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In the new season, large amounts of screen time – and there is plenty to go around – are given to scenes flashing back to the 60s and 70s, building the character of Margot, an isolated second-wave feminist full of kindness and courage, stirringly played by Abigail Lawrie despite the occasional veer into sparky-cockernee-sparrer cliche. It’s there in the Strike agency’s offices, above a Denmark Street guitar shop and with interiors that feel like stepping back into a woody, brown 20th century. The hankering for the past begins with the retro-filtered opening titles and is palpable in the journeys taken in Robin’s rattling Land Rover. The backwards-looking investigation does, however, fit with the show’s comfortingly analogue vibe. Margot’s disappearance doesn’t reverberate in the present in the way the disinterred mysteries in, say, Unforgotten do: her family want closure and the kidnapper or murderer is out there, but it’s hard to inject any urgency into a surplus of scenes where witnesses wistfully recall events from 50 years ago that barely affect them now. He does crack it, of course, but that coldness is a challenge for the drama.
Strike warns Margot’s daughter that the case is an extremely cold one and may not be solvable. Internet sleuths pin the blame on Dennis Creed, a notorious abductor and murderer of women the detective who investigated at the time appears to have indulged more elaborate theories, to the extent that he lost himself and did not work again.
The new client’s mother, Margot, was a GP in Clerkenwell, London, who left her practice one night in 1974 to meet a friend in a pub, did not arrive, and has not been seen since. Strike is in Cornwall, visiting his uncle and terminally ill aunt, when he is retained by an agitated woman with an ancient missing-person case. Spoiler: the answer isn’t that satisfying and is, after such a huge buildup, somehow sudden and rushed. The new case has a vast cast of suspects and red herrings to chew through before ludicrously monikered private investigator Cormoran Strike (Tom Burke) and his assistant Robin Ellacott (Holliday Grainger) work out who the culprit is in episode four. Despite screenwriter Tom Edge’s efforts to trim some of the book’s discursions, the dramatisation of Troubled Blood is, at four hour-long episodes, far too lengthy. The other main criticism of the novel, that it was bloated and slow at 900-plus pages, is more relevant.
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Troubled Blood is the one that was accused of transphobia when it was published in 2020, but that subplot – a serial killer wears women’s clothing to gain access to his victims, evoking the claim by “gender-critical” campaigners that abusive men will invade women’s spaces if transgender rights are upheld – is barely present here, and was not very prominent in the book anyway. If your only interaction with the Galbraith books is a biennial glance at the headlines they generate, be informed that Rowling’s growing tendency to reiterate political disagreements via her characters is toned right down on TV.
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This fifth season of Strike, based on the fifth book Troubled Blood, has fans and detractors awaiting it with a fervour other TV whodunnits do not tend to provoke. Published under the name Robert Galbraith, the Strike stories have been automatic No 1 bestsellers ever since it was revealed that Galbraith is Harry Potter creator JK Rowling. Ah, but Strike (BBC One) cannot be like the others, because of the books’ author.
#Cb strike series series#
Another Sunday night, another crime drama based on a series of novels.
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