→ May 28, 2014
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Aké: The Years of Childhood.

In case you missed it, my second go at projecting this year’s first round went up for Insiders on Tuesday. My next mock will go up on Tuesday, June 3rd, and I’ll have an updated ranking of the top 25 prospects in the minors this Friday. I’ll also be on Baseball Tonight tomorrow night, May 29th, at 10 pm ET.

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At the turn of the century, the rush to compile “best of the last 100 years” lists of books tended to leave a lot of postcolonial writers behind, something that the Zimbabwe International Book Fair attempted to address by assembling a list of Africa’s 100 best books of the 20th century. I saw the list not long after it was released in February of 2002, and had heard of exactly two books on the list: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which I’d already read once and subsequently re-read; and Nuruddin Farah’s Maps, the first book of his “Blood in the Sun” trilogy.

Within that broader list, the jury identified a dozen titles as the best of the best, without trying to rank any of the books, probably a thankless task given the effort required just to compile the nominations for the final hundred. The Nigerian-born author Wole Soyinka, the first native African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, made the top 100 twice, with his play Death and the King’s Horsemen appearing on the main list and his first memoir, Aké: The Years of Childhood, earning special mention in the top twelve.

Aké is the name of the town where Soyinka grew up, on the grounds of a parsonage with his mother, whom he calls “Wild Christian,” and his father the teacher, whom he calls “Essay,” as well as a nearby collection of relatives, friends/workers, and spirits. The book takes magical realism and transplants it into the realm of the autobiography – Soyinka never pauses to consider whether these memories of ghosts, spectres, or other otherworldy entities are real; they simply are. Yet the stories he remembers revolve around more mundane matters, not least of which is what on earth a family was to do with a precocious, argumentative child in a country still ruled autocratically by the local puppets of a distant white government.

The memoir, however, is a joyous one, even around the crises and tragedies and the eventual buildup to the book’s concluding chapters, where the women of Ak&ecaute; agitate for more local rights, less corruption, and lower taxation. Soyinka renders even those scenes, which always threatened to devolve into violence, humorously, through the eyes of a mischievous child watching when he shouldn’t be watching or playing rebel by delivering message between various outposts of protesters. His memories of his time in school, where the lawyering he used to stymie his parents runs up against the wall of a headmaster who’s already seen that act before, and of the town’s market, with extensive descriptions of fresh fruits and African foods of which I’d never heard, show off Soyinka’s ability to evoke colorful scenes with precise descriptions and light prose that puts the reader right on the dirt road in the middle of all the market’s vendors.

Soyinka devotes another section to his childhood addiction … to powdered baby formula, which he sneaks from the family’s pantry now that their youngest child no longer needs it, only to end up playing cat-and-mouse with his parents to avoid detection. He also offers several anecdotes on the local blend of Christianity and native traditions, such as the fellow student who tries to counter “bad juju” by repeating “S.M.O.G.” – which stands for “Save Me Oh God” but he claims is faster to say in acronym form while running from your enemies.

The one weakness of Aké is its lack of structure; it’s a collection of stories and recollections, but there’s no single narrative because the book ends while Soyinka is still a child, so we haven’t driven towards a specific goal or endpoint. That doesn’t make the book less enjoyable or less vivid, although it means it more resembles a set of interconnected short stories than a non-fiction novel. It compares favorably to my favorite memoir, Gabriel García Marquez’ Living to Tell the Tale, although GGM’s prose flowed more easily, as Soyinka’s syntax and even punctuation often threw me off (e.g., he omits a lot of commas we’d consider essential in American English). For me, Aké ranks somewhere in the middle of the seven titles I’ve read from the top twelve on that African literature list, below Things Fall Apart, A Grain of Wheat, and Nervous Conditions but above Sleepwalking Land, Chaka, and L’amour, la fantasia.

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→ May 27, 2014
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Bleak House.

My second “mock” draft for 2014 is up for Insiders today.

I’ve had mixed views on Charles Dickens over the years, loathing his work when forced to read Great Expectations and Tale of Two Cities in high school, only to enjoy The Pickwick Papers tremendously when I read it at age 34, picking up more of the wordplay and sarcasm but also benefiting from a more free-wheeling storyline. I even read abridged (Moby books) versions of at least two other Dickens novels when I was about my daughter’s age, and still remember hating Fagin – probably a reason I’ve never read the unabridged Oliver Twist to this day. My goal of completing the full list of titles on the Bloomsbury 100 forced me to decide on Dickens’ longest and most highly-regarded work, the 350,000-word Bleak House, a legal drama, soap opera, romance, and mystery all wrapped up in an overarching work of stinging social criticism.

The central plot device in Bleak House is a never-ending lawsuit in England’s Chancery Court, Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce, a case that originated as a dispute over a will that has since devolved into a nightmarish sequence of legal maneuvers designed only to rack up billable hours, with no evident progress toward a conclusion. The suit has already driven one claimant, the dotty Miss Flite, to madness, and its promise of lucre if it ever reaches a conclusion will lead other characters down that path over the course of the book. Dickens uses the lawsuit as a method of introducing a panoply of main and secondary characters, and splits the narration between his omniscient voice and the orphan Esther Summerson, who becomes a ward of John Jarndyce and companion to another of his wards, Ada Clare. Ada’s romance with her cousin Richard Carstone, and his subsequent search for an actual career, form the basis for one major plot thread, while the unknown history of Lady Dedlock, another claimant to part of the Jarndyce fortune, forms another. The latter story eventually leads to murder, a mystery that gives the novel some much-needed narrative greed just as Dickens seemed to be passing his pitch count and losing his fastball.

Dickens published the novel in monthly installments, something he did for many of his novels, which is the common explanation for his verbose prose, mostly comprising overly detailed descriptions of anything worth describing in the text. But the style also likely encouraged Dickens to craft chapters as individual episodes, moving the stories along and creating cliffhangers and twists to conclude them, so that even the modern reader won’t get too bogged down in lengthy descriptions of a stand of trees or the furniture in a sitting room. I also got the impression while reading Bleak House that the serial nature of the initial publication may have helped blunt the impact of the numerous deaths, mostly tragic (and one, Mr. Krook’s, rather comic), that occur over the course of the novel, ranging from deaths due to poverty and disease to those due to drug abuse, mania, or a broken heart.

The social criticism within Bleak House remains the book’s main selling point in modern reviews and rankings, with Daniel Burt naming it the 12th-best novel of all time in The Novel 100, tops among the Dickens novels on his list. The theme of a chasm between the haves and have-nots still resonates today, especially in the United States where the safety net is tattered and worn, but it’s somewhat obscured by the soap opera that dominates the novel’s plot. To make the story appeal to a large audience, Dickens included no end of romantic entanglements, loony side characters (some enjoyable, some just too ridiculous), and deaths and illnesses, all of which serve both to stretch the book out and to provide entertainment value. The absurd Mr. Smallweed (whose physical state seems a dead ringer for J.K. Rowling’s depictions of Lord Voldemort at the beginning of Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire), the rakish Mr. Skimpole, and the doomed Mr. Krook all have their moments of humor, often dark, but Dickens overplayed many of his other jokes, such as Mrs. Jellyby, a woman obsessed with Africa to the point of ignoring her own children – a metaphor for England and for missionaries more worried about converting African natives than feeding the local poor. (I’ve already slipped one reference to Mr. Krook into an ESPN column, and there will be more when Oregon pitcher Matt Krook is draft-eligible again in 2016.) That’s the main reason why the third quarter or so of the book began to drag, along with Dickens’ too-prolix prose, before he inserts a murder and the ensuing mystery to ratchet the tension back up in a race to the finish. Without that, finishing Bleak House would have been quite a chore.

I haven’t seen the award-winning 2005 mini-series (free for Amazon Prime members) which adapted the book into an 8½-hour serial and included in its large cast a young Carrie Mulligan (as Ada Clare), Gillian Anderson (as Lady Dedlock), and Patrick Kennedy (as Richard Carstone), but would welcome any feedback on whether it’s worth tackling.

Next up: I’m behind on reviews, having already finished Nobel Prize-winner Wole Soyinka’s memoir Aké: The Years of Childhood, and just started Attila Bartis’ Tranquility.

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→ May 24, 2014
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Saturday five, 5/24/14.

My ESPN content from the past seven days:

* My 2004 redraft, going back to that year and redoing the draft with the benefit of hindsight.
* And a companion piece looking at the 2004 first-rounders who didn’t work out.
* How the Rangers should respond to Fielder’s injury.
* My SEC tournament wrapup.
* Friday’s Klawchat.

My next mock draft goes up Tuesday, and I’ll have a pro prospect ranking update later in the week as well, because I don’t have enough going on right now.

I left Alabama a little earlier than expected, since the 3 pm game on Friday didn’t include anyone I needed to see, but I did stop by Octane in Homewood for an espresso and a bag of beans (Rwandan, since I enjoyed the Four Barrel beans from that country). The space is bigger and brighter than the Octane I visited in Atlanta, too.

And now, this week’s links, with two extra today since I went a little heavy on the vaccine topic.

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→ May 20, 2014
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Insomnium’s Shadows of a Dying Sun.

I have two new posts up for ESPN.com Insiders today – my 2004 redraft and my review of 2004 first-rounders who didn’t pan out.

Finnish melodic death metal band Insomnium have one of the broadest wingspans of any artist in that subgenre, incorporating theatrical and symphonic elements without eschewing the heaviness and rapid riffing that keep one foot firmly planted in the death-metal sphere. Their latest release, Shadows of the Dying Sun, continues that tradition and then some, veering from over-the-top extreme/speed metal to operatic tracks that you might even call death-metal ballads.

Melodic death metal generally includes two major elements: technically proficient, hook-laden guitar lines, and screamed or growled vocals. Insomnium adds many other twists to their particular flavor, with strings, pianos, acoustic guitar lines, and vocal harmonies (sung in normal voices) in choruses. It hasn’t been a straight line from the genre’s originators like Celtic Frost and Carcass, but the result is a more accessible brand of “melodeth” that should appeal to fans of everything from contemporary extreme metal to the earliest waves of speed and thrash.

Shadows of the Dying Sun starts innocuously enough with “The Primeval Dark,” a slow-building doom track that clocks in at barely over three minutes, a sign that Insomnium aren’t trying to pummel the listener with unnavigable ten-minute songs, and the song is just the teaser for the tremendous “While We Sleep,” into which it leads without a break. The lead guitar line is joined by a second axe for some parallel riffing before we get an actual sung verse, musical motifs that continue even as the song shifts tempo and direction multiple times. It’s among the most overtly listener-friendly death metal tracks I’ve ever heard: melodic, theatrical, even bombastic, and far more coherent than I’d expect from a six-minute snog of this complexity.

The abrupt tempo shifts of “While We Sleep” are a recurring musical theme for Insomnium, driving other tracks as well. “Revelation” opens with a straightforward European speed metal riff, then drops the pace by more than half for the funereal verses, picking back up in the bridge to the initial tempo, then finding the middle ground for what passes for a chorus here. “Ephemeral” is similarly catchy, an abject lesson to pop acts that try to appropriate punk or metal for commercial airplay, thanks to memorable guitar lines and a growl-along chorus that play well with the heavy rhythm lines and the rapid percussion that marks this clearly as death metal, while also playing around with timing and rhythm. Meanwhile, “Collapsing Words” dispenses with those velocity changes – the song drives in with a rapid-fire pedal-point sixteen-beat riff that evokes 1980s European speed metal and even its predecessors like Iron Maiden and Diamond Head, although it’s probably the one track that would have most benefited from a traditionally-sung vocal.

The album’s centerpiece track is the eight-minute opus “The River,” comprising several movements, including the juxtaposition of slow-changing guitar lines over blast beats, as well as an acoustic intro where lead singer Niilo Sevänen actually sings – although the lines sound more effete than he likely intended because of his accented English. The track builds from the slow intro into multiple swells of machine-gun drumming and fast-picked guitar leads, but the bridges between the choruses are major-chord interludes with clear and compelling melodies. That song and “Lose to Night,” which I’d call a ballad if I didn’t think that would be offensive to Insomnium fans, show both growth in Insommium’s songcraft and breadth in their musical interests – you don’t write this kind of song if you only listen to metal and hard rock.

There are misses here; “Black Heart Rebellion” is just a giant blast-beat, a sop to the portion of the crowd that just wants it faster and louder and more annoying, while “The Promethean Song” would have worked better at about half its 6:40 running time. Even the title track suffers from the same issue of bloat – and as the tenth song on the album, it ran into my own fatigue by the time I’d reach it on straight listens through the disc because of its length and languorous pace. That’s also a function of the overall ambition of Shadows of a Dying Sun, which, at 70 minutes, is almost double the length of some recent indie releases, and has appropriately high musical aspirations without forgoing Insomnium’s sense of melody and even commercial appeal. It’s the best new melodeth album since Carcass’ Surgical Steel, although with Arch Enemy and At the Gates coming out with new albums soon, it’ll be an epic summer for fans of the genre.

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→ May 19, 2014
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Odludek.

Jimi Goodwin, lead singer and bassist for the popular British rock band Doves, recently released his first solo album, Odludek, while the group is on an indefinite hiatus. I was a longtime Doves fan for their eclectic approach to each album, use of heavily textured music that often recalled their brief time as an electronic act called Sub Sub, including the landmark The Last Broadcast, which hit #1 in the UK and produced a top ten hit in “There Goes the Fear.” Doves never found much traction in the U.S. – Broadcast peaked at #83 here and none of their singles charted – but that hasn’t deterred Goodwin from making a Doves-like album, even weirder on some songs than the most experimental Doves material, but far less even than his old band’s best releases.

Goodwin crosses many genres on Odludek, from ’70s funk-inflected tracks like the opener “Terracotta Warrior” to the electronic influences of “Live Like a River.” Oddly enough, however, the strongest moments on Odludek are when Goodwin goes acoustic, borrowing from the same source material that drives artists like Mumford and Sons and even underlies the sanitized Irish folk songs of Celtic Woman. “Hope,” “Oh Whiskey,” and the brilliant closer “Panic Tree” are all built on familiar acoustic guitar rhythms, each bringing a different twist to the format to avoid the “I’ve heard this before” feeling of the various knockoff acts sailing in the wake of Mumford’s first album (and I’d include their second album in that category). “Oh Whiskey” comes along like a drinking song, a plea to a different kind of spirit to bring him patience or empathy – but not the blues. “Hope” finds Goodwin singing beyond his range to begin the song, but gains intensity with the deep harmonies behind the chorus reminiscent of Negro spirituals. “Panic Tree” tells a family history of anxiety via the metaphor of, yes, a tree growing in the yard for generations, a serious subject treated with humor over music that sounds like it’s lifted from a nursery rhyme or a Raffi album.

The common thread tying the album together is a sense of musical exploration, grafting sounds on to each other even though the immediate connection isn’t apparent. That supports some of the weaker tracks where Goodwin cranks up the distortion and the tempo, as on “Terracotta Warrior,” which has horn-heavy breaks in between the heavily strummed guitar lines. Unfortunately Goodwin’s songwriting suffers as he tries to ramp up the complexity; “Lonely at the Drop,” an acoustic/electric track with lyrics that offer a bitter attack on Christianity, opens with a guitar riff we’ve heard a thousand times before and moves like a car that’s driving without a destination. “Man V Dingo,” the album’s most eccentric track, rides a dissonant riff too long – a tritone just begs for a resolution at some point – and comes across like an attempt to mimic freeform jazz in a rock format. The slowest tracks, “Keep My Soul in Song” and “Didsbury Girl,” pass by without making any impact, musical neutrinos that don’t showcase any melody or technical skill.

Doves may not return to the studio any time soon – the band hasn’t officially broken up, but it sounds like it’ll be a while before we get new material, if at all – and I was hoping a great Goodwin solo album would tide me over, but Odludek falls short of the mark. While the three strong acoustic tracks show off his sense of melody and make better use of his wry lyrical voice, the remainder of the album doesn’t have the hooks to justify the experimentation, and the lack of consistency across the ten tracks only seems to emphasize its lack of strong melodic elements.

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I won’t give Courtney Barnett’s The Double Ep: A Sea of Split Peas a full review, but there are two standout tracks on the album, which features brilliant (if weird) lyrics set to some pretty simple music. Most of the time Barnett seems to be sing-talking over her guitar, but “Avant Gardener” (available free on amazon right now) and “History Eraser” have actual melodies to go along with the insane stories she’s telling. “Avant Gardener” turns a routine afternoon going outside, picking weeds and preparing to plant a garden, into an asthma attack that sends her to the hospital; on the way she observes that the parademic “thinks I’m clever because I play guitar/I think she’s clever ’cause she stops people dying.” Meanwhile, “History Eraser” tells of a drunken evening in a style that mimics the meandering, stream-of-consciousness thinking of an inebriated person, but with tons of wordplay, assonance, and allusions that you’d have a hard time conceiving if you were sloshed. She’s one to watch if those two songs are any indicator of what she’s capable of writing.

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→ May 17, 2014
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Saturday five, 5/17/14.

My first mock draft for 2014 – that is, my projection of how the 27 picks of the first round will go – went up on Thursday, and I held my regular Klawchat that day as well. The next mock will go up after next week’s college conference tournaments; I’ll be at the SEC tournament in Hoover from Wednesday to Friday, if any of you choose to make that trip.

A friend of mine in the baseball world recommended the KettlePizza, a kit that sits on top of a kettle-style charcoal grill to turn it into a wood-burning pizza oven. He swears by it, saying he can get the internal temperature up to 800 degrees, which is enough for traditional Neapolitan-style pizza (my favorite kind). Have any of you given tried one of these? I’ve mentioned it to my wife in the context of my upcoming birthday … so any comments would be great.

And now, the weekly links…

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→ May 11, 2014
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Saturday five, 5/10/14.

Sorry this is a day late – I daytripped Indiana at Penn State yesterday, which was almost 11 hours door-to-stadium-to-door. IU’s Sam Travis is a better player than I’d realized; this was my first look and he reminded me of some very good big leaguers.

My ESPN content from the past week:

* My ranking of the top 100 draft prospects for 2014. Of course, we’ve had more injury news since then, so Fedde and Finnegan would move down.
* This week’s Klawchat.

My first projection of this year’s first round will go up on Thursday, May 15th. I’ll chat that afternoon, and I’ll be on Baseball Tonight on Wednesday and Thursday this week.

I didn’t have time to do a five-of-something segment, but I’ll make it up to you with eight links, culled from five different sources:

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→ May 8, 2014
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A History of the World in 6 Glasses.

Klawchat at 1 pm ET today.

Tom Standage’s A History of the World in 6 Glasses gives a light, high-level history of six beverages that all had an impact on human history or development. I’m a big fan of four of them – beer, distilled spirits, coffee, and tea – and won’t turn down the fifth, wine. Only the last of the six Standage covers, Coca-Cola, seems out of place, both based on my personal tastes (I’ll only drink it if I have a headache and can’t have more coffee) and on its status as a thoroughly artifical beverage protected by trade secrets.

Standage has to stretch on occasion to make some of his historical connections, but in general he’s treading on safe ground, especially with beer and liquor, because their development or discovery had substantial economic impacts on the societies that consumed them. Beer was originally both a natural byproduct of grain storage and a safer alternative to water in an era when bacterial contamination was not understood; liquor, notably rum, drove international trade routes, agricultural production in the Caribbean and Latin America, and the slave trade with native kingdoms in western Africa. Wine was an essential part of the symposion, the Greek ancestor of the cocktail party, where great discussions took place in an atmosphere of convivial drinking … and probably excessive drinking, too, although Plato seems to have left that part out of his Dialogues.

Standage connects coffee to the academic cafe culture of western Europe, particularly London, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the coffee was bad, prepared in large pots in advance and reheated to order, but these cafes, each of which was devoted to a specific subject or area, hosted conversations that led to great advances in areas from science to philosophy. Tea, like coffee, brought medical benefits, especially since water had to be boiled to make the beverage, and became the drink of choice in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a shift that led to the British colonization and development of India (for their own purposes, of course, and only after they’d wiped out the subcontinent’s native textile industry) … as well as playing a role in our own revolution against the crown.

Where Standage lost the plot a little was with his shift to an overtly commercial product, Coca-Cola, which was the product of a handful of accidents and experiments and did, as the legend has it, once contain cocaine – the name comes from its onetime use of both the coca plant and the kola nut (a natural source of caffeine) as flavoring agents. The Coca-Cola company did play a role in the post-World War II trend of globalization, but its role was hardly as essential or as organic as those of the other five beverages in the book, and unlike the other drinks Standage covers, cola has no redeeming health qualities and is unhealthful even in small quantities.

A History of the World in 6 Glasses concludes with a prediction, in Standage’s epilogue, that the next beverage to direct human history will be the first one: water, with the need for clean, reliable water supplies directing political strategies and conflicts over the next century. That could have earned a larger chapter, similar to the discussion of the topic in Empires of Food, as it’s going to be a significant issue all over the world, including in the southern half of the United States. I also wish Standage had spent some time discussing the chemistry of each beverage, or more details of its production; he focuses far more on the history aspect of each drink than the scientific or culinary angles. The idea of “notes” in different beverages, widely used in discussions of wine but popping up more and more in reviews of beers, coffees, and even chocolates, derives from the differing chemical composition of the raw materials, which is usually a function of the soil and temperature where those materials grow. Those specific characteristics help drive the higher ends of the markets for each product, which in turn represents a path for coffee and cocoa farmers (and perhaps farmers of other crops) in developing countries to earn an actual living from their work, the kind of economic development that Standage discusses in a historical context in his six primary sections.

Next up: I’m about a quarter of the way through Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. I’m not sure this lawsuit is ever going to be settled.

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→ May 3, 2014
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Saturday five, 5/3/14.

My two bits of content from ESPN.com this week:

* The mishandling of Bryce Harper
* Klawchat

I’ll have an updated top 100 ranking for this year’s rule 4 draft up on Thursday, May 8th, followed by a projected first round (aka a “mock”) on the 15th.

—

Now, in keeping with the original idea for the Saturday five posts, here are five songs I’ve been listening to lately, outside of the albums I’ve been reviewing:

* The War on Drugs – “Red Eyes.” Everyone seems to love their latest album, Lost In The Dream, but after multiple listens no song has grabbed me like “Red Eyes,” which is the only track on the album that doesn’t sound like a band trying to imitate Bob Dylan. “Red Eyes” reminds me more of Lord Huron or the Head & the Heart, bands that also draw inspiration from Dylan and other folk-rock artists but without coming off as in any way derivative of their influences.

* Thumpers – “Unkinder (A Tougher Love).” Yet another heavily New Wave-inspired English synth/rock act … but the offbeat rhythm of all of the vocals, both verses and chorus, sets the song apart from the dozens of similar tracks that have been coming out of the UK over the last few years. Their debut album, Galore, came out in February.

* Broods – “Bridges.” My daughter loves this song, so here’s her review: “I like the way she sings, and the words sort of, but I mostly like the way she sings.” Works for me. For all the raves Grimes got for her 2012 album Visions, Broods mines similar high-pitched territory but with a far more pleasant vocal style. Their debut EP Broods came out in January.

* Gap Dream – “Fantastic Sam.” The song reminds me of Django Django’s last album, but with a more melancholy, hypnotic tone, and less interesting lyrics (which even my daughter picked up on). Their debut album, Shine Your Light, came out in November.

* La Sera – “Losing to the Dark.” The solo project from former Vivian Girls member Katy Goodman, La Sera put out this lead single earlier this spring, and it’s a near-perfect tranche of bright punk-pop to contrast with its downtrodden lyrics. Her third album, Hour Of The Dawn, comes out on the 13th, and it’s probably my most-anticipated album of the month.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/137953039″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_artwork=true” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

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And now, this week’s five links, heavier on science this week…

Also, two bonus links this week that may be relevant to your interests, since you’re here… My ESPN colleague Ramona Shelburne wrote an amazing, thorough story on the Donald Sterling imbroglio from inside the Clippers’ organization. Also, fellow Parks and Recreation fans will enjoy Alan Sepinwall’s post-season-six interview with Michael Schur, covering everything from the changes ahead for season seven to the evolution of the running Cones of Dunshire gag. I’m convinced part of Parks & Rec‘s success came from embracing the show’s essential nerdiness, both the eccentricity of its central characters and the writers’ willingness to make references (like Settlers of Catan) that wouldn’t normally appear in a network series aimed at a mass audience. Or maybe it’s just that they let Chris Pratt do more dead falls. Those work too.

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→ May 2, 2014
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The Cuckoo’s Calling.

J.K. Rowling published her first detective novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling, under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, apparently to see what kind of response she would get to a novel that didn’t have her name attached to it. The book received strong reviews, but barely sold anything until word leaked – or “leaked” – that Rowling was the true author, at which point it became a global best-seller, along the lines of the more modestly-reviewed The Casual Vacancy. It turns out that Rowling has quite a knack for the detective genre, crafting a legitimate hard-boiled detective story, complete with a compelling main character, along the lines of the field’s masters, just updated to a modern setting, and populated with characters and red-herring subplots you might find in a classic mystery novel too.

The detective at the heart of The Cuckoo’s Calling, Cormoran Strike, is indeed hard-boiled, a very down-on-his-luck detective, discharged from the British armed services after losing part of one leg to an IED in Afghanistan, and momentarily living in his office after breaking up with his longtime, faithless girlfriend Charlotte. Strike receives two unexpected visitors to start the novel: A new client, the brother of one of his old school chums (who died when riding his bike into a local quarry as a teenager), asking Strike to investigate the alleged suicide of his adoptive sister; and a temporary secretary, Robin, whom Strike wasn’t expecting and probably can’t afford to keep, but who takes to the work far more than either she or Strike anticipated.

The suicide in question is that of Lula Landry, a supermodel and star of newspaper gossip columns who appears to have jumped to her death from her new luxury apartment, a building also occupied by a famous film producer and his coke-addict wife, as well as an American rapper who has written several songs about Lula. Her brother, John, doesn’t believe the official verdict of suicide, and wants Strike to find the truth, suspecting two hooded black men spotted fleeing from the area of her building on CCTV footage.

The Cuckoo’s Calling brought me back to the first Hercule Poirot novel, Death on the Nile, one of Agatha Christie’s finest works because of the broad set of characters she introduced and heavy use of red-herrings, where nearly every character who didn’t commit the murder at the heart of the novel has some other secret Poirot eventually sniffs out. Rowling has also populated her book with peculiar secondary characters and suspicious suspects, most of whom have something going on they’d rather you not know about, even if it had nothing to do with Lula’s murder. (Spoiler: She didn’t kill herself. Sorry.) While I understand Rowling’s prose has always provoked oppobrium from critics, I appreciate her highly evocative style of writing, long on descriptions to allow the reader to see the action in his/her mind – which suits how I read fiction.

I’m currently re-reading the Harry Potter series for the third time by reading a chapter a night aloud to my daughter – we’re on The Goblet of Fire and I’m running short of accents already – and, because I know the plots so well, I’m picking up all of the clues Rowling left along the way to point the perceptive reader to the ultimate reveal at the end of each book. She uses the same tactic in The Cuckoo’s Calling: Everything you need to know to figure out who did it is there in the book, but she blends these details into the dialogue so well that they didn’t stand out (to me, at least) as obvious clues.

The pleasure in detective novels isn’t so much about the whodunit as it is about the central detective character, whether it’s a hard-boiled shamus like the Continental Cop or an erudite eccentric like Nero Wolfe. Rowling appears to have studied the genre well, as Strike has plenty of aspects of the hard-boiled detective, but with modern flourishes, including what I might call his unusual parentage, and enough of an intellectual streak to call to mind Wolfe or Lord Peter Wimsey – which also means Rowling doesn’t have to have Strike fight his way out of most of his confrontations with suspects. His interactions with Robin, his less-interesting assistant who remains endearing for her innocent eagerness to participate in the detecting side of the job (perhaps an alter ego for the reader), also break type, as Rowling seems to have made it clear that the two aren’t going to shack up, a direction I hope she maintains in future books. It’s a promising beginning to a new series, especially if you liked Rowling’s detail-oriented writing style and the humor she always worked into the Harry Potter novels, and would like to see that brought to the hard-boiled detective arena, a genre where sparse prose is the usual rule. The next Cormoran Strike novel, The Silkworm, comes out on June 19th.

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