Who dunnit?

Cormoran Strike is the latest in a long line of damaged detectives in fiction

I know it is probably blasphemy to admit this, but the first J.K. Rowling book I ever read was not written by J.K. Rowling. Sadly, The entire Harry Potter hoopla passed me by entirely, but as a dedicated fan of detective fiction, I downloaded a novel by a certain Robert Galbraith, The Cuckoo’s Calling, the moment it became available on Kindle. So, I was among the fortunate few who came to the conclusion that this was a cracking good read, long before the world discovered that Robert Galbraith was, in fact, J.K. Rowling by another name.

Since then, I have devoured the entire Galbraith oeuvre, racing through The Silkworm at record speed and then devouring the latest, Career of Evil, in one greedy gulp, even though it left me a little cold.

I have been wondering ever since why this should be so. Career of Evil was just as good a story as the other Galbraiths, there were all the requisite plot twists we look for in detective fiction, and the writing was vintage Rowling. So, why didn’t the book work for me?

Well, there is a simple, two-word answer to that: Cormoran Strike. Or rather, the lack of Cormoran Strike.

Unlike the first two books in which the strong, surly, glowering and occasionally growling presence of Strike – the private detective with a prosthetic leg and a tortured personal history – was the focal point of the story, Career of Evil shifts the focus to his female assistant, Robin Ellacott. Her backstory is compelling enough (I won’t say more for fear of spoilers!) but I struggled to care about her romantic life in quite the same way I had cared about Strike’s dysfunctional personal relationships.

I guess, what made the Galbraith series work for me was the character of Strike, the damaged but undaunted survivor of a life that only J.K. Rowling could have made up. And the fact that he was only a pale shadow of his former self in Career of Evil, left me disappointed with the book as a whole.

In a sense, of course, Strike is only the latest in a long list of tortured, damaged fictional detectives, whose shambolic personal lives serve as a counterpoint to their sharp analytical skills while investigating a crime. And whose personal failings and foibles make for the most compelling reading.

The original of the genre is, of course, the most famous of them all: Sherlock Holmes. His character has been suitably toned down recently for television and movie audiences, but Holmes, as written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was an anti-social recluse who dabbled in such drugs as cocaine, had difficulty negotiating real life, coming alive only when an insoluble problem presented itself.

Ever since Holmes established his hold on our imagination, our appetite for the damaged and tortured detective has only grown. We fell in love with P.D. James’ creation, Adam Dalgliesh, the quiet and reflective poet-detective who lost his wife and his only son in childbirth, and seemed destined to go through life alone. We couldn’t get enough of Ian Rankin’s Inspector John Rebus, the rumpled policeman teetering on the verge of alcoholism as he tried to make sense of his tangled personal life. Elizabeth George’s Thomas Lynley (the Earl of Asherton to give him his full title) tugged at our heartstrings with his doomed love life, which was blown apart just when it seemed to be coming together nicely.

One reason why Scandinavian detective fiction has established such a hold over the market is because of its damaged, off-kilter heroes. There’s Henning Mankell’s Inspector Kurt Wallander, who drinks too much, eats too much, exercises very little, has anger issues, struggles with his relationships with both his father and his daughter, but brings an incisive eye and intuitive brilliance to his job as investigator. Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole has the same sort of problems with alcohol and people, but makes up for it with his formidable analytical skills.

When it comes to dysfunctional heroes, however, there is no beating Val McDermid’s creation: Dr Tony Hill, a clinical psychologist who works as a profiler for the police and helps them hunt down serial killers. He brings his experiences of an abused childhood to the cases he deals with, which gives him a sort of special insight into the psycopaths and sociopaths that he deals with. The danger, of course, is that the line between the observer and the observed often gets very blurred indeed.

It is in this context of damaged heroes, that we have to see Cormoran Strike. Here is a man who grew up in the squalor of squats with his super-groupie mother, Leda, whose rock star father refused to have anything to do with him. He pulled himself out of poverty by his bootstraps and made a career for himself in the army. But an explosion blew up his leg and his military prospects, and Strike found himself ejected into civilian life, complete with a prosthetic leg. His career as private investigator progresses only by fits and starts, and his love life is a bit of a shambles.

Is it any wonder then that we want to hear more about Strike? That we want to see him come into his own, to cheer him on as he fights crime and finds love with equal felicity?

We like our detectives to be brilliant. But we identify with them a little more when they are also a bit damaged. 

Death Comes To Us All

But a good measure of a person’s life is how they are remembered after they are gone

When I wrote about P.D. James a fortnight ago in my column, the last thing I expected was that she would be dead in a matter of weeks. There was something about her that seemed immortal and immutable, as she produced murder mystery after murder mystery in a writing career spanning over half a century. But, in the end, death comes to us all, and it came to Phyllis Dorothy James as she reached the venerable age of 94.

The moment I heard about her passing, I pulled out the first book she had ever written (and the first P.D. James I had ever read), Cover Her Face. And there on page two was the prescient phrase: “…there was wisdom in knowing when to die with the least inconvenience to others and distress to oneself…”

I can only hope that that was the kind of death she had. But what I am quite sure of is that she will never really be dead to those of us who loved her books. And even a hundred years down the line, when someone picks up one of her titles –  Shroud for a Nightingale, Murder Room, Devices and Desires are just some of my favourites – the justly-chosen words, the sharp observations, the tautly-worked plot, the nail-biting suspense, will bring her back to life in yet another reader’s imagination.

What better legacy could an author ask for than to live on in her books? I am quite certain that James would ask for no more (or less) than to be remembered for her literary oeuvre. After all, this was a woman who was such a fan of Jane Austen that she took off from where Pride and Prejudice left off to write a murder mystery, Death Comes to Pemberley, set a few years after Darcy and Elizabeth have settled down to domestic bliss in their sprawling estate. Maybe two centuries down the line, another author can pen a similar homage, in which Adam Dalgliesh finally finds marital happiness and settles down to cosy domesticity with Cordelia Gray. (Though why wait so long; maybe Elizabeth George can get cracking on this right now!)

But as I read the many obituaries of James, and began re-reading Cover Her Face (the perfect start to reading all her books yet again, in chronological order), I began to think about the nature of death itself. In James’ books it is inevitably violent, sometimes brutal, and always shocking. There is no sugar-coating, no polite side-stepping, no euphemisms, and certainly no discreet aversion of the authorial gaze. James wants us to confront the horror of murder upfront and realize the violence – both physical and emotional – it brings in its wake. In her books, death strips away all dignity and privacy from those it visits, leaving their lives open to the vulgar, even voyeuristic, curiosity of others. In a sense, her murder victims lose more than their lives; they lose all control over how they are viewed in death and after.

And in some ways, that is a more terrible loss. All of us, at some level, want to remembered in the best possible way when we finally pass over. We want our loved ones to cherish our memory, we want our grandkids to remember us as more than a yellowing picture in a silver picture-frame. We want our lives to have had some meaning. We want our legacy to live on after us.

But the funny thing about legacy is that it can mean so many different things to different people. Some want to be remembered for the businesses they built; others for the kids they raised. Some want to live on by establishing charitable trusts in their own name; others seek absolution in leaving all their worldly belongings to the children they neglected while alive. Some want to be remembered for their kindness, others for their talent, and yet others for their power and prestige.

But, at the end of the day, none of us has control over how it ends. So, while some like P.D. James are celebrated for having led a long and fulfilling life others like Phil Hughes are mourned for having had their life cut short by cruel fate. Even as obituaries for James flooded the papers, Hughes, the Australian cricketer who died days after being hit on the head by a bouncer, was commemorated the world over with the hashtag #putoutyourbats . Everyone from cricket legends like Sachin Tendulkar and Shane Warne to ordinary folk who loved the game, posted a picture of their bats with a cap on top to pay tribute to the batsman who would forever remain 63 not out.

As I scrolled through all the tributes, my thoughts went back to a funeral I had attended only a few days before when my dear friend, Murli Deora, passed away suddenly after a brief illness. There was sadness in the air; how could it be otherwise? And yet everyone only had happy memories of Murli to share. There was the tearful old man who remembered the time the young Mayor of Bombay had helped get his son a school admission. There was a young woman, escorting her grandmother, who had had her cataract removed at one of the eye camps he organized.

Everyone I spoke to had wonderful stories about how he had touched their lives.  Maybe, when all is said and done, that is the best legacy any of us can ask for. To have touched even a single life – and left it better for your presence. And yes, to live on in the hearts that you have touched.

Sherlock or Poirot?

Which of them deserves to be crowned the best detective in fiction?

As regular readers of this column will know, I am a huge fan of detective fiction. Give me a good murder mystery and I will shut myself up for the rest of the day, gobbling it up greedily, devouring every plot twist, chewing on each red herring, and drinking in the denouement with delight. 

So you can imagine my joy when I managed to lay my grasping little hands on the latest Anthony Horowitz. The author first brought his brand of magic to the Sherlock Holmes oeuvre with House of Silk. And now he’s dealing with the period immediately after Sherlock’s famous ‘demise’ at the Reichenbach Falls. The book is called Moriarty and that is all I am willing to say at this point, lest I be accused (yet again!) of planting spoilers.

But as I galloped across the pages at breakneck speed, I began to wonder: Is Sherlock Holmes the most popular fictional detective of all time? There must be at least four if not five generations now who have been brought up marveling at his deductive skills and intuitive insights. And yet his charm – or rather the talent of his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – never seems to fade. Re-read The Hound of Baskervilles today and you will feel that familiar chill run down your spine. But if you give Holmes first place then who else would feature in the top ten?

So this Sunday morning, here’s my list of the top ten detectives in fiction. Needless to say, this is an entirely subjective list based entirely on my own preferences and, dare I say, prejudices. Feel free to compile and share your own and we’ll take a crack at making a more universal, comprehensive one!

But speaking for myself, this is how the list would go.

1) Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle): The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was what I grew up on, cutting my detective-fiction-loving teeth on an impressively bound volume of Conan Doyle’s collected works that belonged to my grandfather. When I re-read these stories on my Kindle these days, they evoke memories of sunlit afternoons in the verandah of my childhood home, the wonder I experienced as a child at a story well told, and my absolute awe at Holmes’ many exploits.

2) Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie): His giant ego, his French-accented English, his little eccentricities, his luxuriant moustache, and those ‘leetle grey cells’ all combined to make Poirot one of the most recognizable creatures of detective fiction. (Though I must confess that these days when I think Poirot, I see David Suchet!)

3) Thomas Lynley (Elizabeth George): Lord Lynley, or the 8th Earl of Asherton to give him his full title, is the archetypal tortured genius. He is estranged from his mother, his brother has a drug problem, his rash driving has crippled his closest friend, Simon St James, who is now married to Deborah, who used to be love in Lynley. If that isn’t enough stuff for psychological drama, you have Lynley’s on-off relationship with Lady Helen Clyde and his volatile partnership with his working class Detective Sergeant, Barbara Havers. All that before you even add on a murder mystery!

4) Guido Brunetti (Donna Leon): The best part of this detective series is that it is set in Venice, and the city’s beauty is apparent at every turn. Guido Brunetti is that stranger to detective fiction: a good family man. He lives life the Italian way, going home every afternoon for a three-course meal with his wife, Paola, and their kids, Raffi and Chiara. He counts on his aristocratic father-in-law, Comte Falier, for insights into Venetian high society, and by way of light reading, dips into the writings of the Roman historian, Pliny.

5) Adam Dalgliesh (P. D. James): How can you not love a detective who is also a poet? A cerebral, quiet, thoughtful, intensely private man who brings his subtle intellect to bear on the most knotted of cases and untangles them with gentlemanly ease. If that ticks all your boxes, than Dalgliesh’s your man.


6) Aurelio Zen (Michael Dibdin): He’s a bit of a mess really. With a complicated love life, an ageing mother, and a propensity to land himself in near-death encounters in various scenic parts of Italy. This is an anti-hero you find yourself rooting for despite yourself.

7) Cordelia Grey (P.D. James): She is the one character that I wish James had made more of. Grey has so much potential. Shaped by a peripatetic childhood, she has worked at all kinds of odd jobs till she ends up in a private detective agency, which she inherits when her mentor dies. If anyone deserves another outing among fictional detectives, it is Cordelia Grey. 


8) Lord Peter Wimsey (Dorothy L Sayers): The original prototype for Lord Lynley, Lord Wimsey (later the Duke of Denver) is an amateur detective, whose whimsical, slightly foolish manner, conceal a sharp, deductive mind. Think upper-class fop crossed with Hercule Poirot.

9) Miss Marple (Agatha Christie): We’ve all known someone like her. That ageing busybody who pokes her nose in everyone business, and keeps a close watch on proceedings from behind her twitching curtain. But it’s an absolute joy to read what Christie makes of her.


10) Kay Scarpetta (Patricia Cornwell): The medical examiner as detective was an unusual conceit when Cornwell came out with her first book, Post Mortem, in 1990. But what I like best about Scarpetta is her brisk, almost brusque, take-no-prisoners attitude, which in recent novels, she has transmitted to her computer genius neice, Lucy Farinelli.