Review | J.K. Rowling channels Dickens for latest Galbraith outing, Lethal White, a gripping romp of a read

Lethal White
By Robert Galbraith

Robert Galbraith is the pen-name J.K. Rowling chose to write under for her first crime novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling (2013) – a title indebted to a poem by 19th-century English writer Christina Rossetti. It’s not hard to understand the allure of anonymity for the world’s most famous living author. As well as escaping the shadow of Harry Potter, Rowling was trying her hand at a new and distinctly adult genre. One wonders, too, if she was seduced by the prospect of seeing if her work could stand on its own two feet – or in the case of Cormoran Strike, her war-wounded new detective hero, one fleshly foot and one prosthetic.

If this latter were the intention, then there were flaws in the plan. Galbraith refused all offers for interviews, including my own, something almost unheard of for a debut novelist. She (let’s keep to that pronoun) was also lent the backing of a major publisher and one of crime writing’s best editors.

We will never know if Galbraith and Strike could have made it on their own. Any hope of prolonged secrecy was quickly dashed by a loose-tongued acquaintance and an investigative journalist who apparently subjected Galbraith’s prose to a computer program that found striking similarities with Rowling’s work.

Rowling’s name ensured mass sales, two further books, a television adaptation and now Lethal White, part four of Strike’s London-based investigations.

The first thing you notice about the hardback is its sheer heft. Strike, like Potter, has expanded with time – by more than 200 pages from his debut. This is fair enough. Any ongoing series entails ever-increasing backstory: here, revolving around the simmering romance between Strike and his regular partner in crime solving, Robin. What prevents it boiling over is established on page one: Robin’s wedding (a white but not lethal one) to the handsome, ambitious but petulantly oversensitive Matthew.