When is Strike next on TV?
And what mystery will Tom Burke’s sleuth tackle in book two, The Silkworm?
After solving the mystery of who killed model Lula Landry (Elarica Johnson) over three episodes on BBC1, new TV detective Cormoran Strike (Tom Burke) is currently getting stuck into his second investigation - the curious death of Owen Quine, an author who was killed in the exact same way as a character in his latest unpublished manuscript.
Unlike the previous investigation Strike's current adventure is only a two-part story, and will conclude on Sunday 17th September at 9.00pm - though there's still an hour of literary excitement to enjoy before the series takes a break.
While the first three episodes of Strike were based on The Cuckoo’s Calling, the original Cormoran Strike novel written by Harry Potter scribe JK Rowling (under the penname Robert Galbraith), the current mystery comes from The Silkworm, a sequel published in 2014.
“The Silkworm takes place in the world of the literati, which is treated in the same vibrant and detailed way the fashion industry was in the first book,” Tom Burke, who portrays Strike in the series, explains.
“It starts with a disappearance; there's a hunt to find this guy, whose body is eventually found in a rather bizarre way – it looks like some sort of ritual sacrifice. He was an author and he’d written a book that exists in manuscript form but hasn’t been published. It says a lot of things about a lot of people, so immediately there are a lot of suspects.”
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“Whereas in Cuckoo’s Calling they moved in a kind of young society, The Silkworm is set in the publishing world, which is presumably something that JK Rowling knows quite a lot about,” adds Holliday Grainger, who plays Strike’s receptionist and mentee Robin in the series.
“It exists more in the imagination and the grotesque, rather than the social realism of The Cuckoo’s Calling.”
As noted above, Strike: The Silkworm will air as two one-hour episodes as opposed to the three-part Cuckoo’s Calling mystery, with this weekend's second half of the Silkworm adaptation also serving as a series finale for this five-episode run of Strike mysteries.
Still, fans won’t have to wait TOO long for more episodes – RadioTimes.com understands that an adaptation of Rowling’s third Cormoran Strike novel Career of Evil (penned by Tom Edge, who also adapted the Silkworm) is set to air in the new year, having already been filmed with the cast. Presumably they were hoping to Strike while the iron’s hot.
Strike continues on BBC1 on Sunday evenings at 9.00pm
