Epigraphs in Career of Evil
‘What does it mean, “Mistress of the Salmon Salt”?’
Career of Evil, Robert Galbraith
‘Search me. Their lyrics are insane. Science fiction. Crazy stuff.’
The epigraphs in Career of Evil all come from the lyrics of the Blue Öyster Cult, the American group famous for hard rock classics including ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’, who were also early pioneers of music video. The title, ‘Career of Evil’ is the name of a track on ‘Secret Treaties’, their 1974 album with lyrics by Patti Smith.
Only chapters from the killer’s perspective don’t have epigraphs, but their titles are all titles of Blue Öyster Cult songs. These include: ‘This Ain’t the Summer of Love’, as the story begins; ‘Good to Feel Hungry’, as the killer obsesses over Strike and his sudden success and fame; ‘One Step Ahead of the Devil’, where the killer watches Strike, then sees Strike turn towards him; ‘The Girl That Love Made Blind’, sees the killer following an oblivious Robin and ‘Here Comes That Feeling’, describes the moments when his urgent need to kill is satisfied.
Blue Öyster Cult’s songs are famous for their ambitious, literary, open-ended and cryptic lyrics. They often deal with love and death or tell uncanny stories apparently springing from myth and legend, and the language and imagery draw from sci-fi, mysticism, horror fiction and the occult, with macabre touches. The range and depth of the lyrics makes them a perfect source for the chronicle of the killer, stalking Robin and Strike during a murderous spree that will earn him the nickname of the Shacklewell Ripper, and the detectives tracking him down in turn.
The songs were written by a number of different lyricists who are credited in the back of the book, and some songs are referenced more than once. Watch out for ‘Before the Kiss’, which appears four times and ‘Madness to the Method’ which appears three times.
‘Old Jonny came a poor second with Leda. She wanted Eric Bloom, lead singer of the Blue Öyster Cult, but she never got him.’
Career of Evil, Robert Galbraith
Leda Strike, Cormoran’s super-groupie mother, was obsessed with the Blue Öyster Cult. Jonny Rokeby, Strike’s father and lead of The Deadbeats, always came a poor second, Strike tells Robin. Strike also tells her that he was nearly named Eric Bloom Strike. His mother did honour the band in his name though. His first name ‘Cormoran’ might be inspired by a Cornish giant, but the detective’s second name is ‘Blue’ in honour of the band. Strike normally keeps his middle name quiet, but his former fiancee, Charlotte Campbell, always calls him Bluey, even after he asks her not to during the Chiswell investigation (Lethal White).
Leda’s obsession with the band extended to having one of their song titles, ‘Mistress of the Salmon Salt’ tattooed just above her the line of her pubic hair. Jeff Whittaker, Strike’s stepfather, also quoted the song from the dock during his trial for her murder. ‘She wanted to die. She was the quicklime girl.’
Chapter 1
A rock through the window never comes with a kiss.
Blue Öyster Cult, ‘Madness to the Method’
…she made an angry stab to the end of the package, slit it open and pulled the box apart.
Career of Evil, Robert Galbraith
Robin is expecting various deliveries for her upcoming wedding, so takes the package from the motorcycle courier without thinking as she arrives at the Denmark Street office. She’s also distracted, thinking over her last fight with her fiancé Matthew, started by his friend Sarah’s shit-stirring. Instead of disposable cameras, inside the package she discovers the severed leg of a woman.
When the police take charge of the grisly package, they find a note apparently filled with nonsense, but Strike recognises the words. They are lyrics from Leda’s favourite Blue Öyster Cult track, ‘Mistress of the Salmon Salt’. The package may have been addressed to Robin, but it looks as if the target is Strike.
Chapter 4
Four winds at the Four Winds Bar,
Two doors locked and windows barred,
One door left to take you in, The other one just mirrors it…
Blue Öyster Cult, ‘Astronomy’
‘You know four men who’d send you a severed leg? Four?’
Career of Evil, Robert Galbraith
Strike is pretty sure, he tells Robin in reply to her shocked question, that he actually only knows three men who might have sent him the severed leg. He tells her about them in the Tottenham pub as they recover from the shock of the delivery: Donald Laing, with a rose tattoo and ferret eyes, who Strike got life when he was a Red Cap, though Laing was about to get off on the charge Strike was originally investigating; Noel Brockbank, a Desert Rat who Strike doesn’t want to discuss, and Jeff Whittaker his mother’s second husband. The intimate tattoo of the song title ‘Mistress of the Salmon Salt’ was photographed during Leda’s supergroupie period, so any of the men could have known about Strike’s connection to the lyrics.
The Four Winds bar in the song is ‘the nexus of the crisis and the origin of storms’. An appropriate place to begin the investigation perhaps.
Chapter 18
I’ve been stripped, the insulation’s gone.
Blue Öyster Cult, ‘Lips in the Hills’
You can’t cry here. You mustn’t cry here.
Career of Evil, Robert Galbraith
Robin arrives at the office for the first time without her sapphire engagement ring. Her relationship with Matthew Cunliffe, nine years in the making, has fallen apart in four days. Petty squabbles over the weekend in Yorkshire leave them barely speaking, then, in the midst of a fight, Robin has learned something about her fiancé which has made her leave their house with an overnight bag and without her ring. She is hardly holding it together when she arrives in the office. A visit from Shanker – Robin’s first encounter with Strike’s criminal friend – with information about Jeff Whittaker means that Strike can’t ask her what’s wrong either.
Strike will learn later that Matthew slept with Sarah Shadlock while Robin was recovering from the attack that derailed her university career, proving his immediate instinct to punch Matthew in the face as soon as he saw Robin’s distress was a good one.
Chapter 23
Moments of pleasure, in a world of pain.
Blue Öyster Cult, ‘Make Rock not War’
You could find beauty nearly anywhere if you stopped to look for it.
Career of Evil, Robert Galbraith
The view of the mist lying over Regent’s Park reminds Strike of similar moments of natural beauty glimpsed during his childhood in Cornwall – the glitter of the sea first thing in the morning, or the mysterious emerald-and-shadow world of the Gunnera Passage at Trebah Garden. It is a momentary distraction from his romantic problems. He and his current girlfriend, Elin, have just had their first fight and Strike recognises he doesn’t feel as badly about Elin’s distress as perhaps he should.
He and Robin head to Barrow-in-Furness, pursuing Noel Brockbank and the mood is bleak as Strike shares the grim story of Brockbank’s crimes, arrest and escape from justice and Robin is in the midst of dealing with her broken engagement. Still, in the drive and their companionship there are moments of pleasure. Strike teases Robin over her pony, Angus, and she reckons if he wants to try getting on a horse himself, her uncle has a Clydesdale that might be able to carry him.
Chapter 28
Oh Debbie Denise was true to me
She’d wait by the window, so patiently
Blue Öyster Cult, ‘Debbie Denise’, lyrics by Patti Smith
…the lonely women sitting in Summerfield among the memories of loved ones who had left her.
Career of Evil, Robert Galbraith
Robin and Strike’s investigation takes them to Corby – a town which once had the highest Scottish population south of the border – and through a maze of streets with Scottish names. There they meet Lorraine, one-time partner of Donald Laing and her elderly terrier, Tigger, who gets a surprise when he tries to bite Strike’s prosthetic ankle and swift lesson manners from Robin, who picks the surprised dog up by the scruff of its neck.
They learn Laing is long gone, with Lorraine’s mother’s wedding ring and all the money from her purse. Lorraine is still surrounded by her mother’s possessions, and Laing obviously took advantage of her when she was still grieving her lost parent. The interview with the lonely, humiliated woman, and Strike’s apparent eagerness to get back to town and Elin, leave Robin deeply depressed.
Chapter 40
…love is like a gun
And in the hands of someone like you
I think it’d kill
Blue Öyster Cult, ‘Searching’ for Celine’
Yet he liked her face. He liked her voice. He liked being around her.
Career of Evil, Robert Galbraith
Robin’s engagement with Matthew is back on and Strike is struggling with the idea of their wedding which he thinks is a big mistake. Aware they have been growing closer, Strike tells himself the idea he and Robin could be together is insanity, but he also knows how much he values her – her courage and intelligence and worries how long they will be able to carry on working together once she is Mrs Cunliffe. He promises himself he will reestablish the professional distance between them that has somehow ebbed away recently, but still, he ends his rumination hoping the marriage will never take place.
Chapter 49
It’s the time in the season for a maniac at night
Blue Öyster Cult, ‘Madness to the method’
Then horror exploded across Wednesday’s front pages.
Career of Evil, Robert Galbraith
The Shacklewell Ripper has struck again, killing a building society employee, Heather Smart, and been given his nickname by the newspapers. An exhausted DI Eric Wardle meets Strike at the Feathers – a pub near New Scotland Yard – and fills him in on what they know about Heather’s killing. He also tells Strike the police think the killer may have struck twice already, and looking at Jacob Epstein’s sculpture, Day, of a boy and throned man opposite the pub, tells him Brockbank is apparently living with someone who has kids. Laing is disabled, and Jeff Whittaker seems to have an alibi.
‘Madness to the Method’, a song of sex and violence, provides another apt epigraph – the song’s third and final appearance in the book.
Chapter 54
And if it’s true it can’t be you,
It might as well be me.
Blue Öyster Cult, ‘Spy in the House of the Night’
Robin’s heart was thudding as though she had been running.
Career of Evil, Robert Galbraith
After surviving an attack by the Shacklewell Ripper, Robin is being pressured to go to Yorkshire, to stay out of danger and prepare for her upcoming wedding. She refuses. As the investigation reaches its climax, and she fights with Strike about tactics, she decides to take radical action of her own. It will put her in danger (and mean sacrificing the Jimmy Choos she has bought for her wedding), but she believes she has no choice. If Strike won’t step in, at once, to save the children of Alyssa Vincent, she will.
The rich texture, and dark undertones of the Blue Öyster Cult’s lyrics provide perfect epigraphs for every step along the dark journey of the killer and the detectives, and the band are still going strong. The Blue Öyster Cult released their sixteenth studio album, Ghost Stories, in April 2024.
