I usually don’t mind long books. Gone With The Wind (despite the racism) is one of my favourite novels ever. The writing is crystal clear, the characters are intuitive, and the best part is that it stretches well over eight hundred pages. It is an epic story, and reading it was easy.
So imagine my surprise when Robert Galbraith a.k.a. J.K. Rowling wrote a book about the length of Gone With The Wind that didn’t reach the same storytelling heights.
This week’s review is Troubled Blood.
Wait, that ain’t Hogwarts!
For those arriving from Neptune, Robert Galbraith is a nom-de-plume for Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. Although initially a secret, Rowling was unmasked as Galbraith shortly after the first book was released under that name. It should be noted that Rowling was not happy about how it happened.
The Galbraith crime series has been met with generally positive reviews. Particularly appealing is the recurring detective, a throwback to the Sherlock Holmes era of crime fiction. Rowling’s protagonist is the ex-British military cop (and one-legged Hagrid impersonator) Cormoran Strike. Also like the ‘20s era detective fiction, Strike is not a policeman but a private detective. This strips him of the sophisticated technology available to police-procedural protagonists, forcing him to rely on a magical skill known as deductive reasoning.
However, Strike isn’t alone. He is joined in the first book by Robin Ellacott, a young temp who becomes his full-time assistant before graduating up to agency partner in the most recent book. With their Will They/Won’t They chemistry, many fans want the pair to investigate more than their client’s request if you catch my drift.
With these two emotionally rich characters and a baffling unsolved mystery, Rowling has the chassis for a fantastic crime series.
Troubled blood? More like troubled launch.
Part of the reason I wanted to review this book was due to the controversy surrounding Rowling during the book’s launch. At the time, Rowling wrote a controversial essay on her website about transgender issues. When an early review stated (misleadingly) that the “moral seems to be: never trust a man in a dress”, most of the subsequent reviews concerned topics other than the book.
Clocking in at over 900 pages, Troubled Blood is the longest tome Rowling has ever released. So just how complex is this mystery?
Strengths and weaknesses: Easy to Separate
Unlike my last two reviews, what I liked and disliked about Troubled Blood can be easily identified. Rowling’s superior writing skills explains why. She is the queen of concrete imagery, ensuring that the reading experience is pleasurable regardless of how complex the topic is on the page. The mind lights up at easy-to-grasp concepts and descriptions of motion, all of which Rowling nails by a couple of touchdowns. Without these features, Harry Potter would’ve been ignored by millions of kids. The Strike series thankfully continues the Potter tradition of concrete imagery.
When reading the book, I feel like I can see, smell, and hear what’s going on in the world. Therefore, when something works in a Strike book (or doesn’t), it’s easy to spot.
This is the way it should be. Too many books are painfully abstract in their writing style and storytelling.
The Case
Strike and Robin’s client, Anna, asks for their help in finding her mother. Her mother, a GP named Margot, disappeared after leaving her practice one day and was never seen again. Now the daughter has grown up without her mother and the case has been unsolved for no less than forty years. Not surprisingly, Strike and Robin’s chances of success are low. They are given approximately one year to solve the case, for the client does not have unlimited funds.
Cold cases are one of my personal favourite crime fiction tropes as they immediately come with an extra layer of difficulty. After all, if the police couldn’t solve the case in the past, why should present-day detectives fare any better?
Much of the book involves the pair struggling to track down Margot’s friends and coworkers to get their recollections and old police statements. Speaking of the police, Strike and Robin’s work is complicated by the fact that the Met officer tasked with solving the case tried to do so via occult means. Poor Strike and Robin have to consult tarot cards and take a crash course in 1970s astrology (shudder) to figure out what the first detective was banging on about.
Sure enough, Strike and Robin figure out that the other staff members in Margot’s clinical practice were…kind of fucked up. I’ll stop there to prevent needless spoilers. In short, Strike and Robin have a long road ahead of them.
So what’s wrong the book? Going on the above details, nothing. We have a mystery, a series of obstacles, and the detectives can’t rely on a deus ex machina to solve the case. They have to use their intellect and creativity, the hallmarks of great characters.
The problem with this book isn’t the central mystery, but everything else around the mystery.
A pile of crap on the ocean floor.
In addition to their case, the two lead detectives are going through personal dramas so intense that they’d give the Real Housewives of New Jersey a run for their money. Strike’s aunt is terminally ill, forcing him to make lengthy diversions to his hometown in Cornwall. His famous father is also trying to end their estrangement, resulting in Strike becoming an asshat for several chapters. For good measure, Strike’s ex-lover Charlotte wanders into the plot as well.
Robin isn’t devoid of drama either. She is in the middle of a nasty divorce from Matthew, a solid gold wanker who has been around for the entire Strike series. She is now in a new flat, living with a gay actor named Max. This divorce, plus the fact she is turning 30, coincides with Robin’s brother starting his own family, creating more angst.
Even Strike’s agency has its own drama. The cases Strike solved in previous books have brought him in-story fame and notoriety, forcing him to hire sub-contractors in order to handle the increased workload. As if having still more characters wasn’t enough, the increased workload means that Strike and Robin spend countless pages not working on the main mystery. They’re doing surveillance for unrelated and downright weird cases. The longest of these interloping shenanigans involves an adult diaper fetish. Jesus. Oh, the ballooning ensemble at the agency also allows for office politics to raise their ugly head for the first time in the series. The young female Robin has seniority over older men causing tension, dick pics, and a variety of other sanctimonious undertones.
Speaking of male-female interactions, Rowling’s feminist views also make an unwelcome cameo. The missing GP was a Playboy Bunny in her younger years, but a hardcore feminist by the time she disappeared. In another instance, a woman at the G.P. office needed an abortion. As mentioned in the early reviews, the chief suspect in the case, a convicted serial killer, exclusively targeted women, sometimes by dressing in drag. These women were sexually assaulted, tortured and creatively mutilated before the male killer disposed of them.
In another scene, Robin’s flatmate hosts a strange dinner party where the guests spend a bewildering number of pages talking about slutwalks in front of a drunken Strike and a mortified Robin. Shortly afterward, Robin and Strike have their worst row yet (W.T.F.).
In her attempt to create a panoramic story, Rowling utilised so many themes that each one of them was about as welcome as a pile of crap on the ocean floor. If she picked one theme and ran with it this book wouldn’t be so exhausting.
Good god…
The mystery confronting Strike and Robin is as compelling as ever. Collecting the evidence and interviewing the witnesses should be straightforward, but obviously isn’t. After all, a decades-old cold case will leave many gaps in knowledge and memory. That is, by itself, a good six hundred page book.
Rowling’s mistake was that Strike and Robin were too often distracted by other, unrelated nonsense. Why couldn’t the sub-contractors work on the other cases in the background, rarely if ever consulting the partners? Why did Strike’s aunt have to get sick in this book, where the plot was already complex enough? Similarly, why did Robin’s divorce have to drag through the whole thing? Couldn’t she and Strike not have as many rows in this book as their relationship progressed? Did we need the subtle highlighting of sexual harassment in the workplace too? On and on it goes.
I mention all of these things because I could easily imagine the book without them. One of the first pieces of advice doled out to new novelists is “kill your darlings”, i.e. take out anything unrelated to the main plot.
In contrast, the last Strike book, Lethal White, featured a wide-variety of characters and sub-plots. Yet it was considerably shorter, and none of the extra features muddied the story or reading experience. All in all, I preferred Troubled Blood’s core mystery to Lethal White’s.
The problem was everything else.