Robert Galbraith is the pen name under which J.K. Rowling writes the Cormoran Strike novels, a series of London detective stories that began with “The Cuckoo’s Calling” in 2013. Eight books have been published so far in a planned series of ten, and they have been adapted for BBC One as “Strike”, with Tom Burke and Holliday Grainger.
“The Cuckoo’s Calling” was published by Sphere in April 2013 as the debut of an unknown author, and initially sold about 1,500 copies in hardback. After an investigation prompted by discussion on Twitter, a journalist contacted Rowling’s agent, who confirmed that she was Galbraith. Rowling has said she wanted to start again in a new genre without hype or expectation and to receive unvarnished feedback. She took the first name from Robert F. Kennedy and the surname from “Ella Galbraith”, a name she had wanted for herself as a child, and she has continued to use the pseudonym to keep the crime novels distinct from her other writing.
The series follows Cormoran Strike, a former Special Investigation Branch investigator who lost part of a leg while serving in Afghanistan and now runs a private detective agency. Robin Ellacott arrives in the first book as a temporary secretary and goes on to become his business partner. In “Troubled Blood” the agency takes on a cold case, the disappearance of a female doctor in 1974, and Rowling has said the pair’s relationship takes its biggest step forward in that book.
Rowling has named Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell, Margery Allingham and P.D. James among the detective writers she loves, and has described the books as contemporary whodunits that play by the rules of the genre. “Troubled Blood” won the Crime and Thriller prize at the British Book Awards in 2021. By February 2024 the series had sold more than 20 million copies worldwide.
The television adaptation began on BBC One in August 2017 and is distributed by HBO in the United States and Canada. The eighth novel, “The Hallmarked Man”, was published on 2 September 2025. A ninth, “Sleep Tight, Evangeline”, was announced in February 2026, and no release date has been given yet.
Publication Order of Cormoran Strike Books
| The Cuckoo’s Calling | 2013 |
| The Silkworm | 2014 |
| Career of Evil | 2015 |
| Lethal White | 2018 |
| Troubled Blood | 2020 |
| The Ink Black Heart | 2022 |
| The Running Grave | 2023 |
| The Hallmarked Man | 2025 |
Photo: Daniel Ogren, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).