub-chapters: the history of the genre, detective stories of the Golden Age, hard-boiled

detective fiction, and an introduction of the three novels by Robert Galbraith. Julian

Symons’s Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel and P. D.

James’s Talking about Detective Fiction will be used as the main reference materials for

the history of the genre and the description of the Golden Age and hard-boiled

subgenres of detective fiction. The second chapter is divided in three sub-chapters while

each of them focuses on the plots of the individual novels by Galbraith. The third

chapter is devoted to the individual characters in the novels and is divided in four parts:

the Great Detective, the sidekick, the police, and the murderers. There the characters

mentioned will be analysed in relation to their counterparts in Golden Age and hard-

boiled novels.

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 2 DETECTIVE FICTION

2.1 Detective Fiction and Its Beginnings

Detective fiction is a distinctive genre of literature which is concerned with a

mystery within the story – usually a murder – which is investigated by a detective and

which the reader is supposed to solve according to clues presented to them by the

author. In her book Talking about Detective Fiction, P. D. James offers a definition of

the genre:

What we can expect is a central mysterious crime, usually murder; a closed

circle of suspects each with motive, means, and opportunity for the crime; a

detective, either amateur or professional, who comes in like an avenging deity to

solve it; and, by the end of the book, a solution which the reader should be able

to arrive at by logical deduction from clues inserted in the novel with deceptive

cunning but essential fairness. (James 15)

Another definition is provided by W. H. Auden in Julian Symons’s book Bloody

Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: “The basic formula is this: a

murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are

eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies” (Symons 14). These definitions apply

largely to the detective story of the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction and not as

much to the later developed genres such as the hard-boiled school, but they also apply

to the stories of Robert Galbraith. But before all these stories saw the light of day, there

were other writers who helped shape the genre as we know it today.

Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Murders in the Rue Morgue is considered to

be the first modern detective story and Poe himself has been called “father of detection”

(Symons 35). The story features the first “Great Detective” C. Auguste Dupin, who

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shares many traits with later Great Detectives such as Sherlock Holmes or Hercule

Poirot, and is narrated by a sidekick of the detective, which is another common

detective story feature. More importantly, as stated by Heather Worthington in the “From

the Newgate Calendar to Sherlock Holmes” chapter of A Companion to Crime Fiction,

the story “not only [offers] a rational explanation of a mystery or solution to a crime,

but also [sets] in place narrative and thematic patterns that are still apparent in modern

crime fiction” (Worthington 22). These narratives are “not the straightforward pursuit of

the criminal […] but something new – an intelligent analysis of facts that leads to a

resolution, a process of inductive thought” (Worthington 22). The way Poe makes his

Great Detective investigate the crime later becomes a model for the manner in which

other Great Detectives work.

The novel which is considered to be the first detective novel written in the

English language is Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, described by T. S. Eliot as “the

first, the longest, and the best” of modern detective novels (James 23). Rather

unusually, the central crime is not a murder but a theft of a large diamond. However, it

does feature police officers who are just incompetent enough to come to a wrong

solution for the crime, which then has to be investigated by an amateur detective. The

setting of the story is an isolated house – a trend later seen in many Golden Age

detective stories – and the plot includes a number of “red herrings”: clues which are

designed to set the reader off their path to the right solution.

Perhaps the best-known detective preceding the detectives of the Golden Age is

Sherlock Holmes. As Heather Worthington puts it, “he is the archetypal detective whose

influence can still be seen in modern crime fiction and his representation is the

culmination of the development of the crime fiction genre over the nineteenth century”

(Worthington 26). The first story in which he appears is A Study in Scarlet, first

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published in 1887. In the story, many of the Great Detective’s typical traits, including

his fondness for “deduction”, are introduced. Sherlock Holmes is a person of great

intellectual ability with little concern for the feelings of others, almost a thinking

machine, up to the point that his very name became a synonym for an extremely clever

person. The “science of deduction” is a very influential aspect of Doyle’s detective

stories because the detectives of the Golden Age, most notably Hercule Poirot, work in

a similar manner. Another influential aspect of the stories of Sherlock Holmes is his

sidekick, Dr. Watson. Many Golden Age detectives had a friend or colleague who was

influenced by the character of Watson, including Hercule Poirot’s Arthur Hastings,

Nero Wolfe’s Archie Goodwin (by Rex Stout), or, perhaps a little unusually, Lord Peter

Wimsey’s female sidekick (and love interest) Harriet Wane, written by Dorothy L.

Sayers, and the sidekick character appears in the novels of Robert Galbraith as well.

Arthur Conan Doyle wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories about Sherlock

Holmes and the detective is considered to be “both an end point in the development of

crime fiction and a starting point: crime fiction in the twentieth and twenty-first

centuries would not be the same without him” (Worthington 27).

2.2 Detective Fiction of the Golden Age

The so-called Golden Age of detective fiction is most commonly defined as a period

which covers the two decades between the two world wars (James 48). In the Golden

Age, short stories gradually gave way to the detective novel because the plots were

becoming more complicated and more developed (James 47-48). Symons explains this

shift to be linked to the social and economic changes after the First World War: “The

emancipation of women which took place during the War played a large part in the

creation of a new structure in domestic life, particularly in Europe, through which

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women had more leisure, and many of them used it to read books” (Symons 86).

Therefore the need for more developed, and thus longer, stories emerged. The

emancipation of women played its part not only in the readership but also concerning

the authors of these novels as the best known detective novels of the Golden Age were

written by the so-called “Queens of Crime”: Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio

Marsh, and Margery Allingham.

Each of the Queens of Crime created a unique series of novels as well as

distinctive Great Detective characters and Christie’s and Sayers’s creations will be now

further introduced, as they will be referenced later in the thesis. Agatha Christie’s

Hercule Poirot is a Belgian ex-policeman whose modus operandi famously includes the

usage of “little grey cells” (The Mysterious Affair at Styles 145). In her autobiography,

Christie describes the creation of Poirot and lists the character traits the detective would

have: he would be an inspector, so that he would have some knowledge of crime, he

would be tidy, always arranging things, he would be extremely brainy, and he would

have an unusual name (An Autobiography 263-264). These characteristics stuck with

the detective for more than fifty years of Christie’s writing career. She also defines the

universal plot of the stories she would write: “The whole point of a good detective story

was that [the culprit] must be someone obvious but at the same time, for some reason,

you would then find that it was not obvious, that he could not possibly have done it.

Though really, of course, he had done it” (An Autobiography 262). This pattern is the

most used in her stories and has become the best recognised pattern of the Golden Age

itself. As Julian Symons puts it, “Christie’s first book is notable because it ushered in

the era during which the detective story came to be regarded as a puzzle […] It was the

beginning of what came to be known as the Golden Age” (Symons 92).

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 Christie was also one of the only detective novelists of the Golden Age who created

a female Great Detective – Miss Marple. This elderly spinster greatly differs from other

detectives of this period: she is an ordinary lady, living in an ordinary village, does not

have any eccentric qualities (except for, maybe, an inclination to gossip), and does not

solve crimes with her “little grey cells” but only with the help of her knowledge of

human nature. The first novel in which she appears is The Murder at the Vicarage

(1930) and Christie continued to write stories about her for the next forty-six years; in

fact, the last Christie novel ever published was a Miss Marple novel. However, female

detectives were a rare sight in Golden Age detective fiction. Before the beginning of the

Golden Age era, in 1910, Baroness Orczy published a short story collection about a

female Scotland Yard investigator Lady Molly, and Christie later published stories

about Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, where at least a half of the main duo is female,

but other than that, female characters in Golden Age detective fiction in general were

“either sidekicks or cheerful crusaders-in-arms to the dominant male hero, serving

either as a Watson or a love interest, or both” (James 62). Miss Marple, being neither of

these things, is a rare Golden Age creation.

Dorothy L. Sayers’s creation is Lord Peter Wimsey, an English aristocrat whose

hobby is to solve murders which baffle the police. Julian Symons talks about him very

critically in his Bloody Murder, saying that he is a caricature of an English aristocrat

whose great many qualities are not endurable for the reader (Symons 101). The

detective is paired with a Jeeves-like character, Bunter, who serves as a sort of sidekick

to Wimsey, although later this part is undertaken by the famous detective novelist

Harriet Vane. The plots of Sayers’s novels follow the classic whodunit pattern where

the culprit is revealed at the very end by the Great Detective. Wimsey, just like other

Golden Age detectives, relies on his wit rather than fists, and although Sayers, as a

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feminist, created a female sidekick for him, it is always Wimsey who plays the

dominant part (James 63).

The Queens of Crime, along with many other detective fiction writers of the Golden

Age, were members of the so-called Detection Club. Founded in 1930 and still in

operation today, it was formed to join together writers of detective fiction who followed

(and sometimes broke) a set of rules for writing detective stories established by Ronald

Knox. The rules Knox came up with, dubbed the “Ten Commandments of Detective

Fiction”, were the following: “The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the

narrative but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.

All supernatural agencies are ruled out. Not more than one secret room or passage is

allowable. No hitherto undiscovered poison should be used or any appliance which

needs a long scientific explanation. No Chinaman must figure in the story. No accident

must help the detective, nor is he allowed an unaccountable intuition. The detective

himself must not commit the crime or alight on any clues which are not instantly

produced for the reader. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, should be

slightly, but no more than slightly, less intelligent than the average reader and his

thoughts should not be concealed. Twin brothers and doubles generally must not appear

unless the reader has been duly prepared for them” (James 52). These rules were more

or less followed by the writers of the Golden Age. A famous case of a rule being broken

is Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd where not only the narrator’s, the

“Watson’s”, thoughts are concealed but he is in fact revealed to be the murderer.

Another case is Christie’s Curtain in which there are two crimes which need solving

and one of the murders is committed by the dying Hercule Poirot.

The settings of Golden Age detective stories vary: in Christie, it is most frequently a

rural setting; in Sayers, it is London; but the most important characteristic of the setting

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is the fact that there is a limited number of suspects. Agatha Christie was a master of the

“closed-circle mystery”: Christie’s Death on the Nile takes place on a luxurious ship

which no one else apart from the people travelling on it could board. Her Death in the

Clouds goes even a little further because the murder takes place in a flying airplane.

There are a number of other Christie novels which use this pattern, such as Cards on the

Table, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, or And Then There Were None. Dorothy L. Sayers’s

The Five Red Herrings is an example of a closed-circle mystery as well, taking place

amongst a group of artists where the murderer must be a painter because they finished

the victim’s painting for him. The village setting of detective stories might make the

crimes depicted a little incredible; however, it has a purpose: “The single body on the

drawing room floor can be more horrific than a dozen bullet-ridden bodies down

Raymond Chandler’s mean streets, precisely because it is indeed shockingly out of

place” (James 112).

Detective novels of the Golden Age are concerned the most with the puzzle. The

mystery of “who has done it” is much more important than realistic depictions of the

crimes. Bodies of people who have died under the most cunning circumstances one

could come up with pile up in peaceful English villages whose homicide rate is much

more above average, but realistic depiction of death is not the point of these novels. As

P. D. James states,

[…] they are novels of escape. We are required to feel no real pity for the victim, no

empathy for the murderer, no sympathy for the falsely accused. For whomever the

bell tolls, it doesn’t toll for us. Whatever our secret terrors, we are not the body on

the library floor. And in the end […] all will be well. […] All the mysteries will be

explained, all the problems solved, and peace and order will return to that mythical

village […] (James 66).

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In other words, we must solve the puzzle behind the story – or, if the solution is beyond

our capacity, let the Great Detective tell us what happened – and life can go back to

normal.

2.3 Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction

With the outbreak of the Second World War, popularity of the simple puzzles of

the Golden Age started to decline. Although a number of Golden Age novelists

continued to produce detective fiction written in the old tradition, in the United

States of America another genre of crime fiction started to become increasingly

popular. The hard-boiled style of crime fiction is defined as “a tough, unsentimental

style of American crime writing that brought a new tone of earthy realism or

naturalism to the field of detective fiction [and] used graphic sex and violence, vivid

but often sordid urban backgrounds, and fast-paced, slangy dialogue” on

Encyclopaedia Britannica. Author John Scaggs, in his Crime Fiction, provides three

elements which characterise early hard-boiled crime fiction: a Californian setting, an

American vernacular, and a “portrayal of crimes that were increasingly becoming

part of the everyday world of early twentieth-century America” (Scaggs 57). The

genre very much depended on the personality of the detective who is described by

Raymond Chandler in his famous essay The Simple Art of Murder (1944) as a man

“who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this

kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a

complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a

rather weathered phrase, a man of honor […]” (The Simple Art of Murder 12). The

two best known detectives created in this tradition were Dashiell Hammett’s Sam

Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe; however, the genre itself began in

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the 1920s with the emerging of pulp magazines, most notably the Black Mask

(Symons 123).

The first “hard-boiled dick”, as Julian Symons says, was Race Williams, the

creation of Carroll John Daly (Symons 123). Daly’s hero, according to John Scaggs,

is “a large, tough, violent man, and is clearly the prototype for many hardboiled

heroes, from Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe to Mickey Spillane’s Mike

Hammer, although as a model he was quickly superseded, and has been all but

forgotten” (Scaggs 55). However influential this character may have been, it is

mostly his toughness and not his brains that had any influence on the later hard-

boiled detectives. Author Robert Sampson writes the following about him:

“Williams is a hired adventurer who may occasionally detect if he blunders into a

clue the size of a bathtub and painted bright pink. He has little use for clues, even

less for chains of reasoning” (qtd. in K. Smith). This is not true of the later hard-

boiled detectives as they need to employ their brains as well as their fists to restore

order in the fictional world.

Dashiell Hammett started writing detective stories in the early 1920s and his first

notable creation was the Continental Op, a private investigator whose name is never

mentioned in the works in which he is featured. Hammett himself had an

investigator background because in the number of jobs he had in his youth there was

a time when he was employed as a Pinkerton detective (Symons 124). In The Simple

Art of Murder Chandler says that Hammett “gave murder back to the kind of people

that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand,

not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish” (The Simple Art of

Murder 10). His style differs greatly from the style of Golden Age detective fiction,

as not only did he provide crimes which were realistic (or at least somewhat), but

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his stories, according to Symons, have a “bareness of a style in which everything

superficial in the way of description has been removed” (Symons 125).

The first novel in which Hammett’s Continental Op appears is Red Harvest

(1929). What is unusual about it in terms of differences between typical Golden Age

detective novels and Red Harvest is the fact that it is not narrated by a sidekick, nor

is it narrated in third person, but the Continental Op himself narrates the story. The

plot of the story revolves around rivalling gangs in the city dubbed “Poisonville” by

the Continental Op who is hired to clean up the city where even the police are

corrupted. “This world of total violence was not far removed from life in some parts

of urban America, and Hammett does not make the gang bosses glamorous of the

Continental Op a crusader” (Symons 125). The character of the Continental Op

himself is described by P. D. James this way: “There is nothing subtle about him

and little we expect to know […] but there is an honesty and directness about his

personal code, limited as it may be. […] He is as ruthless as the world in which he

operates, a violent gun-carrying dispenser of the only justice he recognises” (James

73). The Continental Op, the first major hard-boiled detective, appeared in two

novels and thirty-seven short stories, but the best known detective created by

Dashiell Hammett is undoubtedly Sam Spade, the hero of The Maltese Falcon.

The Maltese Falcon, published in 1930, is concerned with the whereabouts of a

large valuable statuette of a bird. Sam Spade, a private eye in the Archer and Spade

detective agency in San Francisco, is approached by a beautiful woman, later

introduced as Brigid O’Shaughnessy, to find her lost sister. The woman, however, is

not who she seems and after a couple of murders, including the murder of Spade’s

partner, she is identified as the culprit in the most detective story-like plot in the

novel. Foreign gangsters are involved in the story as well and with its complex plot

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it has become the archetypal hard-boiled detective novel, just like Spade has become

the archetypal hard-boiled private eye (James 74). Spade, described in the opening

paragraph of the novel, looks “rather pleasantly like a blond satan” (Hammett 1). He

is a tough San Francisco detective, who is not afraid to use his fists or his gun, but is

also witty and clever, unlike Daly’s Race Williams. The fact that Spade is self-

employed is another important feature of the hard-boiled detective. As John Scaggs

puts it, “unlike the Miss Marples, Hercule Poirots, Peter Wimseys, and Gideon Fells

of classic detective fiction, the hard-boiled private eye is no longer an eccentric or

wealthy amateur [but rather] a professional investigator who works for a living, and,

more significantly, who works for him- or herself” (Scaggs 60).

When it comes to the methods of investigation Spade employs, there is not much

detection going on in the course of the novel. At the very end of the story, the reader

learns that Spade has known who the murderer of his partner Miles Archer was

since the beginning and only played along. This is not explained in the novel but is

for the reader to deduce from the story, because no new information about Archer’s

murder emerges in the course of the novel. There are no clues, no investigation

methods the reader is familiar with from the detective stories of the Golden Age.

Still, the revelation about Miss O’Shaughnessy’s guilt does not come until the very

end. Although the puzzle is very much in the background of this novel, P. D. James

thinks that there are other valuable features that Dashiell Hammett brought into the

detective novel: “He showed crime writers that what is important goes beyond an

ingenious plot, mystery, and suspense. More important are the novelist’s individual

voice, the reality of the world he creates, and the strength and originality of the

writing” (James 75).

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 Apart from Sam Spade, there is another fictional detective who became the

archetype for a hard-boiled private eye. His name is Philip Marlowe and he

appeared for the first time in Raymond Chandler’s 1939 novel The Big Sleep.

Chandler himself started writing at a relatively advanced age; his first novel was

published when he was fifty-one. A lot has been said about his style of writing, for

example by Julian Symons:

[Chandler] was highly conscious of the fact that he was working in what he

called a mediocre form and trying to “make something like literature out of it”

[and he] succeeded. […] Chandler had a fine feeling for the sound and value of

words, and added to it a very sharp eye for places, things, people, and the

wisecracks that in their tone and timing are almost always perfect (Symons 130).

John Scaggs says the following about Chandler’s writing: “While Hammett’s lean prose

and emphasis on colloquial dialogue had the effect of seeming neutral and objective,

Chandler’s adoption of Hammett’s tough-guy tone is tempered by a romantic

individualism constructed around the viewpoint of his private eye hero, Philip

Marlowe” (Scaggs 59). It is precisely the persona of Philip Marlowe that is the strongest

point in Chandler’s novels; he was allegedly never fond of devising plots for his novels

and thought that plotting was “a bore” (Symons 131), but as Symons says, the plots are

not that important for the reader of Chandler’s novels. Instead, what we take from his

stories is “the writing, […] the Californian background, the jokes, the social observation

[and] the character of Marlowe” (Symons 131).

In all Philip Marlowe novels, it is always the detective who is simultaneously the

narrator of the stories. In The Big Sleep Marlowe is hired by a wealthy general to deal

with the blackmailing of his younger daughter Carmen. After a couple of

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disappearances and murders, all solved in the course of the story and committed by

gangsters, it is revealed that the blackmailed lady is responsible for the murder of her

older sister Vivian’s husband because he rejected her advances. Vivian knew about her

sister killing her husband but did not want her father to know and therefore did not tell

Marlowe or anyone. The femme fatale feature is very strong in hard-boiled detective

fiction and The Big Sleep is no exception in this matter. Marlowe himself is presented as

a tough detective who is not afraid to take a beating or administer one, but at the same

time his moral code is much more developed than the one Sam Spade has. He does not

sleep with any of the suspects, like Spade ruthlessly does, and seems to care about the

feelings of the dying general who hired him so much that he agrees not to tell him about

the involvement of his daughters. P. D. James says about Marlowe that “unlike Spade,

he has a social conscience, personal integrity, and a moral code beyond unquestioning

loyalty to his job and colleagues” and that he “never takes tainted money or betrays a

friend and is totally loyal even to undeserving clients” (James 76). Scaggs has a similar

opinion on Marlowe, saying: “Marlowe is an idealised figure, a questing knight of

romance transplanted into the mean streets of mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles. Like

the questing knight, Marlowe’s is a quest to restore justice and order motivated by his

own personal code of honour” (Scaggs 62).

When it comes to the investigation Marlowe runs, there is much more of it than

in the Sam Spade stories. He interrogates witnesses, looks for clues, and pieces the

puzzle together to reveal its solution at the end. In this sense The Big Sleep is much

more of a detective novel than The Maltese Falcon. However, the puzzle is, again, not

as important. Hard-boiled detective fiction depends on the persona of the detective and

both Hammett and Chandler created masterful characters who set the tone of hard-

boiled fiction which persists to this day.

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 2.4 “Robert Galbraith”

Robert Galbraith is a pseudonym under which J. K. Rowling wrote her (to date)

three detective novels about private investigator Cormoran Strike. Before it was

revealed that it was in fact Rowling who wrote the books she came up with a fictional

biography for the author. He was supposed to be an ex-military man because, as it is

stated on the official website of the author, “it was the easiest and most plausible reason

for Robert to know how the Special Investigation Branch operates and investigates.

Another reason for making him a military man working in the civilian security industry

was to give him a solid excuse not to appear in public or provide a photograph”

(Rowling). The disguise did not last for long and soon it was revealed who the true

author of the novels was; nevertheless, the first novel received praise from critics even

when it was considered to be written by a debuting author (Collin).

Just like the fictional Robert Galbraith, his detective is also an ex-military man: a

former Special Investigation Branch investigator, who has been working as a private

detective since leaving the army. The reason for this is again revealed on his official

website:

I know a lot of people who have served in the armed forces and who have been kind

enough to help with my research. […] In fact, all my factual information came from

military sources. […] So while Strike himself is entirely fictional, his career and the

experiences he’s had are based on factual accounts of real soldiers. Making Strike a

war veteran is both very plausible and exciting novelistically (Rowling).

More about Strike and his character will be discussed in the chapter devoted to him later

in the thesis.

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 As it is stated on Galbraith’s website, most of Rowling’s Harry Potter stories are

in fact whodunits (Rowling) and therefore it is not surprising that she was inclined to

write a real detective story. She wrote the novels under a pseudonym because

“[she] was yearning to go back to the beginning of a writing career in this new genre, to

work without hype or expectation and to receive totally unvarnished feedback”

(Rowling). When asked why she wrote the novels under a male pseudonym, Rowling

said that she wanted to throw the public off her track as much as possible and claimed

that her editor could not believe a woman wrote the first story. However, in Mark

Lawson’s article about The Cuckoo’s Calling published in the Guardian, he claims that

the writing is “unusually attuned to female fashion” and that the book is written very

much in Rowling’s style (Lawson). Whether the readers knew or did not know who was

behind the stories, the novels were received well (Collin) and it can be said that J. K.

Rowling produced fine whodunits whose charm depends also on the persona of her

detective, making the stories seem influenced by both the Golden Age and hard-boiled

genres of detective fiction.

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 3 THE PLOTS: SUMMARIES AND ANALYSES

3.1 The Cuckoo’s Calling

The first in the series of novels about private investigator Cormoran Strike

revolves around the apparent suicide of Lula Landry, a young mixed-race supermodel

who was adopted into a wealthy white family when she was a child. Strike is hired by

her brother John Bristow who does not believe that Lula killed herself and presents

Strike with a theory that she was instead murdered. Lula fell from the balcony in her

luxurious London flat three months before the events of the novel and her death is

supposed to be a suicide because she suffered from bipolar disease. Strike is reluctant to

open the case, which he considers to have been thoroughly investigated, but because of

his financial situation he agrees to look into the matter. Helping him is his temporary

assistant Robin Ellacott who has always been fascinated by detective work. In the

course of the investigation Strike interrogates witnesses such as the night guard working

in Lula’s building on the night of her death, her driver, uncle, neighbours, and her

friends. In the end he pieces together the story: in the months prior to her death, Lula

Landry looked for her biological family. She got in touch with her biological brother

Jonah who was supposed to visit her on the evening of her death. Lula was a very rich

woman and she wrote a will in which she bequeathed all her money to Jonah, which

was witnessed by her friend Rochelle (who is later murdered as well). The crime was in

fact committed by John Bristow, Lula’s adoptive brother who hired Strike, because he

needed her money and she would not give him any. When John realised Lula had

written a last will, he came up with a plan to hire a detective to investigate her death to

frame Jonah for her murder, so that in case the will surfaced, Jonah would not be able to

profit from it. He hired Strike because Strike was childhood friends with John’s

deceased brother Charlie, whom John had also killed as a child. Lula’s friend Rochelle

22
was killed because she blackmailed John with her knowledge of the will. The features in

which the plot resembles those of detective stories of the Golden Age will now be

analysed. Details about the plot which have not yet been mentioned for the sake of

clarity will be examined as well.

The fact that Cormoran Strike is hired by the person who is later revealed to be

the murderer directly refers to one of the Ten Commandments of Golden Age detective

fiction: “the criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the narrative” (James 52),

as John Bristow is the very first character the readers meet, excluding the detective and

his sidekick. Bristow also pretends to help with the investigation, but in fact tries to

point Strike to other people than himself. This device was used in a number of Golden

Age detective stories, such as Agatha Christie’s Peril at End House, where Hercule

Poirot is hired by a murderess-to-be to throw him off track, or her The Murder of

Rodger Ackroyd, where Poirot’s investigation is being “helped” by Ackroyd’s killer.

The murderer hiring the detective is also seen in Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon –

since the hard-boiled detective is almost always hired by someone, it is easier to

incorporate this aspect in the stories.

What also seems to be taken from the detective stories of the Golden Age is the

way the clues are presented to the reader. (There are two purposes for clues in detective

fiction: to lead the reader to the solution of the crime and to lead them away from it –

clues that are in the second category are called “red herrings”.) Clues are vital to the

stories of the Golden Age, because, as it was already mentioned, the main purpose of

the stories is for the reader to solve the puzzle behind the crimes. In The Cuckoo’s

Calling the clues are written in the story for precisely this reason, and they are clear

enough so that the reader can come to the same solution as the detective, because Strike,

according to one of the rules of the Golden Age, does not “alight on any clues which are

23
not instantly produced for the reader” (James 52). The first clue is unintentionally

presented by the murderer himself when he alerts Strike to the existence of a CCTV

footage of two men running (one of which is John Bristow himself, the other one is Lula

Landry’s biological brother whom Bristow is trying to frame and whom he calls “The

Runner”): The Runner was a tall black man who was seen walking in the direction of

Lula Landry’s house and later caught on the CCTV footage running back in panic (The

Cuckoo’s Calling 59) but there was another man caught on the camera, who Bristow

claims is also black – but in fact he is a white man wearing black gloves which Bristow

stole in the flat where he was hiding for the majority of the day before he committed the

crime. The flat was to be rented to a famous American rapper, Deeby Mac, and the

gloves, along with the hoodie Bristow is wearing in the video, were sent to him as gifts

from a well-known fashion designer Guy Somé. This was Bristow’s first mistake, as the

hoodie was made specifically for Deeby Mac and therefore he could not have got it

anywhere else but the flat (The Cuckoo’s Calling 523). The way Strike and the reader

learn about the hoodie is in a usual detective story manner: there is a list of things that

was given to Deeby and a list of things he actually received and the two do not match

(The Cuckoo’s Calling 472). The list clue is used in many Agatha Christie novels, such

as The ABC Murders where she lists all the victims’ visitors on the days they died and

every victim was visited by a stockings salesman (The ABC Murders 210), in Death in

the Clouds where such an insignificant item as an empty matchbox among the

murderer’s possessions leads Hercule Poirot to the truth (Death in the Clouds 81), or in

Hercule Poirot’s Christmas where the detective solves the case with the help of a small

pink rubber scrap from a balloon which is among the things found in the deceased’s

room (Hercule Poirot’s Christmas 55). The usual scenario for this clue is that it seems

24
insignificant to anyone but the detective, which is the same in The Cuckoo’s Calling

where no one paid attention to the things sent to Deeby’s flat.

Another use of the list clue in the novel is when Lula Landry’s doorman shows

Strike a record of all the people who came in and out of Landry’s building on the day of

her murder (The Cuckoo’s Calling 204). This clue is, however, much more subtle and

very much for the reader to figure out, because the movements of John Bristow are not

recorded in the file. Bristow admits that he visited Lula Landry in the morning and

therefore his visit should be recorded there, but since it is not, not even his leaving of

the building is recorded and therefore no one really knows when (and whether at all) he

left the house. The “missing clue” is again used in Agatha Christie’s works, for example

in the short story “The Market Basing Mystery” where Poirot deduces the truth from the

fact that there should be cigarette smoke at the scene of the crime but he smells nothing:

“ʻOver and over I go back to the smell of cigarette smoke.’ ʻI didn’t smell any,’

[Hastings] cried wonderingly. ʻNo more did I, cher ami’” (Hercule Poirot: The

Complete Short Stories 189-190). Dorothy L. Sayers uses this device in The Five Red

Herrings, where the list of the contents of a dead man’s satchel does not include a

crucial item and therefore it is clear that the deceased was murdered (The Five Red

Herrings 22).

The most important clue in the novel pointing to John Bristow is the fact that

Lula Landry said to her friend that she would leave everything to her brother (The

Cuckoo’s Calling 392). Of course, who she meant was her biological brother Jonah, but

people assumed she meant John, which gives John the motive to both kill Lula before

her new will is given to the lawyers and to hire Strike to frame Jonah for her murder in

case the will is found. This is further developed in another clue: Lula’s writing of her

will was witnessed by her make-up artist who admits to Strike that she is dyslexic (The

25
Cuckoo’s Calling 384) and therefore she mistook the two names since Jonah and John

look identical to a person suffering from dyslexia.

The theme of another person being killed because they know something that is

dangerous to them (and sometimes blackmail the killer with their knowledge) is a

device used in Golden Age detective fiction as well. In The Cuckoo’s Calling the

unfortunate second victim of John Bristow is Rochelle Onifade, Lula’s friend who knew

about her will. Not only does she blackmail Bristow – a similar progress is seen for

example in Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile, where the murdered woman’s maid is

killed for this reason – but she also does not realise that what she knows can put her in

danger – this is seen in a number of Miss Marple stories, most notably in The Moving

Finger where a maid is killed because she realises that no one came to the house where

a murder occurred when someone should have, but she does not put two and two

together and does not realise who the killer is, or perhaps in Christie’s Sleeping Murder

where a former maid is killed for what she saw almost twenty years before the events of

the novel. It is interesting that the second murder victim seems to almost always be a

servant or a person of a lower rank. In The Cuckoo’s Calling Rochelle is a homeless

person with mental problems which fits the character profile of the second victim

according to detective stories of the Golden Age.

Another Golden Age aspect in the novel is the alibi John Bristow produces to

hide the fact that he is the one who murdered his sister. He claims that he spent the

evening taking care of his mother, who is dying of cancer (The Cuckoo’s Calling 502)

and at this point of her life she uses so much Valium she hardly registers what is

happening around her. However, John came to see his mother only after he killed Lula,

and the way he devised his alibi was by changing the time on his mother’s clock to an

earlier hour, so that his mother would think he was with her at the time Lula died (The

26
Cuckoo’s Calling 533). The clock is a powerful device in detective fiction; there are a

number of detective stories where the murderer tampers with the clock to either make it

seem that the murder happened at an entirely different time or to make it seem that the

murderer himself was somewhere else at the time of the murder. In his article “Supreme

Moments of Detective Fiction”, Burton Egbert Stevenson claims that this manner of

obtaining alibi was used for the first time in Émile Gaboriau’s 1867 novel The Mystery

of Orcival, where a clock has stopped at the assumed time of murder – but, of course,

that was cleverly devised by the killer and the murder took place at a completely

different time (Stevenson 4). Agatha Christie used this manner of obtaining alibi in her

The Murder at the Vicarage, where the clock found in the room in which the body is

discovered is off by fifteen minutes to give the murderers their alibi (The Murder at the

Vicarage 86).

There are a lot of aspects found in the detective stories of the Golden Age in the

plot of the novel. The clues which lead Cormoran Strike to the right solution are clearly

outlined and are devised in a way similar to the stories of mainly Agatha Christie, who

used a number of the same aspects in her plots. The development of the puzzle is done

in a similar way as well, most notably with the fact that there is a blackmailer who gets

murdered as a second victim. Galbraith also does not break any of the Ten

Commandments of the Golden Age, but rather seems to follow them to deliver a clear

puzzle with minimal distractions.

3.2 The Silkworm

In the second novel in which he appears, Cormoran Strike investigates the

disappearance of Owen Quine, a notorious writer who was working on his next book,

27
Bombyx Mori, at the time of his disappearance. Strike is hired by Quine’s wife Leonora

who does not go to the police because her husband “goes off sometimes” (The Silkworm

18) and she wants him to come home to her and their daughter. The fact is, however,

that this tome Quine did not disappear to get away from his wife and child, but instead

he is found murdered under horrible circumstances: his body is found disembowelled

and partially soaked in acid in a scene which resembles the final scene in Quine’s

unpublished last novel. This immediately gives Strike and the reader a list of suspects,

as the killer must be someone who has read the novel. Moreover, Bombyx Mori is an

allegory where people from Quine’s life appear under false names (and they are not

portrayed in a very positive way), and therefore the killer is assumed to be one of the

characters in Quine’s unpublished book. The killer is Elizabeth Tassel, Quine’s literary

agent and a failed writer, who has been blackmailed by Quine for a quarter of a century

because of an anonymous literary parody she wrote which made the author of the

parodied work commit suicide. The manuscript of Bombyx Mori which everyone read

was not in fact written by Quine but by Tassel in an attempt to expand the circle of

suspects and also to get her revenge on the writing community. Tassel in fact made

Owen Quine stage his own murder by telling him to hide in the abandoned house to

obtain publicity before the publishing of his new novel, and there she later killed him,

feeding his intestines to her large dog. Rather than having an alibi for the murder she

tries to turn the attention of the police to other people by writing the manuscript instead

of Quine.

The clues in this novel are more for the reader to figure out and are not as clear as in

The Cuckoo’s Calling. One of the first clues is the fact that Elizabeth Tassel has

something wrong with her voice: she claims that she has a cold she has not been able to

shake (The Silkworm 57) but it is due to the acid she used on Quine’s body that her

28
voice is damaged. As stated by Strike during the revelation of the killer, she “didn’t

realise [she would] get tissue damage just by inhaling the fumes” (The Silkworm 557)

and therefore forgot to buy a respiratory mask. Another early clue is the dog Elizabeth

Tassel has: since no one knows where Owen Quine’s intestines went, Strike deduces

than she fed them to her pet, who pukes under a desk in Tassel’s office the first time

Strike comes to see her and Tassel tells her assistant who is about to take the dog for a

walk to not “forget the poo bags [since] he’s a bit soft today” (The Silkworm 57). The

dog is of course not feeling well after having to digest the insides of a dead man. The

fact that the body is mutilated refers much more to the hard-boiled school of detective

fiction; as Wu Chia-ying states in her dissertation thesis, “though in Golden Age British

detective fiction, corpses may pop up one after another, they are seldom mutilated [and]

mutilation of the body seems almost a taboo” (Wu 5). However, the hard-boiled genre is

not afraid of such images, for example in Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake

where a bloody and mutilated body is found on a pull-down bed and another one is

found almost unrecognisable after having decomposed in the water for some time, as

stated by Erin Smith in her book Hard-Boiled (E. Smith 114).

The closed circle of suspects is a device used in many Golden Age detective stories,

as it was mentioned in the chapter on the fiction of the Golden Age. In The Silkworm

there are seven people who appear as characters in the fictional Bombyx Mori (while

Owen Quine himself appears as the title character Bombyx) and therefore are

considered suspects: Owen Quine’s wife Leonora, who appears in the novel as Succuba,

a “ʻwell-worn whore’ who captured and tied [Bombyx] up and succeeded in raping

him” (The Silkworm 132); Elizabeth Tassel, who appears as the Tick, a parasitic woman

who has “an unpleasant habit of suckling from Bombyx while he [sleeps]” (The

Silkworm 132); Quine’s editor Jerry Waldergrave, who appears as the Cutter, who

29
wants to castrate Bombyx (The Silkworm 133); Quine’s lover Kathryn Kent, who

appears as Harpy, a sexual deviant whose breasts leak “something dark brown and

glutinous” (The Silkworm 178); Quine’s fan Pippa Midgley, a transgender woman who

appears as Epicoene and disgusts Bombyx (The Silkworm 178); famous writer Michael

Fancourt, who appears as Vainglorious who abuses his wife for not being talented

enough (The Silkworm 179); and Daniel Chard, Quine’s publisher, who is called Phallus

Impudicus in the fictional book and steals work from talented authors while his penis is

rotting (The Silkworm 179). All of these people had a clear motive for getting rid of

Quine and for his book never to be published: revenge and fear. The theme of a circle of

suspects who all had a motive and opportunity to commit the crime is most notably used

in Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Five Red Herrings. Here, as mentioned in the chapter on

Golden Age detective fiction, the victim is a painter (and therefore just like in The

Silkworm a member of a community of artists) who is killed by one of six people – also

painters – who are all suspected for a reason. Another aspect resembling the book by

Dorothy L. Sayers is the fact that Elizabeth Tassel wrote Bombyx Mori instead of the

murdered Owen Quine, and as she already proved more than twenty years before the

events of the novel with the parody that made a writer kill herself, she is a “very good

imitator of other people’s writing” (The Silkworm 554). In The Five Red Herrings the

murderer imitates the victim’s style and finishes bits of his painting for him (The Five

Red Herrings 28). The closed circle of suspects is also used in Agatha Christie’s Cards

on the Table where a man is murdered at a bridge game, each of the players has both

motive and opportunity to commit the crime, and no other people could have murdered

the man but the bridge players (Cards on the Table 36).

As mentioned before, there are clues which are designed to mislead the reader from

the right solution. The biggest red herring in The Silkworm is the fictional novel Bombyx

30
Mori itself. Since it is assumed that it was Owen Quine who wrote the book, it can be

deduced that the people mentioned in the book really do have motives to kill Quine. In

reality, only Elizabeth Tassel and Michael Fancourt have credible motives: Fancourt’s

motive would be revenge because the parody that Elizabeth Tassel wrote is believed to

have been written by Quine instead and the writer who committed suicide because of

the parody was Michael Fancourt’s first wife. Therefore Fancourt’s motive does not

depend on Quine’s unpublished novel like the other persons’ mentioned in the novel do.

However, once it is established that Quine did not in fact write the Bombyx Mori

everyone has read, it is clear that Fancourt could not have written the novel and

therefore could not have killed Quine: it is implied in Bombyx Mori that Fancourt was

the father of Quine’s editor’s daughter (The Silkworm 399). This insinuation is

completely untrue, as Fancourt was infertile (The Silkworm 547), which Owen Quine

knew and therefore would not have put this in his book, and of course Fancourt knew as

well and therefore he could not have written Bombyx Mori either. Therefore Fancourt’s

infertility is another clue to who it was who wrote the book and killed Quine. The

suspects are therefore gradually eliminated in the course of the story, just like it is

supposed to be in detective fiction: as Donald Rice and Peter Schofer say in their book

Rhetorical Poetics, “The pleasure of reading a detective story comes in large part from

[the] gathering of traces and elimination of paths, as suspects and instruments are

eliminated in the story. The general movement can be seen as from condensation to

elimination […] to reduction to just one suspect, where the causal chain no longer

permits any multiplicity” (Rice and Schofer 102).

The moment Strike comes to the right conclusion is after an interview with a

waitress in a café in which Owen Quine and Elizabeth Tassel had a public argument

before his disappearance. The waitress not only says that Quine’s anger seemed staged

31
(The Silkworm 460) but also remembers what he said – and what he said about the book

did not appear in the Bombyx Mori everyone thought Quine wrote (The Silkworm 461).

The public row was actually staged by the murderess and her victim-to-be in an effort to

provide publicity for the book. However, as the waitress states, Tassel was furious and

was not pretending her anger (The Silkworm 461). This was because Tassel knew that

what Quine talked about would not appear in the manuscript and therefore the

information could lead the police to the solution that Quine did not write the novel.

Strike’s revelation is written in a very Golden Age-like manner: “Like the turning lid

that finds its thread, a multitude of disconnected facts revolved in Strike’s mind and slid

suddenly into place, incontrovertibly correct, unassailably right” (The Silkworm 462).

This is written in the novel for a simple reason: to let the reader know that they now

have all the information they need to come to the right solution of the puzzle, just like

the novel’s hero has. This is a device used in Golden Age detective stories to that

extent, that when Josef Švorecký wrote his Sins for Father Knox, a reaction to the “Ten

Commandments of Detective Fiction”, he ended each of the stories with the statement

that all the clues have been laid out and asks the reader to figure out the solution for

themselves.

Just like in The Cuckoo’s Calling, in The Silkworm there are a number of devices

used in the detective stories of the Golden Age. The mutilation of the body, however, is

unusual for Golden Age detective fiction and is much more frequently found in the

hard-boiled genre of detective stories. The way the plot develops and the manner in

which the clues are presented in, again, similar to the Golden Age, mostly in the fact

that the puzzle is well structured and the reader is able to come to its solution on their

own.

32
 3.3 Career of Evil

The third Cormoran Strike novel is a little different from the first two in the fact

that there is not one central murder in the story but instead Strike deals with a serial

killer who is obsessed with the detective and wants to get his revenge on him. In the

beginning of the novel, Strike’s assistant Robin Ellacott receives a package with a

severed leg inside. In the package is also a scrap of paper with lyrics to a song by Blue

Öyster Cult which Strikes mother had tattooed on her body. Strike immediately

understands what is happening: the leg is supposed to warn Strike that one of the men

he had problems with in his past is plotting his revenge on him. Strike focuses on three

men who could be the culprit: a former military man whom Strike helped convict for the

abuse of his wife and child and who suffers from arthritis, Donald Laing; a sexual

abuser of children whom Strike hit so hard during his arrest that he was able to fake

insanity and got away with his crimes, Noel Brockbank; and Jeff Whittaker, the former

boyfriend of Strike’s mother whom Strike suspects of having murdered her. The police

focus on a fourth man, a professional gangster called “Digger” Malley whom Strike

helped convict – however, since Strike’s evidence in the case was given anonymously,

the detective never thinks the culprit could be him. When the police find the body of a

teenage girl called Kelsey from which the leg came, it leads them (and Strike) to the

home of the victim’s older half-sister Hazel who is living with a fireman called Ray.

Meanwhile, another murder and an attempted murder take place in the city and the killer

is dubbed the “Shacklewell Ripper”. In the end, the fireman Ray turns out to be the fake

identity of Donald Laing, whose psoriatic arthritis has healed in the years Strike has not

seen him and therefore he is able to commit the crimes which take place in the story.

33
 This book is unusual because apart from the point of view of the detective, the

reader also gets to read chapters where the killer’s thoughts are exposed. P. D. James

says in Talking about Detective Fiction:

The writer of detective stories has a particular problem arising from Monsignor

Ronald Knox’s insistence that the reader should not be allowed to follow the

murderer’s thoughts […] but I wonder whether there might not be exceptions to

[the] rule. Surely there must be some moments when the murderer’s thoughts are

not dominated by the enormity of what he has done and the risk of exposure.

Could the writer not enter into his mind when he wakes in the small hours with

memories of some traumatic event in his childhood which the writer can exploit

in clue-making and use to give some idea of the killer’s character? (James 120)

This is exactly what Galbraith does in Career of Evil – he uses the chapters written from

the killer’s point of view to plant clues and make the reader understand a little more

what kind of person the killer is. However, since Donald Laing is a serial killer, his

thoughts almost always revolve around memories of his last murder or plotting of the

next one. It is clear from his thoughts that Strike is right about the killer’s motives from

the start, that his ultimate goal is to ruin Strike forever (Career of Evil 4). The point of

view of the culprit is to some extent used in Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were

None, where the killer contemplates who to ask for help (but it is staged as if the killer

was thinking about who to kill next): “It’s all perfectly clear – all worked out. But

nobody must suspect. It may do the trick. It must! Which one? That’s the question-

which one? I think – yes, I rather think – yes – him” (And Then There Were None 214-

215). The same trick is, famously, used in Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,

although this is slightly different as in And Then There Were None and Career of Evil

34
the reader is aware they are reading the thoughts of the killer. However, although

unusual, the murderer’s thoughts appear in Golden Age detective fiction as well.

The theme of a serial killer at large is not uncommon in detective stories, even

those of the Golden Age. In The ABC Murders Hercule Poirot has to deal with a

supposed serial killer who not only kills people according to the alphabet, but also

seems to be obsessed with Poirot, sending him letters and taunting him about not being

able to solve the murders. In the ABC Murders the reader learns that only one murder

was the important one and the others were only committed to distract the police from

what in reality is a typical Golden Age murder among family members. The serial killer

motive has evolved throughout the century and Scaggs argues that

[…] the prevalence of the serial killer motif in contemporary crime fiction,

including the police procedural and the crime thriller, is the logical conclusion of

a process of criminal escalation in the genre, from Poe’s purloined letter and the

swindles and robberies of the Sherlock Holmes stories, through the single

murder of the Golden Age whodunit and the multiple murders of hard-boiled

fiction, to the serial killings of late twentieth-century crime fiction. (Scaggs 117)

Although the serial killer does not appear much in hard-boiled fiction, the number of

murders in hard-boiled stories tends to be higher than in Golden Age detective fiction

(James 112). In Career of Evil the “Shacklewell Ripper” is credited with four murders

and two attempted murders (Career of Evil 404-405) which is a higher number than in

any of the previous books, which could be influenced by the hard-boiled genre.

However, as Scaggs points out, the character of a serial killer is a logical development

in detective fiction in general. Another aspect which points to hard-boiled detective

fiction is the fact that the bodies which are found are, just like in The Silkworm,

35
mutilated: one of the victims has a leg removed, one has her fingers cut off, another one

has her nose and ears removed, and a fourth one is mutilated in an unspecified manner

as well (Career of Evil 405). This mutilation of bodies is, as it was already mentioned in

the chapter on The Silkworm, “almost a taboo” in the detective fiction of the Golden

Age (Wu 5).

The clues which lead Strike to the right solution are even more subtle than in

The Silkworm. In the house where the fake fireman, who is in fact Donald Laing, lives,

he finds a bottle of Accutane, an acne medicine hidden in the murdered teenage girl’s

room (Career of Evil 285). It is for the reader to figure out that the pills are not only

used for acne but also as a treatment to psoriatic arthritis, the illness Donald Laing

suffers from. However, if the reader is not familiar with what various medicine pills are

used for, it is hard for them to understand this clue. The pills are, again, hidden in a list

of items Strike finds in the room, and therefore Galbraith uses the Golden Age list clue

in this book as well. Another clue Strike discovers in the house is a photo of the fake

fireman Ray sitting on a “shingle beside a patch of sea holly” (Career of Evil 280)

which was supposedly taken on the weekend that Kelsey was killed and therefore it

gives Ray an alibi. However, what Strike figures out later, is the fact that sea holly is

not in bloom at the time the photo was supposedly taken (Career of Evil 483) and

therefore Ray does not in fact have an alibi for the time of Kelsey’s murder. The

knowledge of flowers helped solve many murders that were committed in Miss Marple

stories, for example in the short story “The Four Suspects” which appears in the

collection The Thirteen Problems, where Miss Marple solves the murder of a Secret

Service agent only with her knowledge of the language of flowers (The Thirteen

Problems 207).

36
 The novel again employs a closed circle of suspects. P. D. James talks about the

advantages of having a limited number of suspects in Talking about Detective Fiction:

“[The closed circle of suspects] has a number of obvious advantages. The stain of

suspicion cannot be allowed to spread too far if each suspect is to be a rounded,

credible, breathing human being, not a cardboard cut-out to be ritually knocked down in

the last chapter” (James 112-113). In this novel Galbraith really provides complex

personalities for the three suspects; and neither of them can be initially eliminated

because their characters suggest that all three of them really could commit the crimes.

They are instead eliminated through the course of the novel based on their whereabouts

at the times the attacks took place. This is very much reminiscent to the way Golden

Age detective fiction deals with a closed circle of suspects who all have a motive for the

murder, just like in the Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers’s novels referenced in

the chapter on The Silkworm.

The clues given to the reader seem to be mostly put in the novel to justify

Strike’s thought process of coming to the right solution rather than help the reader solve

the puzzle behind the plot. This novel is the least reminiscent of the Golden Age

detective stories of the three because it is much more a hunt for a killer than a simple

deduction. As John Scaggs writes, “unlike classical detective fiction […] in the hard-

boiled […] there is little or no analysis of clues and associated analytic deduction.

Rather, the hard-boiled detective’s investigations, involving direct questioning and

movement from place to place, parallel the sort of tracking down of a quarry that is

characteristic of frontier romance and the Western” (Scaggs 59). Career of Evil

resembles this “tracking” much more than the Golden Age puzzle However, aspects of

both Golden Age and hard-boiled detective fiction can be found in the plot.

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 4 CHARACTERS

4.1 The Great Detective

Robert Galbraith’s novels rely very much on the persona of his Great Detective,

Cormoran Strike. In the course of the three novels, Strike goes from a broke ex-military

detective with a troubled past and no place to live to a well-known private sleuth whose

reputation of a clever investigator precedes him. The detective’s past plays a large role

in the novels, as does his sense for justice and his rather tough character. Although in

some aspects he resembles the Great Detectives of Golden Age detective fiction, there

are many more parallels between him and the hard-boiled private investigators, such as

Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe.

The reader first encounters Strike through the eyes of Robin Ellacott, his

temporary secretary and subsequent colleague. On the first day of her temporary job,

she looks for Strike’s office and finds this: “The name of the occupant of the office was

written on a scrappy piece of lined paper Sellotaped beside the buzzer for the second

floor” (The Cuckoo’s Calling 11). The paper is dirty and there is peeling on the wall of

the building. This suggests that the detective is struggling with money because

otherwise he would choose a more representative environment for his private

investigator practice. This is reminiscent of the hard-boiled detective who, as Stephen

Knight says, “works alone, in a cheap, comfortless office” (qtd. in Scaggs). Strike’s

financial situation is further described when it is said that “he was so deeply in debt that

all that stood between him and a sleeping-bag in a doorway was John Bristow” (The

Cuckoo’s Calling 48). The hard-boiled detective’s financial situation is usually not very

good either, and therefore he accepts jobs mostly with the prospect of money (such as

Sam Spade – and his partner Miles Archer – in The Maltese Falcon, who are happy to

accept Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s offer because the bank notes she gave them had

38
“brothers in the bag” (Hammett 7).) The Golden Age detective is usually a wealthy

character, such as Lord Peter Wimsey or Hercule Poirot. The fact that Strike is a private

investigator also points to the hard-boiled genre, because it has been said by Scaggs that

unlike the detectives of the Golden Age the hard-boiled detective works for a living and

is self-employed (Scaggs 60).

When it comes to the physical description of Strike, the reader again sees him

through the eyes of Robin: “[He] was massive; his height, his general hairiness, coupled

with a gently expanding belly suggested a grizzly bear. One of his eyes was puffy and

bruised, the skin just below the eyebrow cut” (The Cuckoo’s Calling 15). This

description points to the fact that unlike the Golden Age detective, to whom almost

never anything happens, Cormoran Strike’s appearance suggests violence from the very

first time he is seen. What also needs to be mentioned is the fact that Strike is missing

one leg (The Cuckoo’s Calling 48). He lost his leg when he was in the army

investigating a Killed In Action in Afghanistan (The Cuckoo’s Calling 171). This

further emphasises the violence which is happening in Strike’s life.

In The Cuckoo’s Calling and in Career of Evil, Strike ends up fighting the

person that he has accused of committing the murders in the centre of the stories. In the

first book, John Bristow tries to kill Strike after he has laid out all the facts pointing to

Bristow as the killer of his sister (The Cuckoo’s Calling 534) and Strike has to be

stopped by Robin in order to not kill his primary suspect. In Career of Evil, Strike is

attacked by Donald Laing when the detective waits for the murderer in his flat (Career

of Evil 474) and is able to stop the killer with the help of his friend. This shows that

apart from logic and deduction, Strike also uses his fists when there is a need for

violence. Such a thing would never happen in Golden Age detective stories, as the Great

Detective is everything but violent. Hercule Poirot uses only his brain to get the

39
murderer behind bars and lets the police apprehend the suspect; and when Lord Peter

Wimsey is the target of an attack in Murder Must Advertise, it is instead Chief Inspector

Parker who is attacked in his place by mistake (Murder Must Advertise 210). The hard-

boiled detective, however, just like Strike, “[meets] violence with violence” (James 74).

Another aspect in which Strike can be linked to the hard-boiled detective is the

character of a femme fatale which appears in both the Robert Galbraith novels and hard-

boiled fiction. For Strike, the woman is Charlotte, his ex-fiancé with whom he breaks up

in the beginning of The Cuckoo’s Calling. Charlotte is “beautiful, dangerous as a

cornered vixen, clever, sometimes funny, and, in the words of Strike’s very oldest

friend, ‘fucked to the core’” (The Cuckoo’s Calling 46). Although she does not hurt

Strike physically, which is the case in many hard-boiled novels, when the femme fatale

attempts to kill the detective (such as in The Big Sleep where Carmen Sternwood tries to

murder Philip Marlowe (The Big Sleep 133)), Charlotte tries to hurt Strike on an

emotional level, first by breaking up with him three times, then by lying to him about

being pregnant, and later, when she realises that this time Strike will not come back to

her, by telling him that she is engaged to a man Strike hates (The Cuckoo’s Calling

359). The women characters in the Galbraith novels in general have similar responses to

Strike as female characters in hard-boiled novels to the investigator: when the woman is

young, she will want to sleep with the detective. In The Cuckoo’s Calling Strike sleeps

with Ciara Porter, the best friend of the deceased Lula Landry, who seduces Strike after

his interrogation of her (The Cuckoo’s Calling 425). This encounter is almost absurd,

because there is no logical explanation behind her actions, and the fact that Strike had

sex with Porter is never mentioned again. In The Silkworm, Strike sleeps with Nina

Lascelles, who helps him get the manuscript of Bombyx Mori. It is implied that Strike

does not even find her attractive (The Silkworm 115), but she is immediately attracted to

40
him, as he explains that a certain type of woman finds him “unusually attractive” and it

is a woman who is “subconsciously looking for ‘carthorse blood’” (The Silkworm 114).

After Strike sleeps with Nina he is immediately looking for a way out (The Silkworm

145) and therefore it is implied that he slept with her with a purpose – to get the

manuscript. He sleeps with her for the second time to forget about his ex-fiancé on her

wedding night (The Silkworm 470), but Nina eventually figures out that Strike has only

been using her (The Silkworm 544). His treatment of her suggests that she does not

mean anything to him, just like sleeping with Brigid O’Shaughnessy did not mean

anything to Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Spade also has a relationship with his

dead partner’s wife which is very similar to the one Strike and Nina have – the woman

is much more invested in the relationship than the detective. Strike’s treatment of

women is similar to that of the hard-boiled detectives’: “The women in the [hard-boiled

stories] are sexually alluring temptresses seen by the hero as inimical both to their

masculine code and to the success of the job” (James 78-79). In detective fiction of the

Golden Age, the detective either does not have any romantic relationships (having

casual sex seems to be completely out of the question), such as Hercule Poirot; or is

married, such as Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn; or is in love with one woman only

throughout the series, such as Lord Peter Wimsey. If the Great Detective is a woman,

she is a spinster, such as Miss Marple.

Cormoran Strike’s past is another distinctive feature about the detective. He is

the child of a famous rock musician Jonny Rokeby and a super groupie who followed

Rokeby’s band, Leda Strike (The Cuckoo’s Calling 95). Leda died when Strike was

twenty years old and her death continues to haunt him as he believes that his stepfather

murdered his mother (Career of Evil 54). His mother’s death and the fact that his

stepfather was not convicted of killing her might be the reason why Strike’s sense of

41
justice is very highly developed. This is seen in The Cuckoo’s Calling after the body of

Rochelle Onifade is discovered, when Strike thinks about his theory of who the killer is,

and says that all he wants is justice (The Cuckoo’s Calling 455). In The Silkworm, when

the victim’s wife Leonora is accused of having murdered her husband by the police, he

cannot stand the fact that such an injustice is happening and continues to work on the

case even though no one is paying him anymore because he is certain that the real killer

is still at large and feels sorry for the wrongly accused: “You had to maintain a distance,

but there were always people who got to you, injustices that bit. Leonora in prison,

white-faced and weeping, her daughter confused, vulnerable and bereft of both parents”

(The Silkworm 511). The strong sense of justice is a big feature of the hard-boiled

detective as well, as it is said of Philip Marlowe by John Scaggs (Scaggs 62). Sam

Spade is also ruthless when it comes to the pursuit of the truth. When he accuses Brigid

O’Shaughnessy of killing his partner, he tells her: “When a man’s partner is killed he’s

supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of

him” (Hammett 209). However, where Philip Marlowe agrees to not tell the dying

general that his daughters were involved in the murders happening in The Big Sleep,

Strike does not care that John Bristow’s mother is dying in The Cuckoo’s Calling and

calls the police on the killer anyway, because justice is more important to him than

dying people’s feelings (The Cuckoo’s Calling 535).

Strike also frequently drinks and smokes. In The Cuckoo’s Calling he spends a

lot of the book in a pub, even getting so drunk he cannot even speak properly (The

Cuckoo’s Calling 364). Smoking and drinking alcohol is a feature typical of hard-boiled

detectives as well. In the famous opening paragraph of The Big Sleep, Philip Marlowe

tells the reader:

42
 It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid-October, with the sun not

shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was

wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief,

black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat,

clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the

well-dressed private detective ought to be. (The Big Sleep 3)

This paragraph contains all the important information the reader needs to know before

the story develops: and the fact that Marlowe is sober is so important that it needs to be

mentioned. It also implies that Marlowe’s sobriety is not always the case. Stephen

Knight’s definition of the hard-boiled detective also says that he “drinks and smokes a

lot: a single, masculine lifestyle” (qtd. in Scaggs). All of these hard-boiled features in

the character undoubtedly make Strike the man Raymond Chandler thinks the hero

should be: “a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man” (The Simple

Art of Murder 12).

One of the only aspects of the character of Cormoran Strike that reminds the

reader of the Great Detective of the Golden Age is his name. The best known

“classical” detectives, Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, both had unusual names. It

is a frequent joke in the Agatha Christie stories that people mispronounce Poirot’s

name, and in the Cormoran Strike novels, he is almost always called “Cameron” by

characters who do not know him and “[fail to] grasp his first name” (Career of Evil

367). The other aspect of the Golden Age in the stories is the fact that Cormoran Strike

does not work alone like the hard-boiled detective does: he has a sidekick.

43
 4.2 The Sidekick

The character of the sidekick is a common feature in Golden Age detective

stories. Hercule Poirot had Captain Arthur Hastings, who, in the fashion of Sherlock

Holmes and Doctor Watson, narrated the first Poirot novels, and later Ariadne Oliver, a

famous detective story writer, who first appeared as a sidekick to Poirot in the 1936

novel Cards on the Table. Lord Peter Wimsey has Bunter, his valet, and later Harriet

Vane, another mystery novelist who first appeared as a suspect in Strong Poison. In a

similar fashion, Cormoran Strike has Robin Ellacott, first a temporary secretary who

gradually becomes more involved as Strike’s detective partner throughout the course of

the three books.

In The Cuckoo’s Calling, Robin is a newly engaged twenty-five-year-old woman

who has just moved to London with her fiancé Matthew and while looking for a proper

job, she is employed by the Temporary Solutions agency for her secretarial skills (The

Cuckoo’s Calling 15). Robin has always been fascinated by the process of detection

(The Silkworm 93) and “[has] had an ambition to work in some form of criminal

investigation since her early teens” (The Silkworm 471). Therefore, she is a detective

work enthusiast, just like Ariadne Oliver and Harriet Vane inevitably are, since they

both write detective stories for a living. Robin is a hardworking woman who wants to

get better at her job and her position as secretary does not suit her; she wants to become

Strike’s equal. While she lacks the experience with investigation that Strike has, she is

no less intelligent and is a real asset to all of the three investigations Strike runs. In this

she is different from sidekicks of the Golden Age, as according to Ronald Knox, they

are supposed to not only be much less intelligent than the star of the story, the Great

Detective, but also less clever than the reader (James 52). Where the function of Captain

Hastings in the Poirot novels is to help the detective by saying something that does not

44
make any sense to the sidekick but Poirot immediately deduces the truth from this

unknowingly intelligent remark, Robin Ellacott helps Strike with her real intelligence

and is able to deduce parts of the truth by herself without the help of the detective.

The reader gets a lot of Robin’s backstory in the third book. While her personal

life is a subject of interest in all three of the novels, in the third one the author makes his

readers understand a lot about Robin. Her relationship with Matthew and his unpleasant

feelings about Strike add to the dynamics between the characters. Matthew disapproves

of Strike and Robin’s job as a detective and it is implied that he would like her to get a

higher paying job, something boring, where she would not be as happy but at least

Matthew would be satisfied. After a brief period when the two are broken up, Robin

marries Matthew at the end of the third book. What the reader discovers in Career of

Evil is the fact that Robin was attacked and raped when she was at university (Career of

Evil 145). She refuses to be victimised and defined based on this event, telling Strike:

“It was something that happened to me. It isn’t me. […] I’m still the same” (Career of

Evil 144-145). She feels the need to reassure Strike that it does not make any difference

because she is afraid he would think of her differently, as a victim, and not his work

partner anymore. She clings to the job with all she has, because she is truly happy and

satisfied that she can help solve murders.

As P. D. James says in Talking about Detective Fiction, female characters in

Golden Age detective stories were almost always sidekicks or love interests (James 62).

One of those who served as both was Harriet Vane, a sidekick to Lord Peter Wimsey. In

Strong Poison, Lord Peter investigates the murder of Harriet’s lover of which she has

been accused; and falls in love with her, but the feeling is not reciprocated. The second

novel in which she appears is Have His Carcase, where Harriet Vane discovers a dead

body and actually helps Wimsey investigate the murder, serving as both a love interest

45
and a detective partner. In the “Feminist Crime Fiction and Female Sleuths” chapter in

A Companion to Crime Fiction, Adrienne E. Gavin explains that the Harriet Vane

novels “reveal the difficulties women face in balancing professional and private life”

(Gavin 263). Robin Ellacott has similar difficulties to Vane, trying to balance her job

and her relationship with Matthew, but it is also implied in the novels that Strike does

not want Robin to get married as he might be developing feelings for her (The Silkworm

185). Therefore Robin is as much a sidekick as she is a love interest, just like Harriet

Vane, although not in such an obvious way, as Peter Wimsey makes his love for Harriet

Vane apparent and asks her to marry him multiple times, in fact in the first few

sentences after seeing Harriett in Have His Carcase he says: “But still, talking of mates,

will you marry me?” (Have His Carcase 43). Strike’s feelings for Robin are not as

apparent but they are still implied to be there. In the novels with Harriet Vane, Sayers

“also rejected female intuition as a way to solve cases, in part because of the fair play

rule of Golden Age detective fiction that required providing the reader with the same

clues the detective has, and in part because it marginalizes female logic and intellect”

(Gavin 263-264). Robin also does not use intuition but only logic and her brain when

putting clues together.

The fact that Robin starts her employment with Strike as a secretary might be a

reference to hard-boiled detective fiction, as in those stories women hardly appeared as

sidekicks. In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade has a female secretary but a male

detective partner. The secretary, Effie Perine, does help Spade with the investigation,

but only by following his instructions and bringing important items to his office

(Hammett 197) rather than by doing any detection of her own. Robin Ellacott fights

hard to escape the subordinate position of a secretary and between the events of The

Silkworm and Career of Evil she takes surveillance courses to be better prepared for her

46
job as a detective (Career of Evil 24). In the third novel, Strike begins introducing

Robin as his partner: “She’s my partner. We work the same jobs” (Career of Evil 159)

and therefore acknowledging the fact that she is his equal. Furthermore, Robin does not

just follow Strike’s orders without a second thought but even jeopardises her position as

Strike’s partner by deliberately disobeying his instructions in the third novel, which

results in Strike temporarily dismissing her. Noel Brocbank, one of the three suspects in

Career of Evil, is a paedophile and because of her memories of being raped at

university, Robin becomes determined to track him down and warn the woman who is

living with him and her two daughters about his past. She goes against Strike’s orders

and meets with the woman, but the encounter results in Brockbank running away

(Career of Evil 437). When Strike learns about what she has done, he immediately fires

Robin. While she is devastated, she also knows she did what she thought was right and

stands by her actions (Career of Evil 449). This shows that Robin is a strong female

character who is by no means a subordinate to the Great Detective.

4.3 The Police

In the detective stories of the Golden Age, professional policemen were always

in the difficult position of never being right about who the culprit was (that is, of course,

if the Great Detective was not a professional policeman, such as Agatha Christie’s

Superintendent Battle, or Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn). In hard-boiled detective

fiction, the police not only focused on the wrong suspect but also sometimes suspected

the hero of the story of having committed the crimes which happen in the novel. While

the policemen in Golden Age detective fiction were portrayed as “ineffective, plodding,

slow-witted and ill-educated” (James 19), they were never corrupt. In the hard-boiled

stories, the policemen are seen as both corrupt and brutal (James 77). While no

47
corruption happens in the novels of Robert Galbraith, the police have a very negative

relationship towards Strike and they are in turn portrayed as incompetent workers who

do not listen to Strike’s remarks about the cases. This is especially seen in the character

of Detective Inspector Carver, who failed to recognise Lula Landry’s death as a murder

in the first book and therefore holds a grudge against Strike for outwitting him.

Carver is the one in charge of the investigation of Landry’s death. He is

described as a “paunchy man with a face the colour of corned beef [whose] short supply

of patience had been exhausted long ago” (The Cuckoo’s Calling 3). He immediately

thinks Lula Landry jumped on her own and disregards the evidence of a witness who

claims that there was a man in Landry’s flat. In this aspect he is similar to the policemen

of the Golden Age, who always seem to go for the simplest solutions, such as Inspector

Raglan in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, who at once jumps to the conclusion that “the

case [was] going to be plain as a pikestaff” (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd 32) and then

comes to the wrong conclusion which he does not want to reconsider. In Dorothy L.

Sayers’s Have His Carcase, the local police are certain that a man who was found with

his throat slit committed suicide.

Carver also feels very negatively towards Strike: there is “animosity [crackling]

from Carver’s every open pore” (The Cuckoo’s Calling 445) when Strike comes to the

police station after the murder of Rochelle Onifade. This feeling of hatred is further

developed in Career of Evil, where Carver becomes the one in charge of the serial killer

case, and since Strike outwitted him in the first book, Carver feels even more negatively

towards him. It is said that:

Of the policemen whom Strike had managed to offend and upstage during his

two most famous detective triumphs, Detective Inspector Roy Carver had been

48
 the most comprehensively outclassed and was consequently the most deeply

embittered. His failings during the investigation into a famous model’s fall from

her penthouse flat had been extensively documented and, indeed, exaggerated in

the press […] He had had an antipathy towards Strike even before the detective

had publicly proven that the policeman had failed to spot murder. (Career of

Evil 402)

Policemen not being particularly fond of the Great Detective can be seen in a number of

Golden Age detective stories. One of them is The Murder at the Vicarage where an

Inspector Slack is described as “abominably and most unnecessarily rude” (The Murder

at the Vicarage 87). However, hatred similar to what Carver feels towards Strike is

more usually seen in hard-boiled detective stories.

In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade has to deal with police officers who clearly

hate him to the core and even want to accuse him of the murder of his partner (Hammett

18). The policeman in the story who most resembles Roy Carver in the Robert Galbraith

novels is Lieutenant Dundy, who is portrayed as an arrogant, self-important policeman

who likes to bully people, especially Sam Spade. This is in a direct parallel with

Carver’s relationship with Strike, as Carver behaves in a similar way as Dundy. When

he learns that Robin has been to see the woman living with Noel Brockbank, which then

resulted in Brockbank running away, Carver shouts profanities at Strike, his “obscenity-

strewn soliloquy [becoming] louder and filthier” as he speaks (Career of Evil 447). He

also threatens Strike and tries to bully him into not being part of this or any other

investigation which Carver runs (Career of Evil 447). A Golden Age policeman would

never behave in such a way, but professional policemen in hard-boiled stories are

frequently portrayed in a similar manner.

49
 Apart from Roy Carver, there is another policeman whose character is more

developed in Galbraith’s novels: his name is Eric Wardle and he is a subordinate of

Carver’s. Wardle is portrayed as a rather pleasant person who seems to be on Strike’s

side. In the first book Strike gets his contact information from an old army acquaintance

who tells him that Wardle will be a better choice than Carver for Strike to contact

because of their different personalities (The Cuckoo’s Calling 48). Wardle becomes

Strike’s “inside man” in the police department and gives Strike information about the

individual cases which would otherwise be difficult to obtain for the detective. A

contact among the policemen is a common feature in detective stories of the Golden

Age, since the Golden Age detective is most frequently an amateur who would not be

able to know details about the cases if he worked without the help of the police. As

Patricia D. Maida and Nicholas B. Spornick say in their book Murder She Wrote: A

Study of Agatha Christie’s Detective Fiction: “Detective stories need policemen. Law

enforcement officers are called upon to provide support and background for the solution

to the puzzle and to assume the role of the arm of justice in bringing the case to the

courts” (Maida and Spornick 145). In this fashion, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot has

his Inspector Japp; Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey has his brother-in-law,

Chief Inspector Charles Parker; and Robert Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike has Eric

Wardle. Wardle also resembles Tom Polhaus, a policeman from The Maltese Falcon,

who just like Wardle acts friendly enough towards the detective and also gives the hero

of the story information about the case (Hammett 12). Philip Marlowe has a similar

contact in the police department in The Big Sleep, called Bernie Ohls, who in fact

recommends Marlowe to General Sternwood and is on good terms with the detective

(The Big Sleep 25).

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 4.4 The Murderers and Their Motives

The character of the murderer is an important part of a detective novel. Their

various back stories and their motives for killing their victims of course vary, but P. D.

James claims that usually the motive in Golden Age detective fiction is one or more of

these four: “lust, lucre, loathing, and love” (James 127). While lust does not play any

part in the motives of Galbraith’s killers, the other three are featured heavily in his

novels. John Bristow, Elizabeth Tassel, and Donald Laing are portrayed as complex

characters and their motives and actions are believably depicted.

John Bristow kills his sister Lula Landry primarily for money. He works in a law

firm with his uncle and Strike discovers that he has been embezzling money (The

Cuckoo’s Calling 520). Since Bristow needs her money to cover up his embezzling

practices, he decides to murder Lula and almost gets away with his crime. The decision

to kill is relatively easy for him because he has killed before: he murdered his brother

Charlie when they were both children (The Cuckoo’s Calling 528). In addition to the

motive of obtaining money, another motive is added to his actions: loathing. Since all of

the children in the family were adopted, a certain rivalry emerged between them, which

was especially emphasised in John. As Strike says to him at the end of the novel, he was

always “unloved [and] neglected [and] overshadowed” (The Cuckoo’s Calling 528).

John was always the least favourite child of his parents. “No matter how much [he had]

fawned over [his] mother, and played the devoted son, [he had] never come first with

her” (The Cuckoo’s Calling 527). The combined knowledge that if he killed Lula, he

would not only be able to cover up the embezzling of his company’s money but also he

would become the only child of his dying mother and therefore would finally have to

compete with no one else for her love makes John Bristow commit the murder.

Although he did not plan Lula’s murder in advance, he shows a lot of intelligence

51
covering his tracks and turns into a coldblooded killer when he ruthlessly eliminates the

only person who could endanger him – Rochelle Onifade. As Cormoran Strike says to

him, the fact that John had killed before makes any other subsequent murder easier (The

Cuckoo’s Calling 531). The combined motive of money and loathing can be seen for

example in Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile where a young millionaire is killed for

her money and for having stolen her friend’s fiancé. The motive for the murder of

Rochelle Onifade is reminiscent of the murder of a blackmailer in Death on the Nile as

well.

In The Silkworm, Elizabeth Tassel is a failed writer who is at the time the events

of the novel take place a literary agent. She is portrayed as a bitter woman who resents

the fact that she is not talented enough to become and acclaimed writer like those she

represents as an agent. Not only does she commit a murder, she also takes her revenge

on everyone who she feels has ever done her wrong by writing the fake Bombyx Mori.

Cormoran Strike says this to her at the end of the novel: “Did it feel good, raping and

killing your way through everyone you knew, Elizabeth? One big explosion of malice

and obscenity, revenging yourself on everyone, painting yourself as the unacclaimed

genius, taking sideswipes at everyone with a more successful love life […]” (The

Silkworm 556). This is the ultimate description of Tassel’s character and her motives:

she wants to take revenge. Revenge and hatred of the victim is the motive in Christie’s

Hercule Poirot’s Christmas where an estranged son murders his father out of deep

loathing for the man (Hercule Poirot’s Christmas 177) or in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy

Night where a college servant takes her revenge on university educated women who she

thinks destroyed her husband’s life and drove him to suicide (Gaudy Night 160).

However, there is again another motive behind Elizabeth Tassel’s actions and that is

money. This time, the murderer does not want to get her hands on any more money, but

52
instead she wants to stop being blackmailed by her victim. The motive of what P. D.

James calls “lucre” is not, however, as strong as the hatred Tassel feels towards the

writing community and especially her victim Owen Quine. The especially brutal way in

which she decides to dispose of him is a sign of how deep the hatred is rooted in her –

not just towards Quine but towards everyone in her life.

In his third novel, Robert Galbraith presents to the reader a serial killer with a

special wish to destroy his enemy Cormoran Strike. Donald Laing is a psychopath

whose main goal is to take his revenge on the detective hero of the series of novels. By

sending body parts to Strike’s office he almost succeeds in destroying his business

because, just as Strike fears, being involved in such a gruesome case has serious

consequences for his detective practice (Career of Evil 28). His clients gradually back

out of their arrangements with Strike and in the end he is left with no job whatsoever

(Career of Evil 344). The hunt for the “Shacklewell Ripper” is therefore not just a

matter of seeking justice for Strike; it becomes a matter of existential importance to

him. Strike calls what Laing is doing to him “terrorism”: “He’s trying to put the wind up

us, disrupt our lives as much as possible; and let’s face it, he’s succeeding” (Career of

Evil 163). This time, the motive for the murderer’s actions is not money, but instead

what P. D. James calls “that deep-seated hatred which makes it almost impossible to

tolerate the continued existence of an enemy” (James 127). Although Laing does not

directly murder his mortal enemy, his need to destroy everything which is dear to Strike

points to a psychopathic personality who does not hesitate to take everything from his

victims. While his ultimate goal is to destroy Strike, he does take pleasure in murdering

young women, which reveals a deeply broken personality.

Although their personalities are very different, the three killers in Galbraith’s

novels have one thing in common: a deep hatred for the person they wish to destroy.

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This feature is dealt with in different ways in the novels. John Bristow does not only

hate his sister whom he murders, but also anyone who precedes him when it comes to

his mother’s affection. Elizabeth Tassel murders only Owen Quine, but with Quine she

takes down everyone who has ever done her wrong. Donald Laing murders four people,

but his ultimate enemy is neither one of his victims, but Cormoran Strike, who is forced

to see his business and life fall apart because of the Laing’s crimes.

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 5 CONCLUSION

Detective fiction is a genre of literature with a long tradition which has captured the

attention of readers worldwide for more than a century. From the first detective story

written by Edgar Allan Poe to British detective fiction of the Golden Age to the

American hard-boiled version of detective novels, detective fiction has become a genre

of various faces which are equally fascinating. While the novelists of the Golden Age

focused mainly on the development of the puzzle and planting clear clues in their stories

so that the reader can arrive at the correct solution to the central crimes, authors of hard-

boiled detective fiction aimed at a more realistic portrayal of criminal life in the city and

relied on the personas of their hero private investigators to deliver enjoyable plots. The

novels of Robert Galbraith which have been examined in this thesis draw their

influences from both of these distinctive genres.

The first novel in the series about private detective Cormoran Strike, The Cuckoo’s

Calling, is concerned with the murder of a famous model which was committed by her

adoptive brother because of money and family relations. The plot is written in a Golden

Age manner from the first page as the person who the reader meets first ends up being

the murderer, which is a plot feature in accordance with one of the Ten Commandments

of Detective Fiction written by Ronald Knox. Parallels with various Agatha Christie and

Dorothy L. Sayers stories can be seen in the plot, mostly in the way the clues are

presented to the reader. No clues are omitted from the course of the story so that the

reader can easily solve the puzzle by themselves, which is another rule written by

Ronald Knox. A notable Golden Age feature is the usage of the list clue, where an

important clue is hidden in a list of unimportant items. The plot is developed in a

manner similar to many stories written by mainly Agatha Christie, and the second

murder of a blackmailer is one of the aspects in which the story resembles Christie’s

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plots. The identity of the second victim is influenced by Golden Age detective fiction as

well since the murdered woman is of a lower rank.

While the plot of the second novel, The Silkworm, is again influenced mainly by the

stories of the Golden Age, there are features which point to the hard-boiled school as

well. The fact that the body of the victim is found horribly mutilated is one of them,

because in Golden Age detective fiction this is almost never done while writers of hard-

boiled novels are not afraid of these images. What points to the Golden Age, however,

is the employment of a closed circle of suspects, where each of the people has a motive

to murder the victim. Galbraith also uses red herrings in the plot, which is another

distinctive feature of detective fiction of the Golden Age. The moment Cormoran Strike

realises who the culprit is is memorable as well, since it clearly points to the moment

when the reader should be able to come to the right solution because they already have

all the facts they need.

The third Cormoran Strike novel is different from the other two because of the fact

that the killer’s thoughts are not concealed to the reader. In this way, Galbraith breaks

one of Knox’s rules for the first time. The novel deals with a serial killer at large who is

obsessed with Strike, and while a serial killer appeared in Christie’s The ABC Murders,

the murderer in Galbraith’s book is different from what the reader could see in detective

stories of the Golden Age. There is again a closed circle of suspects in Career of Evil,

but the clues are not as clear as in the first two books. This novel is the least reminiscent

of the Golden Age of the three, however, aspects such as mutilation of the bodies and

the high body count that is featured in the story point to the hard-boiled genre of

detective fiction.

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 If the plots of the stories were mostly reminiscent of the Golden Age, the persona of

the detective Cormoran Strike is much more influenced by the hard-boiled genre. He is

a self-employed private investigator who likes his drink and does not hesitate to

physically fight with people he proves to be guilty of the central crimes. In this he is

different from the Golden Age detective to whom nothing violent ever happens. Strike

has a military training and a troubled past which has left him with a highly developed

sense of justice, which again points to the hard-boiled detective tradition. Another hard-

boiled feature connected to Strike would be the fact that he has his femme fatale – a

character which frequently appears in the stories of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond

Chandler. One of the only aspects about the character which points to the stories of the

Golden Age is the fact that he has a sidekick.

The sidekick, Robin Ellacott, is a strong female character who, unlike the

stereotypical sidekick Captain Hastings in the stories featuring Hercule Poirot, is no less

intelligent than the detective, let alone the average reader. She fights hard to be

considered Strike’s detective partner rather than his secretary and her intelligence helps

her with achieving her dream of being a professional detective. While her first position

in Strike’s office as a secretary points to the hard-boiled tradition of female characters

being employed in subordinate jobs rather than on equal positions to the detectives, her

subsequent position of his detective partner likens her more to Golden Age characters

such as Dorothy L. Sayers’s Harriet Vane. Another aspect about the character of Robin

which is reminiscent of Vane is the fact that she, too, serves as a love interest to the

Great Detective.

The two policemen featured in Galbraith’s novels can be linked to both Golden Age

and hard-boiled detective fiction as well. The character of Detective Inspector Carver is

can be linked to hard-boiled policemen such as Lieutenant Dundy in The Maltese

57
Falcon as he is portrayed in a very similar way: an arrogant bully with a special hatred

towards the detective. The other policeman, Eric Wardle, is much more reminiscent of

the policemen in Golden Age detective fiction, who help the detective obtain inside

information about the cases in the stories which the detective would otherwise have no

other way to get.

The three murderers in the stories are all believable characters with different

motives for their crimes. John Bristow kills primarily for money, but also out of hatred

towards anyone who has ever been a favourite of his mother. Elizabeth Tassel murders

out of a deep-rooted feeling of hate towards the community in which she has not been

successful and does not only kill one victim but takes revenge on all the people who

have done her wrong. Donald Laing is a serial killer whose enormous hatred for

Cormoran Strike is the ultimate motive for his actions.

In conclusion, the three novels written by Robert Galbraith, The Cuckoo’s Calling,

The Silkworm, and Career of Evil, draw their influences from both Golden Age and

hard-boiled detective fiction and the various aspects in which they can be linked to

these two genres can be easily traced. The fact that Galbraith puts together the Golden

Age puzzle with a detective reminiscent of the hard-boiled private investigators makes

for an interesting and enjoyable read and one can only hope that readers will see more

of Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott in the future.

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 6 WORKS CITED

Collin, Joe. “What did the critics really think of ‘Cuckoo’s Calling’ (before they knew it

was by J. K. Rowling)?” NewStatesman. 20 Nov 2016. Web.

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Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. Seattle: Stellar Books, 2013. Print.

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Christie, Agatha. An Autobiography. London: HarperCollins, 1993. Print.

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books/1803.pdf>

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---. The Mysterious Affair at Styles. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1973. Print.

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Gavin, Adrienne E. “Feminist Crime Fiction and Female Sleuths.” A Companion to

Crime Fiction, edited by Lee Horsley and Charles J. Rzepka, Wiley-Blackwell,

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Galbraith, Robert. Career of Evil. London: Sphere, 2015. Print.

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Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon. London: Orion Books, 2010. Print.

James, P. D. Talking about Detective Fiction. London: Faber and Faber, 2009. Print.

Lawson, Mark. “The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith – review.” The Guardian.

20 Nov 2016. Web. <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jul/18/cuckoos-

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Maida, Patricia D., and Nicholas B. Spornick. Murder She Wrote: A Study of Agatha

Christie’s Detective Fiction. Bowling Green U Popular P, 1982. PDF file.

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---. Have His Carcase. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2003. Print.

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Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. London: Routledge, 2005. Print.

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 RÉSUMÉ

The aim of this thesis is to trace influences of Golden Age and hard-boiled detective

fiction on the works of Robert Galbraith, a pseudonym under which J. K. Rowling has

written three detective novels: The Cuckoo’s Calling, The Silkworm, and Career of Evil.

Detective fiction of the Golden Age is concerned mainly with the development of the

puzzle behind the plot and the planting of clues throughout the story so that the reader

can arrive at the right solution to the central crime. Hard-boiled detective fiction mainly

revolves around the character of its hero, the private investigator, and the way he deals

with violence and crime in his city. Robert Galbraith’s novels are influenced by both of

these genres. The thesis is divided in three main chapters in which the various aspects of

the two aforementioned genres are first introduced and later examined in relation to the

plots of the three novels and the main characters (the detective, the sidekick, the police,

and the murderers) in the stories.

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 RESUMÉ

Cílem této práce je hledání vlivů tzv. zlatého věku detektivky a tzv. drsné školy

na dílo Roberta Galbraitha, což je pseudonym, pod kterým J. K. Rowling do dnešního

dne napsala tři knihy: Volání kukačky, Hedvábník a Ve službách zla. Detektivka tzv.

zlatého věku se zabývá hlavně hádankou, která se skrývá za zápletkou příběhu, a tím,

aby byla v knize správná vodítka, která slouží k tomu, aby čtenář mohl odhalit viníka a

přijít na řešení centrálního zločinu v knize. V drsné škole detektivky je důležitá osoba

hlavního hrdiny, soukromého detektiva, a způsoby, kterými se hrdina vypořádává s

násilím a zločinem ve svém městě. Romány Roberta Galbraitha jsou ovlivněny oběma

výše zmíněnými žánry. Práce je rozdělena do tří hlavních kapitol, ve kterých jsou

nejprve představeny hlavní aspekty detektivky zlatého věku a drsné školy, a potom jsou

zkoumány ve vztahu k zápletkám a hlavním hrdinům (což je detektiv, detektivův

pomocník, policie a vrazi) Galbraithových románů.

63