BEYOND HARRY: After much speculation, J.K. Rowling has owned up to authoring the detective novel “The Cuckoo’s Calling.” (
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Hold your hippogriffs!
Best-selling Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling is the secret scribe behind “The Cuckoo’s Calling,” a brilliant new detective novel penned under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.
The publisher’s Web site claimed Galbraith was the alias of a former Royal Military Police investigator. But literary sleuths were on to Rowling.
Three months after the book’s debut, Rowling came clean to The Sunday Times of London.
“I had hoped to keep this secret a little longer because being ‘Robert Galbraith’ has been such a liberating experience,” Rowling told the paper. “It has been wonderful to publish without hype or expectation and pure pleasure to get feedback under a different name.”
“The Cuckoo’s Calling” follows Cormoran Strike, a war veteran-turned-private eye who investigates the supposed suicide of a model.
Rowling has mentioned her love of detective books in the past.
Still, bookworms had other clues.
Rowling and Galbraith had the same agent, and Galbraith was the only client who had a silhouette instead of a photograph on the agency’s Web site.
Without the baggage of “Potter,” “The Cuckoo’s Calling” enjoyed strong sales and good reviews.
The Times noted that another successful crime writer, Peter James, said, “I thought it was by a very mature writer, and not a first-timer.”
Some online comments noted how good the “male” author was at describing women’s clothes and people’s looks.
Two independent computer linguistic experts, Peter Millican from Oxford University and Patrick Juola from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, were commissioned to run the last Harry Potter novel and another Rowling novel,” A Casual Vacancy,” against “The Cuckoo’s Calling” and two other detective novels through their specialist programs.
Neither knew Rowling and Galbraith were the same person, but both came back pointing to considerable similarities in phrases and styles. “It was striking that ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling’ came out significantly closer to ‘A Casual Vacancy’ and even ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ than the other books,” said Millican.
In broadcast interviews a few years ago with Stephen Fry and Jeremy Paxman, Rowling said she would much prefer to write any books after Harry Potter under a pseudonym.
The second Strike book, which it is understood has already been written, will be published next year — under the name of Robert Galbraith. But this time we will know who “he” is.