Many authors dream of fame, fortune, and a vast readership. An author who has all three may dream, paradoxically, of the freedom to write without them — of publishing a book that can be judged only on the quality of the prose.
That was J.K. Rowling’s motivation in publishing “The Cuckoo’s Calling” under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith in 2013. The crime novel earned enthusiastic reviews, and some readers said it seemed too skillful to be the work of a rookie. She was outted by a tweet from the wife of a lawyer who's firm represented Rowling and apparently knew that Robert Galbraith was the author of Harry Potter fame (imagine the conversations at home in that house after the tweet was tweeted!)
Acting on the tweet the Sunday Times of London, asked formally if “Robert Galbraith” was really the author of the Harry Potter series, Rowling fessed up. “I had hoped to keep this secret a little longer because being Robert Galbraith has been such a liberating experience,” she said. “It has been wonderful to publish without hype or expectation, and pure pleasure to get feedback under a different name.”
Would Rowling’s fiction be equally appealing by any other name? Despite the warm reviews, “The Cuckoo’s Calling” found only a few hundred buyers. Then Rowling’s cloak of invisibility came off — and a bestseller was born.

Because of the hype I purposefully ignored the The Cuckoo’s Calling because of this.A few weeks ago I received an e-mail with a coupon code for the e-book and thought 'what the heck?'
What the heck indeed!
I was amazed to find that it is a taut, well-written mystery that does a wonderful job of reviving an all-but-dead genre, the gumshoe detective style mastered by such giants as Hammett, Chandler, and Sayers. The characters are strikingly, efficiently drawn, the pacing neither too fast nor too slow, the leavening of real humor a pleasant surprise, and the mystery properly mysterious. The main characters -- from the victim (a supermodel named Lula -- called Cuckoo by her friends -- who is supposed to have committed suicide) to the detective and his temporary secretary-cum-sidekick, the characters show real complexity. Rarely do they behave according to type.
The negatives are few. On a couple of occasions I wanted to hit Strike over the head for not seeing something that I -- and most other readers, I assume -- could see plainly. I was also a bit annoyed when it became clear that he had solved the mystery -- but wouldn’t tell anyone. He spends the first two thirds of the book in a severe funk; his transformation as we head down the home stretch feels a bit forced. And while I loved the solution to the mystery, the psychology behind the crime -- and, even more so, to its aftermath -- still seems like a bit of a stretch to me.

Having enjoyed the first so much I immediately downloaded the second in the series which was published last month.
In The Silkworm, Strike is confronted with the petty rivalries and grand egos of a ‘‘fictional’’ London literary scene. Having published two difficult and obscene allegorical novels, troublesome author Owen Quine has gone AWOL and his wife Leonora and daughter Orlando would like Strike to bring him home.
The dowdy Leonora is concerned that Owen’s disappearance has something to do with the manuscript of his latest roman à clef featuring a cast of literary enemies in a scandalous allegory with the unappealing title Bombyx Mori. Quine’s last sighting was at a famous London restaurant having a very public row with his agent who has declared the book unpublishable.
Galbraith/Rowling is playing cryptic mind games with her readers. Bombyx Mori is the Latin moniker for the domesticated silk moth, which in its larvae stage is boiled to extract silk. The hapless silkworm, as a metaphor for the writer ‘‘who has to go through agonies to get the good stuff’’, thence burrows its way through the book, popping up in all sorts of places, including the epigrams that frame each chapter.
Contemporary London is very present, almost as a character, in this book, from the Monday morning faces on the Tube, ‘‘sagging, gaunt, braced, resigned’’, to the bustling back streets of Soho and Covent Garden in all their rain-sodden, wintry gloom. In terms of cultural tourism, Cormoran Strike may therefore well do for Denmark Street what Holmes did for Baker Street, or what Harry Potter did for Kings Cross . . .
Much of the pleasure lies in the vivid description of fictional people and real places, as well as the subtly evolving relationship between the defensive Cormoran and his ‘‘secretary’’, the beautiful Robin, who is about to be married to the manipulative Matthew. Note the moment of self-revelation when Strike considers how Robin’s engagement functions as the means ‘‘by which a thin, persistent draught is blocked up, something that might, if allowed to flow untrammelled, start to seriously disturb his comfort’’.
As with the Cuckoo's Calling, The Silkworm brings to mind the crime fiction of another, more leisurely and more literary era. In her respect for the structure of the classic detective story, and her obvious delight in its multi-layered artifice, Galbraith – aka J.K. Rowling – is evidently re-creating her own golden age of crime.
The Silkworm is indeed a joy.