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?
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?
