MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Writing under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith, J.K. Rowling, author of the hugely successful Harry Potter series, has launched a new detective fiction series, called the Cormoran Strike series. These novels feature Cormoran Strike, an Afghan war veteran who has become a private detective in London. With the aid of his assistant Robin Ellacott, Strike solves murders. The first novel in the series, The Cuckoo’s Calling (2013), has been followed by three others, The Silkworm (2014), Career of Evil (2015), and Lethal White (2018). A BBC television limited series, Strike, based on the first three novels of the series premiered in 2017 and has been broadcast in America in 2018, as C.B. Strike.

This presentation will analyze the commonalities and differences between the Cormoran Strike detective fiction series and Rowling’s Harry Potter fantasy series. Such a comparison will show that the Harry Potter books, especially the early ones in the series, actually contain the elements characteristic of detective fiction, just as the Cormoran Strike series more obviously does. Or, put another way, the mostly positive reception gained by the Cormoran Strike series is not surprising, as Rowling already had considerable experience not just in writing novels, but in writing narratives with plots, as well as characters and descriptions, typical of detective fiction. The dissimilarities between the two series, primarily due to the lack of fantasy elements in the Cormoran Strike series, will also be explored.