Conlusion Detective fiction is a genre of literature with a long tradition which has captured the attention of readers worldwide for more than a century. From the first detective story written by Edgar Allan Poe to British detective fiction of the Golden Age to the American hard-boiled version of detective novels, detective fiction has become a genre of various faces which are equally fascinating. While the novelists of the Golden Age focused mainly on the development of the puzzle and planting clear clues in their stories so that the reader can arrive at the correct solution to the central crimes, authors of hard- boiled detective fiction aimed at a more realistic portrayal of criminal life in the city and relied on the personas of their hero private investigators to deliver enjoyable plots. The novels of Robert Galbraith which have been examined in this thesis draw their influences from both of these distinctive genres.
The first novel in the series about private detective Cormoran Strike, The Cuckoo’s Calling, is concerned with the murder of a famous model which was committed by her adoptive brother because of money and family relations. The plot is written in a Golden Age manner from the first page as the person who the reader meets first ends up being the murderer, which is a plot feature in accordance with one of the Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction written by Ronald Knox. Parallels with various Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers stories can be seen in the plot, mostly in the way the clues are presented to the reader. No clues are omitted from the course of the story so that the reader can easily solve the puzzle by themselves, which is another rule written by Ronald Knox. A notable Golden Age feature is the usage of the list clue, where an important clue is hidden in a list of unimportant items. The plot is developed in a manner similar to many stories written by mainly Agatha Christie, and the second murder of a blackmailer is one of the aspects in which the story resembles Christie’s plots. The identity of the second victim is influenced by Golden Age detective fiction as well since the murdered woman is of a lower rank.
While the plot of the second novel, The Silkworm, is again influenced mainly by the stories of the Golden Age, there are features which point to the hard-boiled school as well. The fact that the body of the victim is found horribly mutilated is one of them, because in Golden Age detective fiction this is almost never done while writers of hard- boiled novels are not afraid of these images. What points to the Golden Age, however, is the employment of a closed circle of suspects, where each of the people has a motive to murder the victim. Galbraith also uses red herrings in the plot, which is another distinctive feature of detective fiction of the Golden Age. The moment Cormoran Strike realises who the culprit is is memorable as well, since it clearly points to the moment when the reader should be able to come to the right solution because they already have all the facts they need.
The third Cormoran Strike novel is different from the other two because of the fact that the killer’s thoughts are not concealed to the reader. In this way, Galbraith breaks one of Knox’s rules for the first time. The novel deals with a serial killer at large who is obsessed with Strike, and while a serial killer appeared in Christie’s The ABC Murders, the murderer in Galbraith’s book is different from what the reader could see in detective stories of the Golden Age. There is again a closed circle of suspects in Career of Evil, but the clues are not as clear as in the first two books. This novel is the least reminiscent of the Golden Age of the three, however, aspects such as mutilation of the bodies and the high body count that is featured in the story point to the hard-boiled genre of detective fiction.
If the plots of the stories were mostly reminiscent of the Golden Age, the persona of the detective Cormoran Strike is much more influenced by the hard-boiled genre. He is a self-employed private investigator who likes his drink and does not hesitate to physically fight with people he proves to be guilty of the central crimes. In this he is different from the Golden Age detective to whom nothing violent ever happens. Strike has a military training and a troubled past which has left him with a highly developed sense of justice, which again points to the hard-boiled detective tradition. Another hard- boiled feature connected to Strike would be the fact that he has his femme fatale – a character which frequently appears in the stories of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. One of the only aspects about the character which points to the stories of the Golden Age is the fact that he has a sidekick.
