This year’s Christmas telly is starting to trickle through, and we have some crime drama in among all the festive hoopla.
One such series returning this holiday season is Strike, from the pen of Robert Galbraith (aka JK Rowling).
Series five – subtitled Troubled Blood – is a four-part series and sees Tom Burke return as Cormoran Strike and Holliday Grainger as Robin.
Cormoran is visiting his family in Cornwall when he’s approached by a woman asking for help finding her mother, Margot Bamborough, who went missing under mysterious circumstances in 1974.
Strike’s never tackled a cold case, before let alone one 40 years old, but despite the slim chance of success he’s intrigued and takes it on, adding to the long list of cases that he and his partner in the agency Robin Ellacott are currently working on. And Robin herself is also juggling a messy divorce and unwanted male attention, as well as battling her own feelings about Strike.
As Strike and Robin investigate Margot’s disappearance, they come up against a fiendishly complex case with a psychopathic serial killer and witnesses who cannot all be trusted. They learn that even cases decades old can prove to be deadly.
Strike: Troubled Blood: Sunday 11th and Monday 12th December, 9pm, BBC One
Robert Galbraith’s private detective will return for a fifth series – subtitled Troubled Blood – and the news is that it has begun production.
Strike is visiting his family in Cornwall when he’s approached by a woman asking for help finding her mother, Margot Bamborough, who went missing under mysterious circumstances in 1974.
Strike’s never tackled a cold case, before let alone one 40 years old, but despite the slim chance of success he’s intrigued and takes it on, adding to the long list of cases that he and his partner in the agency Robin Ellacott are currently working on. And Robin herself is also juggling a messy divorce and unwanted male attention, as well as battling her own feelings about Strike.
Strike – Troubled Blood,28-01-2022,Cormoran Strike (TOM BURKE), Robin Ellacott (HOLLIDAY GRAINGER),Picture shows: Cormoran Strike (TOM BURKE), Robin Ellacott (HOLLIDAY GRAINGER) *Early Release* BEHIND THE SCENES,Bronte Film and TV Ltd,Alex Rendell
As Strike and Robin investigate Margot’s disappearance, they come up against a fiendishly complex case with leads that include tarot cards, a psychopathic serial killer and witnesses who cannot all be trusted. And they learn even cases 40 years old can prove to be deadly.
Joining Tom Burke and Holliday Grainger are Linda Bassett, Kierston Wareing, Abigail Lawrie, Anna Calder-Marshall, Fionnula Flanagan, Cherie Lunghi, Jack Greenlees, Daniel Peacock, Ruth Sheen, Syrus Lowe, Carol MacReady, Sophie Ward, Robin Askwith, Genevieve Hulme-Beaman, Christina Cole, Ian Radford, Philip Cornwell and Kenneth Cranham.
After holding out hope that this final part of the latest four-part Strike story would provide something approaching a satisfying ending, I was let down horribly.
In the end, it came down to… I’m still not entirely sure, such was the furious onslaught of odd twists and turns. There were paintings, there were boys that looked like girls and there was poor old Robin, who was thrust into yet another life or death situation.
But before the confounding denouement, like in any good procedural there were suspects to be processed.
Jimmy Knight was a no-no because, in custody, the wildly arrogant activist said that the Chiswells owed his family money after Jasper sold his father’s tools. Tools? Have you ever heard anyone murder someone for some tools? And in a crime drama?
(Chiswell’s chisel?)
Then it was on to Geraint Winn, Chiswell’s rival MP and the man who had been blackmailing him. For good reason, too – the late Freddie Chiswell, the apple of his father’s eye – did unspeakable things to Winn’s daughter, causing her to take her own life.
Winn had gone from blustering MP to drinking super-strength lager on a park bench in the space of an episode (a pretty dramatic transformation, it has to be said), but Strike called it right: Winn needed Chiswell alive to inflict as much pain and vengeance upon him as possible.
So Winn was out of the picture.
All eyes were back on the dysfunctional Chiswell family, and especially his widow Kinvara. From the moment Cormoran and Robin interviewed her, things descended into a frantic, barely conceivable ending.
Just before it did, Kinvara explained the whole Chiswell-Knight relationship. Apparently, the Chiswells and the Knights built gallows to sell to dodgy regimes (hence the secret Marappe file, which featured a Zimbabwean man). Hold on, where did gallows come from?
Then there were horses (horses?), paintings of horses (say what now?), and the bones of horses (okaaaaay then). In an eye-widenening explanation, slimy old Rafe Chiswell was revealed to have been having an affair with his step-mother, all because he wanted an expensive painting that no one else in the family knew was expensive.
His psychopathic tendencies began when he was a child, when he had long hair and was mistaken for a girl. One of the people who had mistaken his gender was poor Billy Knight, who saw what he thought was a girl burying the bones of Kinvara’s favourite horse – bones that he thought were human bones. This, of course, had tormented Billy for the rest of his life.
Stop me if this is getting too ridiculous.
There was one final confrontation between Rafe and Robin, who was suckered in going to meet him on a houseboat. Although exactly why he summoned her is anyone’s guess, because all he had to do was do a runner and with his connections and wealth he’d have been in the clear. The scene existed seemingly and purely for Rafe to recount and confirm his role in the whole mixed-up, convoluted and very strange tale.
He didn’t get very far.
So this ending was about as confounding and ridiculous as they came, but throughout there was at least some interesting character development. We’ve seen Robin and Matthew’s relationship go by the wayside, and Cormoran’s romance with Lorelei go the same way, albeit for different reasons.
In this episode, we got to learn more about why Cormoran is so reticent to let anyone close to him emotionally. His glacial ex Charlotte popped up out of nowhere again (we saw her briefly in episode two), and featured in another strange scene – if you think the chemistry between Cormoran and Robin doesn’t feel quite believable, then Cormoran and Charlotte look about as well suited to each other as a vegetarian and a leg of lamb.
Charlotte, in no uncertain terms, told Cormoran she wanted him back (she’s pregnant with twins, but by who? And why didn’t she want to be with the father of her children?). Cormoran told her to fuck off.
It was a strange interlude in a strange series.
We finished with Cormoran and Robin going their separate ways after a job well done – Cormoran back to his dingy Soho apartment, and Robin to her new, post-Matthew home. At one point they seemed destined to get together, but as the series finished there relationship felt more like a deep freiendship.
That has been the core of this series – both of their emotional lives, with others and with each other – and that has been the most satisfying element of the story. But there’s a problem there: if you’re saying that the two main characters’ personal lives become more interesting than the central case itself, something is wrong.
However, all the being said, Cormoran and Robin are very watchable and likeable characters. We just need a case that’s as watchable and interesting.
I got really annoyed with myself at the end of this third episode of the fourth Strike story.
Regular readers will know that I find Strike only mildly diverting, and the will-they-won’t-they relationship between Cormoran and Robin not only hard to swallow but also such a hackneyed, well-worn device.
And yet…
When the moment finally came for Robin and Matthew’s marriage to fall apart spectacularly (she had found a friend’s piece of jewellery on the bedroom floor… so it was Matthew who played away before Robin did), I really felt myself emotionally connect, perhaps even for the first time during Strike.
As Robin courageously decided enough was enough – Matthew threatened to get nasty – she collapsed into the back of a cab and then collapsed into a flood of tears.
As for Cormoran, he showed that when it came to love he was a bit of a coward, stringing Lorelei along until she could take no more.
It was an interesting juxtaposition – two people who are quite obviously destined to be together, now both free and single, but for differing reasons.
But what about the case?
At the end of episode two, Robin found Jasper Chiswell dead in an armchair, his face seemingly wrapped up in cellophane. A quick investigation around the scene found that residue hazed his morning glass of orange juice.
There was also a note from his wife, Kinvara, on his side table, ending their relationship.
So it was off to the Chiswell estate, where our investigators found that the family was already at war – the children did not want the widow to get the house, and argued openly and uncomfortably.
So all eyes were now on the family, who had motive and who might want to cause trouble. Judging by this scene, pretty much all of them were suspects.
(One of the children was called Torquil, which is really all you need to know.)
Also counted as a suspect was Jimmy Knight’s girlfriend Flick, who just happened to be Chiswell’s cleaner and had one of the only keys to his house. For Robin, this meant an unintentionally hilarious undercover mission, where she had to dress up as a goth and befriend Flick at a Camden hippy shop. It suddenly all went a bit Alias.
So, could Jimmy Knight and Geraint Winn still be involved? Or could Winn’s family friend Aamir Malik – who was having an illicit affair with a prominent MP and was protected by the Winns – have something to do with it?
The second instalment of this undemanding adaptation of Robert Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike series continued tonight.
After a lukewarm start, we’re getting another episode straight off the bat (perhaps because it’s a Bank Holiday), and the good news is that the intrigue deepened.
As I mentioned in yesterday’s review, there’s nothing especially wrong with Strike – its two leads are engaging and watchable and the stories are enjoyable without being too taxing, but there’s always a sense that you’ve seen it all before, especially when it comes to the central will-they-won’t-they dynamic between Cormoran and Robin.
But here we were, and our two leads were caught in a bit of a pickle – a pack of frothing dogs were after them (but no human owners? Why?). After a nifty escape – Cormoran’s leg was playing up after this bout of heavy physical activity – they settled back into the case, trying to find Billy and trying to figure out what was going on in the Chiswell family, a more dysfunctional lot you’re likely to see.
More connections were made, namely Jasper’s late son Freddie – a man who Coromoran knew well from the army. Freddie’s legacy wasn’t a stellar one and soon our two investigators found that he was involved in a shaming episode with Rhiannon Winn, the daughter of Geraint Winn, the Labour MP rival who, along with Jimmy Knight, who had been blackmailing Chiswell.
So far the story was relying on a couple of things – close calls with Billy (Cormoran finds him, gets a few drips of new information and then loses him again), and the tension of Robin stealing into the House Of Commons to either place or remove a bug.
It was all getting a bit repetitive.
But what was interesting was Cormoran’s love life. When he’s with Lorelei he seemed like a different person – brighter, happier and, weirdly, cleaner. But when she whispered that she loved him, he freaked and couldn’t respond. Soon he was back supping tinnies in his dingy flat, alone.
Perhaps he likes it like that. Perhaps he can’t bear to let anyone too close.
Or perhaps he only has eyes for another.
By the end of this episode, the blackmail plot against Chiswell had been exposed and sorted out, but there was a stunning development – when Chiswell told Cormoran and Robin that he wanted to hire them for a new case, Robin went around to the MPs posh house the following morning, only to find him dead… wrapped up in cellophane and sitting, lifelessly, in his chair.
Have the family ties and mutual loathing between the Winns and Chiswells caused Jasper Chiswell’s murder? Did Billy, who Cormoran found bleeding (stabbed?) on the street, have anything to do with it?
Whatever happens, the story has taken a turn. And that’s a welcome thing.
This fourth instalment of Robert Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike series (yes, it’s JK Rowling in disguise) is a welcome tonic, not least because we’re getting some actual new primetime drama on our main channels once again.
And it’s also good news because, despite its flaws and cliches, you just can’t beat settling down on a Sunday night to watch an easy-going, male-female detective drama like Strike.
At the end of the two-part Career Of Evil last year, Robin (Holliday Grainger) was about to get married to rubbish Matthew, even though there was a will-they-won’t-they scenario going on with Cormoran. She had also been through quite a traumatic case, which caused her PTSD to flare up again.
We see her in this opening episode dealing with the consequences of all of those decisions – marriage to Matthew, the PTSD, and her feelings for Cormoran.
This is the axis on which this new four-part story continues to swivel on (yes, four-part – an increase on previous years), and my, doesn’t it just – for every segment of procedural action, there are flashbacks to Robin’s honeymoon (which signifies the moment that she knew she had made a mistake in marrying Matthew… although, to be fair, you could argue she had made up her mind way before then) and longing looks towards Cormoran for some reciprocation of feeling.
So what’s changed since we last checked in with these two? Well, there’s a new secretary at the agency (who doesn’t last long) and Cormoran has a new girlfriend, a terrifically sassy woman by the name of Lorelei (Natalie Gumede), which doesn’t help Robin’s complicated feelings towards her boss.
And, of course, there’s a new case. A distressed, disturbed man with blood on his hands (literally) – Billy Knight – confronts Strike and Robin at the office, speaking in paranoid whispers about the murder of a young girl during his youth. Is he telling the truth? Is he deluded and psychotic? Is he telling the truth? After he runs off into the night, Cormoran – somewhat hastily perhaps – feels inclined to help this young, lost, mentally disturbed man.
Some digging reveals that this man is connected via his brother Jimmy to a radical far-left organisation.
And then another strand – an MP named Jasper Chiswell (Robert Glenister) wants to hire Strike because the Knight brothers and their organisation, and a rival MP, are blackmailing him, but he refuses to tell Strike why.
Soon, Robin – who’s still battling severe PTSD – is going undercover at the House Of Commons to see what she can find out. There waiting for her is the dysfunctional Chiswell family – black sheep Rafe, put-upon daughter Izzy and young wife Kinvara.
So Strike takes on both cases, eager to find out why and how they’re connected. And, soon enough, connections are made – the brothers used to work on the Chiswell estate, and when they go digging (literally) they do find the body of a young girl (wouldn’t you know it).
So it’s all set up…. for what we’re not sure. A cover-up by the Chiswells? Something more?
Whether they can string this story out for four episodes is an interesting question. But so far, even though it really does rely on those will-they-won’t-they love stories that seem to proliferate PI shows, there never seems to be anything new or fresh here. That’s not to say it isn’t enjoyable, because it is, but only up to a point.
The story is this: When Billy, a troubled young man, comes to private eye Cormoran Strike’s office to ask for his help investigating a crime he thinks he witnessed as a child, Strike is left deeply unsettled. While Billy is obviously mentally distressed, and cannot remember many concrete details, there is something sincere about him and his story. But before Strike can question him further, Billy bolts from his office in a panic.
Trying to get to the bottom of Billy’s story, Strike and Robin Ellacott – once his assistant, now a partner in the agency – set off on a twisting trail that leads them through the backstreets of London, into a secretive inner sanctum within Parliament, and to a beautiful but sinister manor house deep in the countryside.
And during this labyrinthine investigation, Strike’s own life is far from straightforward: his newfound fame as a private eye means he can no longer operate behind the scenes as he once did. Plus, his relationship with his former assistant is more fraught than it ever has been – Robin is now invaluable to Strike in the business, but their personal relationship is much, much more tricky than that.
Strike: Lethal White: Sunday 30th August, 9pm, BBC One
There’s a new batch of Cormoran Strike episodes on the way.
Strike: Lethal White is the fourth instalment in the series based on the Robert Galbraith (JK Rowling) novels and will air in 2020.
Once again, Lethal White will feature Tom Burke and Holliday Grainger (as Robin Ellacott)and supporting actors include Robert Glenister, while Natasha O’Keeffe and Kerr Logan also return as Strike’s ex-girlfriend and Robin’s fiancé respectively.
In the grips of psychosis, a young man named Billy Knight (Joseph Quinn) arrives in private detective Cormoran Strike’s (Tom Burke) office telling the story of a child he saw strangled many years ago. Strike is simultaneously hired by government minister Jasper Chiswell (Robert Glenister) to investigate Billy’s brother, Jimmy Knight (Nick Blood), who is blackmailing him. As Strike and his partner Robin work to determine how the cases might be connected, Robin goes undercover in the House of Commons.
However, Robin’s private life is unravelling as her relationship with Matthew (Kerr Logan) feels the full strain of her commitment to Strike and her work. At the same time, Strike has his own issues, a girlfriend who confesses she loves him and his complicated ex Charlotte (Natasha O’Keeffe) who is pregnant and back in the frame.
There was much frothing of the mouth when it was announced that the BBC was to adapt Robert ‘JK Rowling’ Galbraith’s best-selling Cormoran Strike novels for TV and through eight episodes and the first three of Rowling’s Strike novels, we were introduced to a comfortingly familiar lone detective (played by Tom Burke) and his assistant Robin (Holliday Grainger). They got better as the episodes ticked by, and the hope was that the BBC would produce more of them.
The good news is that there will be more on the way.
Rowling’s latest Strike novel – Lethal White – is on its way, as is a four-part adaptation.
In Lethal White, when Billy, a troubled young man, comes to private eye Cormoran Strike’s office to ask for his help investigating a crime he thinks he witnessed as a child, Strike is left deeply unsettled. While Billy is obviously mentally distressed and cannot remember many concrete details, there is something sincere about him and his story. Strike and Robin set off on a twisting trail that leads them through the backstreets of London, into a secretive inner sanctum within Parliament and to a beautiful but sinister manor house deep in the countryside.
So in the final Strike story – for some time, at least – we saw that Robin had been sent a severed leg in the post. Strike immediately thought of three suspects that could be behind such a personal attack: Noel Brockbank, an ex-major who had been accused of abusing his daughter, Britney, and someone Cormoran had investigated when he was in the army; some guy called Donald Laing, and ex-squaddie who had been convicted of abusing his wife and child by Cormoran and sent down; and Jeff Whittaker, his mum’s old flame and who had been suspected of pushing her to suicide. The stakes were upped considerably when a young teen linked to Strike was found murdered. He was being framed for something and taunted from afar. But by who? Continue reading Review: Strike – Career Of Evil (S1 E2/2), Sunday 4th March, BBC One→
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