Five Notes with Spoilers after a first viewing of the BBC1 adaptations of Robert Galbraith’s Cuckoo’s Calling:

(a) Rowling made two big mistakes in the first Cormoran Strike novel which she cleans up in the adaptation for the little screen. The two great Flints of the first mystery were the CCTV film gaffe about the two men running together away from the scene and the murderer keeping Rochelle’s mobile phone. Her superstar editor should have been fired for those two mistakes; she fixes it for the BBC1 audience. Whether the change is canonical or not given the many differences in the two stories will be the subject of later conversation.

(b) She ‘cleans up’ the outrageously gay Guy Some character, who is a comic caricature akin in degree to Fagin the Jew in the published original, but at least if no longer overtly gay he is still black on teevee. The deadly Shanker, in contrast, becomes something like an IRA bomber-elf in appearance — a well trimmed auburn beard? — rather than a gangly London street thug [“Tattoos covered his wrist, knucles, and neck,” “gaunt and pale, his head was shaven, a few freckles were scattered across a broad nose and his mouth was wide and thick-lipped,” Career, p. 126]. Shanker doesn’t appear in person until Career in the books and is well worth the wait. Mixed race and a walking human example of spontaneous combustion, he answers to no law or principle beyond his advantage and visceral loyalties. This guy? He’s short enough next to Burke’s already diminutive Strike to qualify as a leprechaun side-kick and looks nothing like Shanker as described in Career.

(c) I may have missed it but they don’t seem to have ever shared with the teevee audience that John Bristow visited Lula’s apartment the day of the murder. Learning that critical information only at the reveal breaks one of the ironclad rules that Rowling always highlights about giving the reader/audience a fair chance (what we’re told, by Bristow, is that he was home watching movies with mum the night of the murder, his alibi, and she does not contradict him). That they cut out Strike’s “bat shit insane” line in the office finale and his recitation of Tennyson’s Ulysses in hospital were also major disappointments. [Ah, Bristow does mention in his first meeting with Strike that he saw Lula the morning of her death. I’ll have to check to see if he says it was in her penthouse home…] [Read more…]

Episode One Can be Viewed Here.

My first thoughts on the Cuckoo’s Calling adaptation are posted here.

Posted on YouTube by a BBC1 viewer in Iraq. View them while they last.

‘Silkworm’ trailer and opening minutes of that adaptation can be found after the jump.

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Watch it while you can!

The broadcasting of the BBC1 adaptation of Robert Galbraith’s The Cuckoo’s Calling the past two nights with the finale this weekend has resulted in a flurry of press coverage to include a revealing interview with J. K. Rowling, the author reality behind the ‘Galbraith’ pseudonym.

For a positive review of the series’ first episodes, click here for Episode 1 and here for Episode 2. For a reviewer who has not read the book trying to figure out whodunnit (and unknowingly sharing with us who have read the books but cannot watch the teevee shows the points of departure from the original), click here for Episode 1 and here for Episode 2.

We have confrmation from the Leaky Cauldron that the Robert-Galbraith.com website we’ve been discussing the last two days (see here and here) is in fact “new.” [It claims there are “a couple of hidden links;” I found one under the Career of Evil script but it only went to the teevee page link that could be found on the page header.] There are old links, as I pointed out yesterday, some going back two years, and the copy of Every Man in His Humour may not be a pointer to Lethal White (it is quoted five times in the Silkworm chapter epigraphs). But that chart of a business chain of command with Robin as PA to a CEO with a scandalous past is certainly fresh.

A new thought. Could this be the Personal Assistant position Robin turned down in Cuckoo’s Calling to stay on at Strike’s? In his send-off to her then he said he imagined her working for a rich CEO in a swank office. Perhaps she refuses to go back to being his junior partner (or he won’t have her back after her decisions at the end of Career counter his direction which led him to fire her). No doubt, if this is the case, she will become involved with a murder case at the office and do her best to solve it on her own — or maybe with the black woman police officer we met in Career whom Rowling has said plays a larger role in Lethal White.

As interesting as all that may be, the treasure of the publicity releases was an interview with the BBC, clearly staged (the film clips from it released yesterday had full noir production effects, everything but green screen CGI and dry ice smoke, about as spontaneous and off the cuff as Japanese tea ceremony). Nonetheless, Rowling said some things that were of immediate interest to her more serious readers.

Most notably, she talked about her relationship with the “rules of the detective mystery genre: [Read more…]