Tag: CCormoran Strike

One thing and another

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn Potpourri, writing

I usually save these catch-all posts for Sundays, but then I realized I have nothing earthshaking to talk about (not that that’s stopped me from posting in the past).

  • No, Facebook has not fixed the software fault on my author’s page. The page is fairly worthless if I cannot post links. If they continue to do nothing, I’ll delete the page.
  • I’ve been updating my website. There’s more I want to do, but for now, I think the books are easier to find now that I’ve moved the books in the folk magic series to a separate page. Now there’s room to display more information about each book.
  • Our heat wave in north Georgia continues with 100° temps. What’s odd is that the daily weather report keeps forecasting an afternoon thunderstorm that never shows up. Well, nothing is promised for today, but tomorrow there’s supposed to be a cooling shower. Yeah, no, like I believe that.  The only consolation here is that we’re not the only ones who can fry eggs on the sidewalks.
  • We watched “Bull Durham” on TV last night and think it’s held up well during the last three decades. Of course, Susan Sarandon’s character made a big splash in that, though what I liked best was how well the film portrayed baseball in the minor leagues. The team reminded me of the team in the movie “The Natural” that was also inept until somebody came along with the competence and charisma to change everyone’s attitude.
  • On a personal note, I’m getting fed up with news stories and Facebook posts that say “legacy media” is spreading hate and lies. I think newspapers and local TV outlets have a long way to go to “catch up” with the slanted news on CNN and Fox.
  • I still haven’t finished Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith (JK Rowling) and, on balance think it includes a lot of digressions about the detective agency’s cases that get left out of most novels. To enjoy the book, you have to be willing to tackle a long haul in the novels (four, at present) in the Cormoran Strike series.
  • If you ever watched the “Star Trek – Deep Space Nine” series, you may remember that when Dax and Worf had sex, they ended up so badly injured that they needed to check in to the infirmary the following morning. I have a scene like that in my novel in progress and have started wondering how my publisher is going to react when she sees the manuscript.

—Malcolm

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Enjoying another Robert Galbraith Novel

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn authors2 Comments

Troubled Blood (2020), at over 900 pages, will take me a while to finish. But that’s good. I enjoy the series about an old-style private detective who doesn’t solve cases by hacking into traffic cams, bank accounts, or FBI databases. Instead, we have stakeouts, interviews, following suspects, and a lot of experience on the resume of British Detective Cormoran Strike. If you know the novels by Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and P. D. James, you’ll have an idea of how Strike works.

This is the fifth book in the series that began with The Cuckoo’s Calling in 2013 and that will continue this August with The Ink Black Heart. The books are long, well-written, and credible within the genre. By now, everyone who reads these books knows that Galbraith is J. K. Rowling’s pseudonym. She got panned for The Casual Vacancy in 2013, mainly because readers expected something magical like the Harry Potter series. I liked the novel a lot.

But after that experience, I can understand why she would want to start fresh–as she said with no expectations–with the Galbraith pen name for her detective series. Unfortunately, she didn’t get to do it because her lawyer’s office spilled the beans, although in what was supposed to be a private conversation. She sued and the lawyer was fined.

I’ve read all the books in the series but one. I plan to keep reading when the next installment comes out in August. Several of the books have become movies, though I haven’t seen them.

Publisher’s Description for Troubled Blood

Private Detective Cormoran Strike is visiting his family in Cornwall when he is approached by a woman asking for help finding her mother, Margot Bamborough—who went missing in mysterious circumstances in 1974.
 
Strike has never tackled a cold case before, let alone one forty years old. But despite the slim chance of success, he is intrigued and takes it on; adding to the long list of cases that he and his partner in the agency, Robin Ellacott, are currently working on. And Robin herself is also juggling a messy divorce and unwanted male attention, as well as battling her own feelings about Strike.
 
As Strike and Robin investigate Margot’s disappearance, they come up against a fiendishly complex case with leads that include tarot cards, a psychopathic serial killer and witnesses who cannot all be trusted. And they learn that even cases decades old can prove to be deadly . . .

Typical of Rowling, the Robert Galbraith website will tell you everything you want to know (and then some) about the series.

—Malcolm