JK Rowling’s Strikes back... in Troubled Blood

Lately, JK Rowling has been hitting the headlines due to her controversial views on certain matters, but when it comes to writing, she’s still got the Midas touch.

Most authors dream of having one successful series under their belt, but she has two – three, if you count the Harry Potter spin-off Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

For those of us who couldn’t get into their fantasy worlds, Rowling came up with something far more down to earth and gritty, although she initially tried to keep it a secret by writing under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. The result was the bestselling Cormoran Strike crime novels. Earlier this year, she released the sixth in the series, entitled The Ink Black Heart.

The TV adaptations are a little behind, however, so when the private detective and his professional partner Robin Ellacott return to our screens this week, they’ll be tackling the novel’s predecessor, Troubled Blood.

When the BBC announced it was going to make a series based on Rowling’s work, fans struggled to come up with an actor perfect for the role of Strike, a large, somewhat rumpled but attractive man who lost half of his left leg while serving with the armed forces in Afghanistan. A few eyebrows were raised when Tom Burke was handed the part, and although not fitting Rowling’s original literary description, he’s made the part his own.

Perhaps he turned to his own father, actor David Burke, for advice on portraying a literary detective – he played Dr Watson in the first series of ITV’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, opposite Jeremy Brett.

“I feel I owe a lot to my forebears, the detectives I greatly enjoy watching, or the portrayals of detectives I greatly enjoy watching,” says Burke Jr. “Sometimes one feels that they balance moral imperative with a kind of obsessive need to try to understand evil. I like the fact that Strike always seems to think he’s got the measure of the killer and why they’ve done it.”

This time, while visiting his family in Cornwall, Strike is approached by a woman who wants to know what happened to her mother. GP Margaret Bamborough vanished in 1974 after a consultation with a patient. Strike’s never tackled a cold case before, but the story intrigues him, so he decides that he and Robin (Holliday Grainger) should give it a go.

Of course, it proves to be far from straightforward, and before long, the dynamic duo realise they’re on the trail of a psychopathic serial killer. What’s more, the supposed witnesses cannot be trusted.

But what many Strike fans want to know is: will he and Robin ever move out of the ‘friend zone’ and act on the obvious attraction between them?

Well, that would be telling – and Burke isn’t giving anything away either. Instead, he’s hoping for something rather different.

“Not in real life, of course, but I’m quite a fan of catastrophe. I’d quite like things to go very, very wrong. But I don’t know – we’ll see…”

Well, with Rowling’s skills as a storyteller still firing on all cylinders, literally anything could happen.