Les premières phrases

«  The buzz in the street was like the humming of flies. Photographers stood massed behind barriers patrolled by police, their long-snouted cameras poised, their breath rising like steam. Snow fell steadily on to hats and shoulders; gloved fingers wiped lenses clear. From time to time there came outbreaks of desultory clicking, as the watchers filled the waiting time by snapping the white canvas tent in the middle of the road, the entrance to the tall red-brick apartment block behind it, and the balcony on the top floor from which the body had fallen.

Behind the tightly packed paparazzi stood white vans with enormous satellite dishes on the roofs, and journalists talking, some in foreign languages, while soundmen in headphones hovered. Between recordings, the reporters stamped their feet and warmed their hands on hot beakers of coffee from the teeming café a few streets away. To fill the time, the woolly-hatted cameramen filmed the backs of the photographers, the balcony, the tent concealing the body, then repositionned themselves for wide shots that encompassed the chaos that had exploded inside the sedate and snowy Mayfair street, with its lines of glossy black doors framed by white stone porticos and flanked by topiary shrubs. The entrance to number 18 was bounded with tape. Police officials, some of them white-clothed forensic experts, could be glimpsed in the hallway beyond. « 

Circonstances de lecture

Parce que sous le pseudo de Robert Galbraith se cache J.K. Rowling…

Impressions

Ici, rien à voir avec Harry Potter ou The Casual Vacancy… A part ce style, cette écriture propre à J.K. Rowling et que j’adore !

J.K. Rowling s’essaie au roman policier et réussit à nous tenir en haleine jusqu’aux toutes dernières pages. Son héros, un détective privé ancien soldat en Afghanistan, est attachant. Tout comme sa toute nouvelle secrétaire. Un duo que j’espère pouvoir retrouver dans d’autres aventures.

Un passage parmi d’autres

 There’s a client here for you. Shall I show him in? »

« There’s a what? »

« A client, Mr Strike. »

He looked for several seconds, trying to process the information.

« Right, OK – no, give me a couple of minutes, please, Sandra, and then show him in. »

She withdrew without comment.

Strike wasted barely a second on asking himself why he had called her Sandra, before leaping to his feet and setting about looking and smelling less like a man who had slept in his clothes. Diving under his desk into his kitbag, he seized a tube of toothpaste, and squeezed three inches into his open mouth; then he noticed that his tie was soaked in water from the sink, and that his shirt front was spattered with flecks of blood, so he ripped both off, buttons pinging off the walls and filing cabinet, dragged a clean though heavily creased shirt out of the kitbag instead and pulled it on, thick fingers fumbling. After stuffing the kitbag out of sight behind his empty filing cabinet, he hastily reseated himself and checked the inner corners of his eyes for debris, all the while pondering whether his so-called client was the real thing, and whether he would be prepared to pay actual money for detective services. Strike had come to realise, over the course of an eighteen-month spiral into financial ruin, that neither of these things could be taken for granted. He was still chasing two clients for full payment of their bills; a third had refused to disburse a penny, because Strike’s findings had not been to his taste, and given that he was sliding ever deeper into debt, and that a rent review of the area was threatening his tenancy of the central London office that he had been so pleased to secure, Strike was in no position to involve a lawyer. Rougher, cruder methods of debt collection had become a staple of his recent fantaisies; it would have given him much pleasure to watch the smuggest of his defaulters cowering in the shadow of a baseball bat.

The door opened again; Strike hastily removed his index finger from his nostril and sat up straight, trying to look bright and alert in his chair.

« Mr Strike, this is Mr Bristow. »

The prospective client followed Robin into the room. The immediate impression was favourable.

The Cuckoo’s Calling – Robert Galbraith – 2013 (sphere)