Will they or won’t they? Seventeen years after the final Harry Potter novel, can JK Rowling fans move on from the boy wizard who conquered the world and attune themselves to the author’s latter-day incarnation as creator of so-so mystery capers? That question looms in the background of Strike: The Ink-Black Heart (BBC One, Monday 9pm), the latest adaptation of Rowling’s Cormoran Strike novels – published under the pen-name Robert Galbraith and lightyears removed from the hoary halls of Hogwarts.
The Ink-Black Heart poses a second teaser. Will Cormoran (Tom Burke) and his sleuthing sidekick Robin Ellacott (Holliday Grainger) finally get together as a couple? The question is posed early in the first episode of the four-parter (which runs through the week). Grumpy Strike attempts to kiss his recently divorced partner-in-crime solving. A stunned Robin demurs. Humiliated, Strike stomps off in a funk.
Teasing a romance between the lead characters in a mystery drama is a cliche that dates back to Mulder and Scully in The X-Files (if not further). But The Ink-Black Heart doesn’t belabour the point. It’s soon off to the business at hand. The murder of a comic book writer who had accumulated both a social media stalker (known only as Anomie) and a nasty boyfriend.
But the boyfriend was seriously injured in the same attack – at a graveyard at midnight – in which Ink-Black Heart creator Edie (Sex Education’s Mirren Mack) had died. So that was him out, right? There is also the right-wing comedian fired from by Edie’s production company because of his bonkers views. And also, judging from his material, due to his stonking unfunniness.
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When Rowling published The Ink-Black Heart in 2022, its depiction of social media as a sewer full of haters was taken as an expression of the author’s views on toxic fandom after a huge segment of Harry Potter readers (and some of the cast of the HP movies) turned on her because of her views on transgender issues. But the idea that the novel is a bully pulpit for Rowling is toned down in the adaptation, where the internet-is-full-lunatics angle barely gets a look in.
Strike is, in some ways, an unlikely cult hit (the Ink-Black Heart is the BBC’s sixth Galbraith adaptation). It thrives on the grumpy chemistry between Burke and Grainger – almost to a fault, given that the plots tend to be at once massively confusing (I was lost 10 minutes in) and largely predictable, with the killer invariably obvious as soon as all the pieces have been set on the board.
But Burke and Grainger sell it, (hog)warts and all. For those of us who could never see the attraction of Harry Potter – this was years before Rowling became a lightning rod for the “gender critical” debate – the show’s rumpled charms are a gift that keeps on giving. Nevermind, the claggy storyline, Strike and Ellacott are a duo you want to spend time with, regardless of whether or not they end up together.
