The Hallmarked Man
I continue to be not very interested in the personal lives of Strike and Ellacott. I’m opening this because it seems to be the main storyline of this book, rather than the murder. There’s a writer’s technique that All Drama Stems From Miscommunication. If you want to heighten tension between two characters, who should by all rights get on well with each other, give one of them bad information about the other. Stories often spiral from there. This book relies on that trope far too much. The vast majority of the book could be whittled away with Robin and Cormoran getting a drink together - which the story goes out of its way to avoid happening - and acting like actual best friends (which I believe they are).
Robin notes in this book that she needs to be aware that her job has taken her to an odd part of society where everyone is awful. By the nature of investigating something awful, like a murder, she ends up interacting with many awful people along the way. The trick, which Robin forces herself to be aware of, is that not everyone is like that. In fact, the minority are.
This book does introduce us to some definitively dreadful people though. The agency ends up investigating the death of one person in a silver vault. (The fact that the title’s meaning was revealed so early on disappointed me a bit.) The complexity though: they were unidentifiable and the police narrowed it down to five possible people, each of whom are missing. The police investigation stopped some time ago - but why? That’s part of the mystery too.
It’s hard to know the author’s process to formulating a mystery. It’s possible that all five threads were crucial to make the tangled web, and that losing one would make the solution too quickly evident. However… five threads is a lot. I could barely hold on with all the names - and indeed neither could the characters. The author was aware of this issue: each time a name was mentioned, they’d be given a small identifier. In the software engineering world, we try to make our code as clear as possible. It should be easy to read and understand what the intent is. When it’s unclear, we try to rewrite it in a clear way. Sometimes that’s impossible. The idea is just complicated and the clean up is making it harder to read. In those cases we add human language comments, which the computer ignores. These comments are the developer throwing up their hands: I tried but I couldn’t fix this. The tags after some names in this book are the same. I don’t have a real example off the top of my head, but they’re along the lines of
“Oh gosh, I think I just realised why the guy was wearing a blue beanie,” said Robin, remembering that Micky was wearing a hat, you know, Micky from chapter eight, he has the dogs.
Speaking of dogs, whilst we’re on the topic of complexity of the story, I’m not sure at all why Strike behaved the way he does in this storyline. On many occasions he had enough information to resolve that particular quandary, and did nothing except spend more of his agency’s limited time to tail people. I blame the writer for this, not Strike.
The book was, nonetheless, quite a good read. I rarely get invested enough in a book that I’m looking for opportunities to read. On a number of occasions I took the very impractical bus to work just to get an extra twenty minutes of the story. Would I recommend reading this book? Yes - notwithstanding the addendum below on the ‘ethics’. It’s a good mystery.
Was it a solvable mystery?
Maybe? The book isn’t worth reading again to find out. I didn’t figure it out this time.
On the ethics of reading a Rowling book
I’ll tell you this much: it ain’t great.
The author of this book has repeatedly turned on the queer community in very harmful ways. They’re not a nice person. Robert Galbraith shares a name with Robert Galbraith Heath, the father of conversion therapy. A wild coincidence, as Rowling insists.
The fact stands though that I find the Strike books - and on a recent re-read, the Potter books - to be very comforting to read. They’re easy to fall into and keep you going, hungrily, chapter by chapter. They’re very enjoyable to read and at this moment in my life, one of the highlights of my day, when I find some time to settle down focus on them.
I got the book from the library - drawing the line at buying it myself. I’m aware that the author still gets money; I’m told this gets capped at £6,000 per library book. I can’t believe that Rowling is still money-motivated though. They can’t possibly be.
They may find pride in the number of readers of their books: I hopefully haven’t contributed to that in an impactful way. The book is released a year ago now. I’ve missed the zeitgeist conversations around it. My mom read it ages ago, and my friends have read dozens of books since, and barely remember it to talk about.
With that all in mind, the only person I’d be punishing by not reading this book is myself. I think the series is quite good.
If this was a smaller author, then things would be different.