All about Robin’s undercover personas
Psychology’s loss,’ said Strike, ‘is private detection’s gain. That was bloody good going, Robin.’
Career of Evil, Robert Galbraith
Robin, brought up in Masham, North Yorkshire, dropped out of her psychology course after a violent attack, and came to London to marry her long-term boyfriend, Matthew at the age of twenty-five. A mistake at her temping agency sent her to Cormoran Strike’s detective agency, awakening long suppressed ambitions she hadn’t even admitted to her fiancé. From her first days working for Strike, Robin proves she has a talent for investigation, and a fascination with the work, and with training and experience she becomes a partner in the business. She has also, over the years she’s spent with Strike, developed impressive skills as an undercover operative.
To celebrate her birthday on 9th October, we’re looking at some of the undercover roles she’s taken on, from her first success during the investigation into the death of Lula Landry (The Cuckoo’s Calling), to her most challenging undercover role investigating the Universal Humanitarian Church (The Running Grave).
Annabel Atkinson
They walked fifty yards in silence, and Strike had lit up a cigarette before he said:
The Cuckoo’s Calling, Robert Galbraith
‘Very, very impressive.’
Robin glowed with pride.
Lula Landry, the supermodel whose supposed suicide Strike has been tasked to investigate, spent part of her last day at an upmarket boutique, Vashti in Conduit Street, central London. Strike and Robin know that she met her friend Rochelle there, but it’s vital they get more of an idea of what happened during the brief meeting between the two women. Strike suggests they go to the boutique and Robin pretends to be his sister, helping him buy a gift for his wife.
On entering the fashionable boutique, Robin walks boldly over to the first assistant she sees and asks to try on a coat in the window. Strike watches, surprised and impressed as Robin chats freely to the assistant and her colleagues, artfully leading them to gossip about Lula, while taking ten thousand pounds worth of goods into the changing room.
While trying on clothes she could never afford with breezy confidence, Robin chats about her fictional sister-in-law, Sandra, who’s turning forty and deserves something special from Strike, and, without raising suspicion, gathers key intelligence about Lula’s visit while Strike casually eavesdrops outside the changing room. As she discovers exactly what Lula did, Robin tries on the miraculously flattering Cavalli poison-green dress Strike will eventually buy her as a thank you for her work on the case.
Venetia Hall (The Lawyer)
It had been Strike’s suggestion that she use her middle name. (‘Makes you sound like a poncy southerner.’) Robin handed over the business card, looked boldly into Holly’s heavily kohled eyes and repeated: ‘Venetia Hall. I’m a lawyer.’
Career of Evil, Robert Galbraith
Strike and Robin have travelled to Barrow-in-Furness looking for information about the whereabouts of Noel Brockbank, one of the men who Strike fears might have a murderous grudge against him (Career of Evil).
There is no sign of Noel, but his sister, Holly, is at the address they have unearthed. Strike’s sudden fame after the cases of Lula Landry and Owen Quine, and his history with the family mean that he’s unlikely to get anything out of Holly, so Venetia Hall is born – a lawyer with Hardacre and Hall, Personal Injury Lawyers. Robin uses Venetia as it’s her middle name and uses a professional London accent and entitled attitude to convince Holly she is a lawyer who might be able to compensate Noel and his family for his injuries. Usually relaxed and empathetic with witnesses, Robin is a little cooler and more superior as Venetia: Venetia is used to a certain level of respect, after all. Venetia also doesn’t understand words like ‘Horney’ the Cumbrian word for policeman, though Robin does.
Over white wine and pints in The Crow’s Nest, Robin interrogates Holly, offering the right level of inducement, concern and understanding to find out a huge amount about Noel’s movements and actions from his sister. She also learns, to her horror, the amount of suffering Noel has caused in his own family. Afterwards, Strike toasts her with a can of McEwans in the front of her beaten up Land Rover and tells her that psychology’s loss is private detection’s gain.
Venetia Hall (The goddaughter)
‘I think the main reason Raff isn’t keen on me hiring you is that he rather fell for your Venetia while she was in the office and now, well, obviously, he feels a bit of an idiot that he poured his heart out to her.’
Lethal White, Robert Galbraith
After government minister Jasper Chiswell approaches the agency, it’s clear that someone will need to go undercover at the Houses of Parliament to plant listening devices in the office of his blackmailer, Geraint Winn (Lethal White). Venetia Hall is reborn, this time as Chiswell’s goddaughter, come to work in his offices in the run up to the Olympics.
Robin works out her backstory: Venetia has a boyfriend at Christie’s and is trying politics after fancying a change from PR, and she adopts coloured contact lenses to subtly alter her appearance. This mission is more of a challenge than her previous, brief, undercover assignments as she works in the Houses of Parliament and must maintain her cover day after day, not just for a few hours. She needs to think on her feet when Kinvara, Jasper’s wife, appears. Luckily, she appears happy to believe her husband has godchildren she’d never heard of. Planting and retrieving the devices in the office of the slippery Geraint takes some fast thinking too: a dropped bangle, the need for a fan. As Robin continues working to maintain her cover and get the information they need, other personal forces are fighting against her. After the traumatic events at the end of the Shacklewell Ripper case (Career of Evil), Robin is dealing with severe panic attacks, and they have no respect for the demands of her work.
Bobbi Cunliffe
‘Bloody ’ell,’ said Bobbi Cunliffe again.
Lethal White, Robert Galbraith
‘Deep state, innit?’ said Flick. ‘Ex-army. Queen and the flag and all that fucking shit. See, Jimmy and me had something on a Conservative minister—’
As the investigation into the Chiswell family progresses and darkens, Robin needs to go undercover again, this time to get close to Flick, girlfriend of activist Jimmy Knight. In the months following the trial of the Shacklewell Ripper (Career of Evil), Robin became adept at make-up techniques, but she has never before worn as much make-up as she does as Bobbi. Her eyes, in which she wears dark brown contact lenses, are heavily rimmed with black kohl, her lips painted pale pink, her nails a metallic grey. She has cheap metal cuffs on her ears, a short black dress, and flat lace up boots.
Rather than using her middle name, she uses a version of ‘Robin’ her brother Martin has used as a nickname to annoy her, and her husband’s surname. She also broadens her Yorkshire accent to play the part of the daughter of a miner, a trade unionist dead after lung damage, knowing that will appeal to Flick, a middle-class revolutionary.
Working alongside Flick in a Wiccan shop in Camden, Triquetra, and sharing tales of romantic troubles builds a bond which gets ‘Bobbi’ invited back to Flick’s house and puts a crucial bit of evidence within Robin’s grasp.
Vanessa Jones
‘Could you explain to me why it was reckless when I did it, but not when you were planning to do it?’ said Robin.
Troubled Blood, Robert Galbraith
Robin’s time as Vanessa Jones, approaching a gangster in a nursing home, then having to get out past his violent and dangerous son, is brief but terrifying. Disguised with hair chalk and contact lenses and a north London accent, Robin manages to think fast and get crucial information from the son, though the father can’t respond to her questions. Strike, though, is outraged when he learns what she’s done. The first round of the fight they have ends with Robin storming out while he is in mid-sentence. In the end Strike has to admit he’d have pushed for the information she got too, and Robin agrees she’ll at least talk to him next time.
An easier job is, as a Yorkshire girl job seeking in London, getting close to Gemma, PA to ‘Shifty’ a suspect in another long running case. A couple of glasses of wine and Robin, sympathetic and supportive, discovers more of what ‘Shifty’ has been up to.
Jessica Robins
‘I love that cartoon,’ said Robin, well aware that she’d now split into two different Jessicas: one from London who knew only vaguely about The Ink Black Heart, and one from Yorkshire who adored it, but there was no time to worry about that now.
The Ink Black Heart, Robert Galbraith
Before going undercover for lessons at the North Grove Art Collective where Edie Ledwell created the cartoon, The Ink Black Heart, with her boyfriend Josh Blay, Robin carefully creates another persona. Jessica, a hazel-eyed brunette, is a marketing executive with frustrated artistic ambitions who’s just broken up with her boyfriend, who wears scarlet lipstick and winged black eyeliner, because Jessica likes to emphasise the fact that a dramatic creature lives beneath her conventional exterior. A Londoner when she first comes to class, Robin realises playing up her Yorkshire roots is a way to form a bond with the vulnerable Zoe, who she discovers is a moderator in Drek’s Game, the online fan game which is home of troll, and possible killer, Anomie.
Being Jessica also gives her the chance to get close to Preston Pierce, aka Pez, one of the original voices of the cartoon who is based at the collective. Playing the sexually experienced and confident Jessica with him gives Robin a chance to rediscover something in herself long suppressed by trauma and her failed marriage.
Venetia Hall also returns to action during the investigation, this time as a journalist, working on ‘Arts and Drama in Schools’, with a convincing webpage created by their IT friend Spanner, square glasses and a wavy wig she knows doesn’t suit her. In this guise she meets teacher Tim Ashcroft, another person who lent a voice to the cartoon, and later Yasmin Weatherhead, former assistant to Josh and Edie, at Comic Con.
Rowena Ellis
While he had total confidence in Robin’s ability to think on her feet, some of what he’d read, and particularly Prudence’s warning that the church sought out weak places in members’ psyches the better to manipulate them, had left him feeling uneasy.
The Running Grave, Robert Galbraith
The investigation into the Universal Humanitarian Church leads to Robin’s most challenging and dangerous undercover mission so far (The Running Grave). She volunteers to be recruited to Jonathan Wace’s cult, knowing full well success will mean having to survive the physical and mental assaults with which Jonathan and his wife Mazu control the members of his church.
She creates her most detailed backstory yet, knowing she’ll face intense questioning. Strike remains uneasy even as she answers, without hesitation, questions on Rowena’s schooling, university career, family, friends, hobbies, pets, ex-fiancé and the details of her supposedly cancelled wedding. Unable to rely on wigs, contact lenses or hair chalk to alter her appearance, Robin has to trust that an extreme, and extremely expensive haircut, and the expensive clothes and accessorises she’s borrowed from Strike’s half-sister Prudence will turn her from Robin to Rowena. Her accent this time, knowing it’s something that will slip when she is tired, remains her own.
In the dangerous, traumatic weeks ahead Robin has to struggle to hang on to her sanity as well as her fake and real identities as she discovers the situation in the church is far worse than she or Strike could have imagined. Again, she has to rely on her ability to think fast and improvise, her only lifeline a fake rock on the edge of Chapman Farm where once a week she can exchange news with the outside world.