The Ink Black Heart carries on the old school charm of Strike – but too much is lost in translation
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JK Rowling’s doorstopper proves challenging to adapt for screen, but Strike and Robin’s ‘will they, won’t they’ dynamic remains electric as ever. What connects Dune, The Lord of the Rings, On the Road, Cloud Atlas, and Inherent Vice? Answer: they’re all books that have been described at one point or another as “unfilmable”. Add to that list, then, The Ink Black Heart, the sixth instalment in a series of private detective novels by Robert Galbraith, a pseudonym for children’s author-turned-political lightning rod, JK Rowling. Set amid the trolls and edgelords of internet subcultures, this profoundly “online” story proves a challenge for the BBC – will they be able to turn it into another gripping instalment of Strike?.
![[A slow burn: the relationship between the series main duo takes centrestage in this crime story]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/12/16/15/499785.jpg)
We pick things up in the aftermath of the events of 2022’s Troubled Blood: the personal relationship between Cormoran Strike (Tom Burke) and his business partner Robin Ellacott (Holliday Grainger) – a will they, won’t they of epic proportions – is as uncertain as ever, but their professional alliance remains strong. It needs to be. When a young artist, Edie Ledwell (Mirren Mack), comes to their agency asking for assistance with a stalker, Robin declines to help. But when she’s later found murdered, the Strike-Ellacott team are drawn into a dangerous world that revolves around Drek’s Game, a fictitious video game spun off from Ledwell’s much-loved cartoon, The Ink Black Heart. Can the secret to who killed her be found in the game’s chatrooms? Or is there something else going on related to the alt-right fascists in the real world?.
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