Stephanie Jones: Book Review - The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith

Robert Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike may be the most colourful protagonist to emerge in crime fiction in several years. Before much of Strike’s second literary outing, The Silkworm, has elapsed, a picture has formed of a man accustomed to pushing himself past his physical limits – in matters of consumption and vice rather than exercise, that is – who favours a full-English diet and possesses a “boxer’s broad nose and thick surly brows”.

The son of a rock star who formerly served in the Special Investigation Branch and the plainclothes wing of the Royal Military Police, Strike is accompanied by a prosthetic lower right leg, his difficulties with which become intrinsic to the plot when, later in the game, he is called upon to give pursuit.

Handily, he has at his right hand his underpaid young assistant, Robin, who proved herself a crucial asset during the action of the first Galbraith/Strike novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling, which took place mere months before that of The Silkworm. Strike’s circumstances have improved markedly since those penurious days, with his resolution of a high-profile death prompting a run on his professional services that afforded more felicitous accommodation than his office, where he had been sleeping since his break-up with a mercurial woman who hangs about The Silkworm like a spectre.

On that note, neither Strike’s history with the troubled Caroline nor Robin’s relationship with her fiancé Matthew, who is jealous of the pull Strike and his business have on his beloved, are essential to the plot, but they add richness and depth to a novel that on story alone would be a triumph.

Immersed as Robert Galbraith (the crime-writing alter ego of Harry Potter creator J K Rowling) has been in the literary world for some years now, it follows that writers, editors, agents and publishers would be the principal folk of The Silkworm, a title that references a fictional book at the heart of the story. Bombyx Mori is the Latin name for a silkworm, and the problem with the book is that while it purports to be a product of imagination, its writer Owen Quine has filled it with thinly disguised real people in his orbit and represented them in offensive and degrading ways.

It is a recipe not just for libel but murder. When Strike is asked by Quine’s wife to find the newly missing writer, and a brief investigation uncovers his gruesomely violated corpse, Strike must examine a shortlist of suspects to determine who among the collectively aggrieved had the greatest motive, means and opportunity, not to mention the stomach to carry out such a killing.

The sum of a fine premise and stellar plotting and character-making is a whodunit with the precision and weight of a fleshier Agatha Christie novel. Though unmistakably a work of crime fiction, The Silkworm is far from formulaic thanks to the unusual chi of Strike, whom Galbraith imbues with considerable charisma despite the handicap of having only text to work with. It’s a story I would love to see adapted to a screen medium, to meet Strike in a new way and enjoy his modestly courageous, mesmeric adventure all over again.