Book Review: Career of Evil, Robert Galbraith's Gory New Chiller

He had not managed to scrub off all her blood. A dark line like a parenthesis lay under the middle fingernail of his left hand. He set to digging it out, although he quite liked seeing it there: a memento of the previous day’s pleasures.

As first paragraphs go, the latest Cormoran Strike novel has one of the best.

Atmospheric (not to mention some wicked tricolonic syntax) Robert Galbraith’s Career of Evil fires readers straight into the mind of a killer with all the propulsive force of a bullet.

Calling this character a killer, however, is something of an understatement. Galbraith (ok Rowling) has created a serial murderer with far more than a grudge against private investigator Cormoran Strike. And his sociopathic mind exists in a landscape more warped than many found in fact or fiction.

It’s darker as a novel. Less genteel but a lot more bizarre than either the Cuckoo’s Calling or The Silkworm. Dealing with paedophilia, serial murder and Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID) with equal amounts of candour and indulgence, the plot takes us across country and into the past, fills pages with macabre details and grisly redherrings.

Reading Career of Evil after attending its launch event, however, makes the departure from the previous two novels stark and strange.

Because the event I went to was almost the set for an Agatha Christie. It was positively Sherlockean, a puzzle game, intentionally similar to one of those tightly plotted, third-person omniscient mysteries.

Let’s put this into context.

Just a few photos. #MakeMeADetective @RGalbraith pic.twitter.com/iQtetxAjUf

— Harriet Allner (@TheScribbleBug) October 21, 2015

On Wednesday, Little, Brown hosted something like a dozen teams of mystery lovers (and Potterheads, lots of charming Potterheads), who they’d invited to become ‘a detective for the day’. With my crime writing finally on track, I of course leapt at the opportunity to feed my inner mystery solver.

It took place at London’s Time Run.

The first challenge was to find the place – which took me a good extra twenty minutes because I kept walking past it (not surprising given it’s not signposted and even the front door has buttons misdirecting you to people who don’t exist). Once inside, however, the 'Crystal Maze But Better' adventure space is all about immersive experience, and Little, Brown used it to recreate elements of The Silkworm. This meant that after a coffee and a short briefing, we were ushered to a door and into the reimagined halls of Roper Chard – the publishing house of Galbraith’s second novel. Distant sounds can be heard upon entering, tinned laughter and clinking glasses. We’re at the drinks party attended by Cormoran Strike (who infiltrates it during the novel to discover more about the publishing house and its authors). However, in this version, Owen Quinn is still missing and it’s up to us – a motley team of five – to find a manuscript that might uncover his whereabouts, hopefully alive.

The odd mix of Victoriana, curiousity shop and publishing house made for an exciting trip into Galbraith’s fictional world, and as we solved one clue after another, racing against the clock, we were filled with a childish, gleeful excitement.

Team 5 challenge complete! #MakeMeADetective@RGalbraith Had so much fun, can we do it ag… https://t.co/v1xsevzdtNpic.twitter.com/ZMmNzYookZ

— Jax Blunt (@liveotherwise) October 21, 2015

We did pretty well. For about an hour we were even in the running for the signed and dedicated copies of the book by Robert Galbraith "himself".

The success was totally a team effort. We were brilliant together – each of us with a different way of thinking and problem solving. We had the eminently logical and the creatively minded. The type who know every twist and trope in crime fiction and therefore know exactly where we need to be looking, and then the kind who understand puzzles and games and how to solve them. Together we worked well and it was great to play the detective with them. (Read More from Jax, who was on the same team here)

Yet this quintessential crime narrative, the Sherlock style solving of clues, the ‘shut-room’ mystery, is a farcry from the topsy-turvy morbidity of Career of Evil. In fact, the only real similarity is the ever-building chemistry between Robin and Strike, and the exuberance of the writing.

Cormoran Strike & Robin Ellacott

Plus, though this may be because I’ve read an awful lot of Ian Rankin and McIllvanney the Elder and Younger, compared to either The Cuckoo’s Calling or The Silkworm, this novel is decidedly more akin to those of the Tartan Noir clan.

Whilst set in London much more time is spent bombing around the United Kingdom, including a jaunt around Scotland in a Mini. Galbraith also spends longer constructing personalities - beyond the sensationalistic elements, the shifts of the narrative voice into that of the serial killer himself attempt to capture something of that coy, insightful type of profiling familiar to any reader of Val McDermid. Then there's the sort of 'Tony Hill / Carol Jordan', 'Will Trent / Sarah Linton' sexual tension thing that we're all so used to seeing in today's crime fiction.

Admittedly, there's something of the romantic comedy in this pair compared to McDermid's most famous partners. Here are two protagonists who clearly fancy each other much more than they do their respective S/Os  but have yet to figure this out despite all their super-sleuthing powers.

Different is not necessarily better, but neither is it worse. It's just different. I'd be quite nervous to be thrown into the Time Run 'experience' of Career of Evil.

Overall, Galbraith's latest novel is a compelling read. It has it's 'daft' points, as the Guardian said, though I think those parts are what stop it from being overwrought and heavy. It also has it's faintly unpleasant moments (the toe, guys, the toe) but they're not gratuitous - we're not talking gore and grit and horror here.

So with this in mind, I would recommend Career of Evil to any crime fan, but if you're looking for the goofy and sly satirical plot of the previous two novels, that's not what you'll find here.

This is Galbraith at "his" most fiendish and entertaining.

If that entertainment is a little gruesome along the way, so be it.

Je serai poète et toi poésie,
SCRIBBLER

Buy Career of Evil, the third book in the highly acclaimed crime fiction series by J.K. Rowling, writing under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, at your nearest bookstore - Hardback £20, ebook £10.99 - or check out Wordery.com to order online.

Of Characters & Coffee (or what starts writers writing)

Different writers have different styles of writing. That’s a given. Starting from the very basics of narrative voice to the inspirations behind the story, what makes up a writer’s style is a question of influence, taste, and personal voice. It’s their literary fingerprint. It’s why even the best ghostwriters will always be slightly paler imitations of their author’s voice (regardless of how well the chameleon blends into the background, he’s still not part of it right?).

Yet one element that has always fascinated me but readers and aspiring writers don’t necessarily ever see is the writer’s style of creation.

Oh we’ve all heard about the peculiar ones, the quirky habits: the hoarding of postcards, the walls of notes, the lucky chair that squeaks, the writer who, like some method actor, cloisters himself away in order to experience the same crippling isolation as his protagonist. I’m not focusing there today.

I’m focusing on the stories and how they begin, where they come from, what makes a person pick up their pen and write. It’s the initial spark that I’m curious about and thought I’d discuss.

The human brain contains about 100 billion neurons. 

All together, those neurons contain about enough electrical energy to power a small lightbulb when you’re awake. In fact, our human brains are so fast that it takes the world’s most powerful super-computers 43minutes to process what we do in a second. So with a ton of information flooding the brain at any given moment, it’s no wonder it has to organise everything somehow nor that it does so in story form.

Stories are how we make sense of the world.

Implying all humans are innate storytellers, why then doesn’t everyone tell stories? Why don’t all humans fill up the hours by writing down their ideas? After all, doesn’t the saying go something like: ‘everyone has a story inside of them, waiting to be writ?’

For one, it’s a matter of interest – not everyone cares enough to write and others not enough to finish. More importantly, in this sense, writing isn’t about solipsism and the grand tangle of ganglion cells passing information neuron to neuron. Writing is an opening of one person to another person, a door from one mind to another.

Human language didn’t develop just so we could think in more complex ways, but so we could develop socially. Through ‘social development’ we learn about ‘self’ and ‘other’, and through understanding those things we develop stories because they help us comprehend the barriers, links and blended spaces between persons.

Ok, moving away from my degree in neuroscience, if not everyone has the interest or the determination to be storytellers in the commercial sense, then the writers that succeed, the ones that write and write and regardless of monetary achievement keep writing, must have something that triggers their ideas, that sparks them into action.

Talking to writers you’ll hear about all their different methods. One of the best writers I know (and who I mention frequently – check her and her writing partner out on Nerd Cactus) is a ‘world-builder’. More often than not her inner historian creates a ‘what if’ situation, a world that is transformed by a single decision, and then she comes up with characters to populate it, a theme that drives it, a plot that underpins each sequence of (often unfortunate) events.

My purpose as a writer is to loot my life to the very walls. THOMAS WOLFE #amwriting #writing pic.twitter.com/GPgv79kWO6

— Jon Winokur (@AdviceToWriters) August 21, 2015

On the other hand, despite working really well together on literary projects (our best is Renegade Earth, the trilogy) I almost always come from a completely different angle. I start with a character. Often just one, who I ‘hear’ in my head. They become part of a scene. That scene develops. We have a discussion: what’s their story, who are they, why should I care. If they fall down in any of these areas, I then investigate whether there’s another person I can talk to instead. I build up from the people, figure out their world, then start on the actual plot and idea.

The way we work together might seem strange. We start in such completely different spaces at times. But it functions because where she can become bogged down in the background, I can pull it back to the people; where I can find myself stuck in one character’s head, she’ll drag me back to the story we’re telling. As part of our development as writers, we’ve learnt from each other and so whilst my ‘initial spark’ is a character and hers more a question, the process is beautifully balanced.

When I put the question to some of the folk on Writer Unboxed, the answers came back with similarly disparate ‘starting points’ for writers. For some it’s when ‘an image blows up’ in their mind – a scene, a moment, complete with words and concepts. For others its all about concepts – they see a thing, remember it; read something, discover a new angle to develop. Some might prefer working with a relationship or a situation.

Most of the writers I spoke to, however, also mentioned that it’s far from being ‘kissed on the ear’ by the muses.

Inspiration might fall into an empty mind, or one that’s so full the idea of fitting more in hurts.

It also can shift. Whilst characters might instigate eight out of ten ideas, later finding an interesting idea in a book of conspiracies or in someone else’s writing is hardly unusual. No two stories are completely the same and no two writers seem to have identical processes.

Seeing the world in different ways is crucial. So whilst we may all claim a coffee habit, or a need for a nicotine fix (this is actually neuroscientifically explicable due to the dopamine dependencies curated by writerly minds that also link to the deficit disorders, depression and creativity associated with them), how we create ideas or start stories is almost entirely distinct from story to story, person to person.

So yes, writers work in different ways and have unique starting points that are as individual to a writer as their literary voice. It also means that if you're writing one way and your favourite writer works another - don't panic. No one really works the same way.

Your artist antenna can be trusted even if it’s not receiving the same signal as everyone else. In fact, that’s probably the best news you can hear.

Je serai poète et toi poésie,
SCRIBBLER