Of "Maternal Instincts," Romantic Heroes, & Shakespearean Villainy

        I would first like to thank Louise for inviting me to share my thoughts about the final chapters (52-62) of Career of Evil, which I believe are some of the most consequential to the Strike & Ellacott series. Robin is injured and fired from her dream career as a private investigator. Strike catches a modern-day Jack the Ripper and saves the agency from utter ruin. Robin and Matthew begin their ill-fated marriage. In this post I’d like to call attention to three particular moments that are small in themselves but also, I think, important to the broader themes of the series: the first is Strike’s epiphany in chapter 52; next, the moment that Shanker comes crashing through the door of Alyssa Vincent’s flat in chapter 54; and finally, Matthew “borrowing” Robin’s mobile in chapter 57.  

        As I’ve said on a number of occasions, I love when “Strike goes Sherlock” – when the clues in the case snap into place in his mind and he lays his trap for the killer. For me it’s reminiscent of that passage from Shakespeare’s Henry V which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was fond of quoting as Sherlock & Watson pursued their prey: “The game's afoot: / Follow your spirit, and upon this charge / Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’” My pace quickens whenever I come to this point in a Strike & Ellacott novel. But in Career of Evil there’s added reasons for us to sit-up and take notice as Strike hears the woman call for her little boy outside of the hospital and watches as she drops a bunch of daffodils on the pavement. The flowers may trigger his memory of sea holly, but it’s also the little boy’s name, Ricky, which recalls Laing’s friend Ritchie or Dickie who had provided him with crucial alibis. Beyond this, however, is the much more important point that it is through the act of aiding a distressed mother that leads to his sudden insight. Strike, who’s mother loved him whatever her lifestyle and shortcomings, will now outwit the Shacklewell Ripper, whose mother did not love him, thanks to his unthinking but instinctive act of thoughtfulness toward a mother who is never named. It’s not only a point worth celebrating but worth remembering, as it wonderfully parallels a later moment in The Ink Black Heart when Strike will finally gain a true insight into Charlotte’s character and her indifference to her children’s and step-children’s fate with Jago. There are of course parallels here in the third novel as well, particularly with Shanker aiding Robin as they try to save Alyssa’s daughters. 

        Which brings me to chapter 54. As I read it, Shanker’s moment of heroism is taken straight out of a fairy tale or heroic western, emulating as it does the triumphant moment when the knight or cowboy comes charging in to defeat the evil ogre and rescue the damsel. The passage deserves to be quoted at length: 

And then came a splintering crash of wood that was the front door caving in. Brockbank released Robin and whirled around to see Shanker hurtling into the room, knife to the fore. 

“Don’t stab him!” gasped Robin, clutching her forearm. 

The six people crammed into the small bare box of a room froze. Then a thin voice piped up, desperate, trembling, but liberated at last by the presence of a scarred, gold-toothed man whose tattooed knuckles were tight around a knife. 

“He done it to me! He done it to me, Mum, he did! He done it to me!” 

 Shanker, for all of his forbidding and deadly appearance, has liberated Angel. In a novel that has the reader cringing at every mention of a knife being brandished, this is a welcome and yet bold reversal by the author as Shanker threatens to emasculate Brockbank. For the description of Shanker at this moment continues as we then read – and it’s so exquisitely, simultaneously heroic and comical that it must not to be missed: 

“You’re all right, babes,” Shanker said to Angel, his free hand shielding her, his gold tooth glinting in the sun falling slowly behind the houses opposite. “’E ain’t gonna do that no more. You fuckin’ nonce,” he breathed into Brockbank’s face. “I’d like to skin ya.”

Ludicrously yet truly, Shanker here is a romantic hero “glinting in the sun falling slowly behind the houses opposite.” Only it’s not his knightly armor atop his vaulting steed that is gleaming in the light of the fading sun, but his gold tooth beneath “a deep scar [running] from the middle of his upper lip towards his cheekbone.” Is this a passage modeled on Sir Walter Scott or a parody of the English Romance tradition? 

        If Shanker crashing to the rescue is drawn from Romance, then Matthew’s behavior resembles that of a Dickensian or Shakespearean villain. It comprises only about a page at the end of chapter 57, but it marks the first and (as far as I can recall) only time that we encounter Matthew’s mental processes for an extended period of time without the interruption or perspective of another character, particularly Robin but also Strike. It’s somewhat comparable to a dramatic soliloquy, a moment in a play when the audience gains privileged access to the thoughts of a character on stage as they lay bare the motives for their actions. The passage is too long to quote here but I recommend that you reread it. It’s particularly illuminating with regard to Matthew’s insecurities about Strike: he calls him “the big ugly bastard” and yet finds himself “paralyzed with indecision” when Strike rings Robin’s phone again because he, Matthew, “dared not answer on Robin’s behalf or tell Strike to fuck off.” He instead (and here I simply cannot resist another comparison with the bold, active, and direct, heroism of Shanker who faced an adversary far larger than himself) chooses duplicity and subterfuge. Matthew then assuages his misgivings by “turn[ing] to his handsome reflection in the mirror.” And we know that it’s only a matter of time before he finally falls from whatever meager amount of grace he had remaining in Robin’s eyes. 

To end as I began, I think that the final ten chapters of Career of Evil are consequential for the larger series – and for yet another reason. They do not provide the anticipated, tidy, and symmetrical ending that we might expect for the novel. Yes, they deliver what is minimally necessary to wrap up the case of the Shacklewell Ripper. But they are full of residual romantic tension and of uncertainty even as they advance the relationships of the principal characters and lay the groundwork for the beginning of the following story – for which Robert Galbraith’s readers would have to wait nearly three agonizing years.