By Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling)
717 KB (464 pages)
Mulholland Books (April
30, 2013)
ASIN: B00AA20E5Y
Someplace on high, the
spirit of Agatha Christie is smiling down on J.K. Rowling these days. Probably
the spirits of Ngaio Marsh, Dot Sayers and Margery Allingham as well. The
Cuckoo's Calling, written by Rowling under the pseudonym "Robert
Galbraith," is as good a "tea cozy" mystery as any written by those
grande
dames in their prime.
I write mysteries
myself. If some day I manage a book that is even three-quarters as good as this
one, the undertaker will need two weeks to get the smile off my face for my
funeral.
"Wait just a damn
minute, Wallace," I can hear you say out there. "I thought you were
an Elmore Leonard/George V. Higgins kind of guy, the sort of mystery fan who
likes to see murder in the hands of people who do it for a living? I thought you liked your crime stories from
the perpetrators' perspective, the kind of stories where the most common
solution to problems is to blow them away with a .44 magnum?"
If that's what you
said, you're right: I like noir-ish
thrillers with a nihilistic edge, in which the protagonist falls victim to his
own greed, lust or arrogance, and his struggle to pull himself out of the
morass just digs him in deeper. I spent 30-plus
years writing about La Cosa Nostra, the Russian Mafiya, Chinese Triads, Vietnamese
microchip robbery rings, street gangs, prison crime syndicates and many, many
drug dealers and their organizations. During that time I ran across dozens of
cops that abused their authority, took money to ignore criminals or simply
looked the other way when serious illegality occurred.
All those years
researching all those crimes, criminals and law enforcement officers has
convinced me that the doomed losers of novels like The Postman Always Rings Twice,
Double
Indemnity, The Friends of Eddie Coyle and Mr. Paradise correspond
more closely to the reality I am familiar with than the duplicitous, well-bred,
public school-educated killers in Have His Carcase, More Work for the Undertaker, or Murder
on the Orient Express.
But I also like horror
stories and occasionally write them, even though I don't believe in ghosts,
witches or demons. And I like sword and
sorceror yarns like the ones written by Robert Howard, even though the
Hyperborian Age never actually existed except in Howard's mind. I once spent
most of a summer reading everything I could find by Andre Norton, despite the
fact that I have never met a human being who could use ESP to communicate with
animals. And I read so much science fiction by A. E. Van Vogt -- whose mutant
humans had supernormal abilities that went far beyond simple ESP -- that I
tackled Science and Sanity, the tome on general semantics and
non-Aristotelian thought that inspired much of Van Vogt's work.
What I am saying here
is, sure: my preference is for a story in which the criminal is just another
working class slob toiling at a particular variant of capitalism where a business
mistake can have more disastrous consequences than getting a slap on the wrist
from the Securities Exchange Commission or being fired by the board of
directors at a shareholder meeting. But
that doesn't keep me from enjoying the occasional locked room mystery, or a
Freeman Wills Croft-style thriller in which the solution depends on, say, reconciling
discrepancies between ship and railway timetables.
 |
| J.K. Rowling, best known for her Harry Potter books, has written a "tea cozy" mystery story that is about as good as any on the market today. |
The Cuckoo's Calling, Rowling's latest, is
one of those cozies that noir
aficionados like Raymond Chandler are inclined to deride. There is no criminal
gang that sets in motion the events of the novel, no obvious motive that
immediately explains the villain's motivation. The police are pretty bright in
this story, although their eagerness to clear the case leads them to miss some
fairly significant evidence.
In a way, it is a
throwback to the sort of suspense novel that Agatha Christie used to write --
except that Rowling is considerably hipper than Christie and populates her
story with such exotic Twenty First Century creatures as supermodels, rock
stars and gangster rappers from L.A. -- all of which hadn't been invented when
Christie was banging out novels and shorter fiction about Miss Marple, Ariadne
Oliver, Hercule Poirot, and Tommy and Tuppence.
Having identified it as
a throwback, it is worth noting that The Calling of the Cuckoo is a very,
VERY good throwback -- better in many ways than a lot of the stuff by
Allingham, Marsh and Christie.
There isn't a single
false note in the entire novel: the characters are just about as fully realized
as any I have ever come across in a crime thriller; Rowling's plot -- though
devious -- is highly believable; her characters each have distinct voices, pet
phrases and vocabularies which give them depth and add immensely to the story's
verisimilitude; her inside understanding of police agencies, the military, the
daily dealings of celebrities is acute; and she
uses a light touch in developing the back stories of our characters, but
tells us precisely what we need to know about them.
Her private detective, Comoran Strike, is a broken man, not
because he lost his leg in Afghanistan, (although he did) or because his mother
was a celebrated rock 'n' roll groupie that died of a heroin overdose (which
she was); No, what has put Strike on the edge of the precipice is the fact that
he in love with a woman who is as fraudulent as the Piltdown Man. As the novel
begins, he is down to only one client, thrown out of his ex-girlfriend's
apartment and sleeping on a camp bed in the back of the office he is soon to be
evicted from.
Rowling sketches Strike
with a deft hand, making him one of those memorable characters that the reader
will remember long after forgetting whodunit.
Strike's temporary
secretary and dog's-body, Robin, is just as finely drawn. The pair -- a
decidedly odd couple -- enhance each other's strengths as individuals and
compensate for each other's weaknesses. Together, they make a formidable team
that should have the reader thinking "sequel, if you please" before
they get very far into the story. And
though Robin ends up reluctantly becoming much more intimately involved in her
new employer's personal life than she intends to, Rowling does not put the two
into a romance, even though it would have been easy to do so.
Even the conclusion of
the story is on the money: the villain comes as a surprise, despite the neat
trail of clues Rowling leaves, and the denouement is thrilling enough to make
the reader worry whether our flawed protagonist will come through it unharmed.
Rowling gets it all one
hundred percent right. As one of Harry Potter's instructors might well put it: "Well
done, J.K. Rowling!"
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