In his popular BBC series Just One Thing, the late Michael Mosley made the case for resistance training. Lifting weights, he explained, not only builds stronger muscles, it also boosts the immune system, maintains a healthy heart and improves brain function. Best of all, it can be done in your kitchen, using ordinary domestic items: pints of milk in place of dumbbells, say, or squats wearing a backpack full of books.
Anyone intending to use Robert Galbraith’s Strike novels for this purpose would be advised to seek the advice of a GP. The Hallmarked Man may not be the heftiest of the eight so far – it does not even make it into the top three – but it still clocks in at a cool 912 pages. Galbraith’s tendency to whopperdom has in the past elicited a fair amount of griping from critics, me among them, who argued that judicious pruning would better serve her plots and her charismatic private detective duo, the sweary one-legged army veteran Cormoran Strike and his brave, decent business partner Robin Ellacott. Not that it changed anything. The books remained resolutely huge (as did sales – by 2024, a staggering 20 million books had been sold in over 50 countries). Galbraith, otherwise known as JK Rowling, has never been one to bow to her detractors.
My arms may plead otherwise, but this time she may have a point. The Hallmarked Man gets off to a spankingly brisk start and from then on seldom lets up. A grotesquely butchered corpse is found in the vault of a silver shop in the City of London. The police claim the body is that of armed robber Jason Knowles, but not everyone accepts their conclusions, including Decima Mullins, who, convinced that the dead man is instead the vanished father of her newborn child, approaches Strike to help her prove it.
Sceptical, Strike and Ellacott reluctantly take on the case, but, as they study the evidence, the plot only thickens. The silver shop, located next to Freemasons’ Hall, specialises in masonic artefacts: among his other mutilations, the dead man’s body has been cut with a masonic hallmark. There are other missing men whose descriptions could match that of the corpse. Before long, Strike and Ellacott find themselves puzzling over not just one potential murder but four.
As always with Galbraith, the personal lives of the detectives play as pivotal a role in the story as the increasingly labyrinthine mystery. Strike’s endless and endlessly tantalising will they/won’t they two-step with Ellacott is jeopardised by her deepening relationship with CID officer Ryan Murphy, himself caught up in a difficult case. Talented but manipulative ex-Metropolitan police officer Kim Cochran has joined the agency and seems set on stirring things up. And if all that was not enough to be getting along with, Mullins turns out to have close family connections with Charlotte Campbell-Ross, Strike’s dead former fiancee.
The result is a terrific and tightly plotted romp with none of the longueurs that padded previous volumes. With an apparent effortlessness that speaks of great discipline and skill, Galbraith keeps the plates of all four possible murder inquiries spinning, each one replete with its own satisfyingly unexpected feints and twists. With so much going on, it is occasionally a challenge to keep track of who exactly has done what and why, but Galbraith’s sure-footedness is such that it hardly matters: the desire to leaf back and check a point feels considerably less urgent than the compulsion to find out what will happen next.
The propulsive drive of the story is matched by the sheer enjoyment of the ride. Previous Strike novels have proved something of a battleground for the often toxic cultural and political wars that Galbraith/Rowling has engaged in on the public stage – transphobia and online mob justice in The Ink Black Heart, cult indoctrination in The Running Grave. But, despite the appearance of a gloriously awful ex-Tory MP who sprinkles his conversation with Latin tags and goes on political quiz shows, The Hallmarked Man is not a novel with a manifesto. For all its fiendish cat’s cradle of a plot, it foregrounds the personal, reminding us yet again what thoroughly good company Strike and Ellacott are. It is no small feat to keep readers invested in a relationship that has been on the breathless brink of almost consummation for seven (giant) books. But Galbraith pulls it off with aplomb, deepening our affection for this engaging, exasperating should-be couple as Strike promises himself (and us) that this time he will finally tell Ellacott how he feels …
Some of Galbraith’s more irritating quirks do surface, most distractingly the insistence on clumsy phonetic dialogue of the “I fink ’e said … didn’ ’e say ’e knew” variety. And little is gained by detailing every drink order in every pub. But these are quibbles. The Hallmarked Man is a triumph of storytelling. Sheer weight aside, I’m pretty sure it improved my cognitive function. It also touched my heart.