Book Report

The Cuckoo's Calling

by Robert Galbraith
Jonathan Rupprecht
Lk 11 English 3 / Mr. Norbert Kalt
Priv. Johannes-Gymnasium Lahnstein

Structure
1. Introduction
2. Short summary
3. Extract from the book
4. Information about the author
5. Larger context / References to the author
6. Personal comment

1. Introduction
The novel The Cuckoo's Calling was officially written by Robert Galbraith and first
published in Great Britain in April 2013 by Sphere publishing. It was three months later to
come out that the real author of the novel was actually Joanne K. Rowling, author of the
famous and successful Harry Potter-series who wrote the book under the pseudonym of
Robert Galbraith. In the following book report, however, I will always write Joanne K.
Rowling when referring to the author herself.
The Cuckoo's Calling is Rowling's first detective novel. Another detective novel by
Rowling The Silkworm which is a sequel to The Cuckoo's Calling was published in Great
Britain in July 2014.
The book deals with the death of a London supermodel, who fell from her balcony. It is not
clarified if it was a attempt of suicide or a murder, which is to be found out by detective
Cormoran Strike.
2. Short Summary
The novel takes place in London in the present time and starts with the death of the famous
model Lula Landry, who is often called The Cuckoo by friends, fell from the balcony of her
apartment Although it is assumed that she had committed suicide her adopted brother John
Bristow does not think of it as suicide and calls private detective Cormoran Strike to find out
who murdered his sister. Detective Cormoran Strike is a war veteran who wears a
prosthetic leg and is not very happy with his life. However, in the first chapter Strike meets
the young woman Robin Venetia Ellacott who was sent to his office to work as a temporary
secretary for him. Although he cannot really afford this he keeps her and soon recognizes
that she might be helpful in his investigations. He interviews several witnesses of Lula's
circle of friends, family, neighbors and staff. After interviewing Rochelle Onifade, a friend of
Lula's, the witness is being murdered as well. This leads him so other investigation
attempts and when he finds out that Lula, who was adopted by her family, made research
on her biological father the case stands in a whole new light.

3. Extract from page 10 of the Prologue

[...] Male eyes lingered on her as she picked her way through the roadworks at the top of
Oxford Street, consulting a piece of paper in her right hand. Robin was, by any standards, a
pretty girl; tall and curvaceous, with long strawberry-blonde hair that rippled as she strode
briskly along, the chill air adding colour to her pale cheeks. This was the first day of a weeklong secretarial-assignment. She had been temping ever since coming to live with Matthew
in London, though not for much longer; she had what she termed 'proper' interviews lined
up now.
The most challenging part of these uninspiring piecemeal jobs was often finding the
offices. London, after the small town in Yorkshire she had left, felt vast, complex and
impenetrable. Matthew had told her not to walk around with her nose in an A-Z, which
would make her look like a tourist and render her vulnerable; she therefore relied, as often
as not, on poorly hand-drawn maps that somebody at the tempting agency had made for
her. She was not convinced that this made her look more like a native-born Londoner.
[]
She found it almost accidentally, following a narrow alleyway called Denmark Place
out into a short street full of colourful shopfronts: windows full of guitars, keyboards and
every kind of musical ephemera. Red and white barricades surrounded another open hole
in the road, and workmen in fluorescent jackets greeted her with early-morning wolfwhistles, which Robin pretended not to hear.
She consulted her watch. Having allowed her usual margin of time getting lost, she
was a quarter of an hour early. The non-descript black-painted doorway of the office she
sought stood to the left of the 12 Bar Caf; the name of the occupant of the office was
written on a scrappy piece of lined paper Sellotaped beside the buzzer for the second
floor .On an ordinary day, without the brand-new ring glittering upon her finger, she might
have found this off-putting; today, however, the dirty paper and the peeling paint on the
door were, like the tramps, from last night, mere picturesque details on the backdrop of her
grand romance. She checked her watch again (the sapphire glittered and her heart leapt,
she would watch that stone glitter all the rest of her life), then decided, in a burst of
euphoria, to go up early and show herself keen for a job that did not matter in the slightest.
She had just reached for the bell when the black door flew open from the inside, and a
woman burst out on to the street. For one strangely static second the two of them looked
directly into each others eyes, as each braced to withstand a collision. []
The name on the paper beside the outside buzzer was engraved on the glass panel:
C. B. Strike, and, underneath it, the words Private Detective.
Robin stood quite still, with her mouth slightly open, experiencing a moment of
wonder that nobody who knew her could have understood. She had never confided in a

solitary human being (even Matthew) her lifelong, secret, childish ambition. For this to
happen today, of all days! It felt like a wink from God (and this too she somehow connected
with the magic of the day; with Matthew, and the ring; even though, properly considered,
they had no connection at all).
Savouring the moment, she approached the engraved door very slowly. She stretched
out her left hand (sapphire dark, now, in this dim light) towards the handle; but before she
had touched it, the glass door too flew open.
This time, there was no near-miss. Sixteen unseeing stone of dishevelled male
slammed into her; Robin was knocked off her feet and catapulted backwards, handbag
flying, arms windmilling, towards the void beyond the lethal staircase."
In this extract from the very beginning of the novel J. K. Rowling introduces the character
Robin (as well as Cormoran Strike) as she describes the young woman's way through
London to her new temporary job at Mr. Strike's detective office.
Rowling very skillfully draws a picture of Robin to the reader right at the beginning. She
describes her as young and beautiful and also self-conscious but also as a little clumsy and
insecure. The reader automatically sympathizes with Robin when she is trying to get
through the loud and crowded streets of London. Also the very colorful description of the
setting as well as little details and thoughts of the character help the reader to imagine this
young woman authentically. This authentic writing style with very detailed description of
characters' behavior and thoughts is very typical for Rowling.
4. Information about the author
Joanne K. Rowling was born as Joanne Rowling on the 31st of July 1965 in Yate in
Southern England. (The K. in her author name stands for the first name of her
grandmother Kathleen and was added by Rowling herself, when Bloomsbury publishing
asked her to use only her initials when the first Harry Potter book was published in 1997,
because they assumed, boys would not like to read a book that was written by a woman.)
By the age of six she already knew she wanted to become an author and also wrote her
first little book (which she finished!) around that age.
It was in 1990, on a delayed train from Manchester to London when Rowling first had the
idea of Harry Potter. Right from the beginning she knew the basic plot and that she wanted
to split the story into seven books. She began with early writing attempts right away. On the
30th of December of the same year Rowling's mother died from multiple sclerosis. Joanne
sadly never told her about her idea of Harry Potter. After going to Portugal to work there
and after having married her first husband Jorge Arantes in 1992, Joanne gave birth to her
first daughter in 1993. However, the marriage did not go well and they got divorced the
same year. Rowling went back to Great Britain, Edinburgh, where she had to live on

welfare, now being a single parent without a solid job. She even skipped meals to have
enough money to buy food for her baby. She still wrote on the first Harry Potter book:
Whenever her little daughter fell asleep, Rowling went to the cafe The Elephant House in
Edinburgh to continue writing because they would let her stay for hours with buying only
one coffee. In 1995 the first Harry Potter-novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
(AE: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone) was finished by Rowling. Right after finishing
the first book the made a contract with literature agent Christopher Little to try to find a
publisher for the first book. After several publishers had rejected the book, finally
Bloomsbury publishing published the book in 1996. Only three days after the release in
Great Britain American publisher Scholastic surprisingly bought the publishing rights for
100.000$. Such a high price had never before been payed for an unknown author's children
book J. K. Rowling became famous immediately. The second book Harry Potter and the
Chamber of Secrets was published one year later in 1998. But the big worldwide
breakthrough for Rowling was after the publishing of the third book Harry Potter and the
Prisoner of Azkaban in 1999. The other four Harry Potter-novels were published in the
following years (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, 2000, Harry Potter and the Order of
the Phoenix, 2003, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, 2005 and Harry Potter and
the Deathly Hallows, 2007).
In 2000 Rowling sold the marketing right and the film rights for Harry Potter to the company
Time Warner. Also in 2000 she became a member of the Order of British Empire.
In 2008, one year after the end of the series, 405 million Harry Potter books were sold
worldwide. Harry Potter has been translated into no less than 70 languages (even old Latin
and Greek) and has been published in over 200 countries worldwide.
In 2012 Rowling published her first book after Harry Potter, The Casual Vacancy. It was
her first novel for only adults. In 2013 The Cuckoo's Calling followed and in 2014 her
latest book The Silkworm has been published.
Joanne K. Rowling lives in Great Britain today and is considered to be one of the world's
richest people.
5. Larger context / References to the author
As often with her books, much of Joanne K. Rowling's personal life feeds into her novel.
Her own experiences in life play an important role in the process of writing a book, as she
often said. She uses her own knowledge of people and things to describe scenes and
situations in her book to the reader. But not also things or people she know may become a
part of one of her books but also a little bit of her own character.
You can recognize that in The Cuckoo's Calling in the character of Robin very much. If
you study the biography of Joanne K. Rowling, you get the she put much of her younger
self into this character, as she often did with characters in her books before.

The Cuckoo's Calling is also Rowling's first attempt on writing a detective novel and her
first book for adults to be published. Like The Casual Vacancy she wrote it to distance
herself from the children book genre and write more serious novels. She did this not for
her readers but for herself, and to show people that she can also write other things than
books for children or fantasy and fictional books.
She began to write the Cormoran Sikes series because it seemed exciting for her to write a
detective novel, not only because she likes mysterious stories but also because she loves
reading novels where you get the feeling that the author knows everything (even if he or
she is not telling the reader all of it in one book), as she said once in an interview. She
wanted to publish the book under a pseudonym because she did not want to have any
pressure on her.
A detective novel is an interactive novel the reader along with the detective character in
the novel wants to find out who committed a crime, while the author knows everything
about the crime, the murderer and other people. The Cuckoo's Call is a good example for
the detective novel and shows all significant characteristics of this genre.
6. Personal comment
My personal review to this book is not as good as I thought it would be before reading it. I
picked this book because I thought it would be interesting to read something else but Harry
Potter from this author. Of course you recognize Rowling's distinctive writing style, but I
personally don not find it very fitting for this kind of novel.
The plot of the novel is also not that exciting that you feel very involved into the story or get
very excited about the ending of the story. It is a rather simple and plain detective novel
with nothing really special about it. However, what I really liked about his book were the
specific characters in the book. Especially the main characters Cormoran Srike and Robin,
but also the minor characters (e. g. the funny Guy Som, Lula's designer) are very vividly
and authentically described by Rowling. This is also true for the descriptions of places,
scenes and situations, as you can also see in the extract I gave in assignment no. 3.
Also, although the plot as itself is not very exciting in my opinion, as I wrote before, it is very
well plotted and thought out, as Rowling's plots usually are.
After all, I think that this is certainly not one of Joanne K. Rowling's best novels but
definitely one of the better detective novels I have read so far. Although this is not my
favorite genre when it comes to novels, Rowling at least made it often fun to read this book
for me.