And you know I will not apologize –
You're mine for the taking.
I'm making a career of evil...
Blue Öyster Cult “Career of Evil”
With Career of Evil J.K. Rowling/Robert Galbraith has once again written a murder mystery in which the mystery is the least well-realised part. Arriving at work one morning – and expecting a delivery of disposable cameras for her upcoming wedding – Robin Ellacott signs for a package (addressed to her) which turns out to have gruesome contents: a severed human leg. By the time the police arrive, Cormoran Strike has assembled a list of four possible suspects – to be clear: he knows of four different men who would have the means and motive to mutilate a corpse and send bits to him; men whose names have never been mentioned in the previous books in this series; neither to us the readers or to Robin his partner. The cops immediately focus on the one suspect that Strike decides to rule out, so he and Robin begin to investigate the other three. The police confirm solid alibis for each of the suspects and warn Strike to back off; he persists; Strike alone rethinks the obscure clue that nabs the killer. This isn't like an Agatha Christie mystery – where once the evidence is assembled in the right order, the reader can either cheer or bemoan their own detective skills – there's really no way for the reader to have solved this crime, making the reading of these Cormoran Strike novels a very passive experience. Which is fine if everything beyond the mystery is interesting enough.
I thought that it was a nicely ironic setup to have a severed leg delivered as the ultimate taunt to an amputee. And it was very interesting to me that the investigation looked at the transabled community (those people whose body dysphoria compel them to want to maim or paralyse themselves in order to match up their inner and outer realities) – I was familiar with this disorder and was satisfied that Strike would rage at the notion; a man who lost his career when he lost his leg and who now struggles with his disability doesn't want to be told he's living the dream. But I don't know if the author really got into the minds of the transabled themselves: even if it's a mental illness, I would have appreciated if even one character had been able to articulate just exactly what they were feeling and hoping to achieve.
In The Cuckoo's Calling we were treated to a jaundiced view of the fashion industry, in The Silkworm the literature and publishing scenes were pilloried, and when I saw that the epigraphs in Career of Evil were all song lyrics (and all Blue Öyster Cult at that), I assumed (wrongly) that we would be examining the music industry. If Career of Evil could be said to have an overall theme, it's about misogynistic yet charismatic men who are able to commit the worst of domestic abuses and both maintain their partners' loyalties and charm their way out of criminal charges. In addition to nursing vendettas against Strike, all of the real suspects on his list (I won't count the one whose only purpose was to serve as a red herring for the police) had this same type of violent/charming personality. In addition to the implausibility of these three men being basically interchangeable, I didn't always buy the pure evil misogyny of the passages from the killer's point of view; and it may be unfair of me, but I was never unaware that these passages were written by a woman (Rowling) posing as a man (Galbraith):
Women were so petty, mean, dirty and small. Sulky bitches, the lot of them, expecting men to keep them happy. Only when they lay dead and empty in front of you did they become purified, mysterious and even wonderful. They were entirely yours then, unable to argue or struggle or leave, yours to do with whatever you liked.Again, like with the transabled, I don't think that the author really got into the mindset of the psychokiller; there's nothing subtle or interesting about a man skulking in the shadows, muttering about women and mentally referring to his partner as “It”. So here's my biggest complaint: Against the backdrop of all these awful, manipulative men, Robin is still suffering the disapproval of her fiance Matthew; he doesn't like her job or its low pay or Robin's close relationship with Strike; basically, Matthew is acting like an awful, manipulative man; it's all a matter of degree. When we learn new information about Robin's past – why she dropped out of university, why she's so keen on low paid detective work, why she feels such loyalty to Matthew – the reader can't help but look at her differently, for the exact same reasons that Robin feared Strike would look at her differently if he had known that information earlier – it's stated outright, and I had to wonder why it had to be written that way; and why does she stay with Matthew? Is Robin as passive and controlled as the women who stay with the potential killers? As much as I wouldn't want to see Robin and Strike get together, so long as Matthew remains a character in this book series, I'll think less of Robin.
More complaints: There was a lot about driving around England and encountering different accents and communities that wasn't terribly interesting to me (in addition, there was quite a bit about the special character of London itself and its customs and snobberies; hasn't this been done enough?); by compressing the in-story timeline – a year has passed over the first three books while three have passed in the real world – it feels incongruous to have the characters watching Will and Kate's royal wedding or Obama announcing the assassination of Bin Laden as though it just happened for the reader too (like with the Harry Potter series, if you want the in-story timeline to be shorter than real life, how about not mentioning real world events?); it felt like a cheat to have Strike's friend on the police force called off the case near the end and have it handed to Strike's nemesis; once again, I found the writing to be oddly formal with some unnatural “big word” choices (words that I know but that don't feel organic to the storytelling took me out of the story every time).
So, I didn't much care for the mystery, and I have a host of other complaints, and I would never stick with this series if it wasn't Rowling writing them – and even then, I don't have a fanatical loyalty to her as an author. And yet...the fact that I will probably read the next in the series when it comes out means that I can't go as low as two stars. Consider this a very weak three.
