Relationships and Romance in Strike and Robin
Always a bit of delusion in love, isn’t there?’ said Strike, watching the vapour rise to the ceiling. ‘You fill in the blanks with your own imagination.’
The Running Grave, Robert Galbraith
Strike and Robin’s romantic lives have caused drama and complications throughout their time working together, and, as Robin moves on after her divorce into a new relationship with handsome CID officer Ryan Murphy and Strike realises the depths and nature of his feelings for his business partner, it looks as if there will be more drama ahead. Valentine’s Day seems an excellent moment to reflect on how the partners have ended up in the romantic soup.
Strike
‘Oh, fuck.’
Career of Evil, Robert Galbraith
‘Whassamatter?’
‘I forgot to ditch someone.’
Shanker began to laugh. Strike smiled ruefully, which was painful. His whole face ached.
Experience has taught Strike a certain type of woman – intelligent, intense and often attractive – finds him unusually attractive. Though Strike has never wondered about the reasons, his oldest friend Dave Polworth describes them as ‘total fucking flakes’ and suggest these ‘nervy, overbred’ women are subconsciously looking for what he calls ‘carthorse blood’.
After sixteen years, on and off with the beautiful, clever, volatile but damaged Charlotte Campbell, Strike takes advantage of the fact these attractive women seek him out. He avoids getting involved with clients, such as the beautiful Miss Jones who pursues him during the Margot Bamborough investigation (Troubled Blood), but seeks diversion, sex and company with other women who cross his path.
‘How’s it going with Elin?’
Career of Evil, Robert Galbraith
‘All right,’ said Strike.
‘Is she still trying to hide you from her ex?’ asked Ilsa, a faint sting in the enquiry.
‘Don’t like Elin, do you?’ said Strike, taking the discussion unexpectedly into the enemy camp for his own amusement.
In the months following his final, messy break from Charlotte Strike’s affairs are brief. He spends a night with supermodel Ciara Porter while investigating the death of her friend Lula Landry (The Cuckoo’s Calling), then has a handful of encounters with publisher Nina Lascelles while searching for her employer’s missing author, Owen Quine (The Silkworm). As time passes, Strike’s relationships last longer. He sees the former professional violinist, and stunning Nordic blonde, Elin Toft for several months, initially thinking Elin’s need for discretion means their relationship can work alongside his commitment to the agency. As Elin’s divorce becomes final though, he is forced to acknowledge she wants more from the relationship than he does. He rebuffs her invitation to go flat-hunting, preferring the Arsenal – Liverpool match, and later forgets a date with her entirely to look after Robin when her engagement to Matthew seems to be over. Elin’s air of cool self-sufficiency is misleading. The missed date leads to a tearful, semi-apologetic tirade when they next meet. On their final date, when he reluctantly meets her at the high-end restaurant Le Gavroche, he spills wine over her then forgets to break up with her officially as he confesses to Shanker during a hurried journey north to attend Robin’s wedding.
Men’s eyes swivelled when she passed them in the street, but she evoked neither the profound longing nor the searing pain that Charlotte had caused Strike. Whether this was because Charlotte had stunted his capacity to feel so intensely, or because Lorelei lacked some essential magic, he did not know.
Lethal White, Robert Galbraith
Lorelei, the vintage clothes dealer Strike meets in the wake of Robin’s marriage, is independent enough to remain with him for much longer. Even Robin thinks she is likeable.
Strike tells Lorelei at the outset of their relationship that hers is the only bed he intends to visit, but if she is looking for predictability or permanence, he is not the man for her. Lorelei appears content with the deal, and Strike enjoys ten months of gentle affection, excellent cooking and other sensual delights. He still sticks to his rule of not sleeping two nights in a row at her house though and avoids checking to see if her understanding of the relationship has changed. As the investigations into the Chiswell family move forward (Lethal White), he is forced to call her for help after falling while shadowing activist Jimmy Knight. He only does so because Robin is away celebrating her anniversary with Matthew. When Lorelei says ‘I love you’ for the first time while he is recovering at her flat, he is sorry, because he knows he cannot reciprocate and curses his luck for breaking his two-night rule.
It is Robin who sits with Strike while his nephew Jack is in hospital, and he begins to realise Lorelei’s understanding reaction is due to her desperation to hang on to him on almost any terms. Eventually, Lorelei sends a long email diagnosing Strike as a fundamentally damaged and dysfunctional creature standing in the way of his own happiness. Strike doesn’t engage and Lorelei ends up feeling disposable and cheap. She does however get the last word:
If you want a hot meal and a shag with no human emotions involved, there are restaurants and brothels.
Lethal White, Robert Galbraith
Strike’s aunt Joan Nancarrow has been a figure of stability for him since childhood and while she is dying of cancer, he has little time for romance (Troubled Blood). He has also, after many years, found a certain peace in being alone. He recognises that none of the affairs or one-night stands he’s had since Charlotte have touched the essential part of him and sometimes wonders if Charlotte has stunted his ability to feel deeply. Even so, he is aware his feelings for Robin are different, but thinking of their work together and their friendship, hopes to keep them under control.
‘How’s your love life?’ Polworth asked, trying a different tack.
Troubled Blood, Robert Galbraith
‘Non-existent,’ said Strike.
Polworth grinned. ‘Joanie reckons you’re gonna end up with your business partner. That Robin girl.’
Robin
She thought of the day that Matthew had asked her out for the very first time and remembered walking home from school, her insides on fire with excitement and pride.
Career of Evil, Robert Galbraith
Robin’s early years working with Strike are complicated by her fiancé and later husband, Matthew. He is jealous and resentful of Strike and taken aback by Robin’s talent and passion for investigative work. In the end he selfishly tries to sabotage their relationship and her career on the eve of their wedding. You can read more about Matthew and their relationship here.
When Robin decides to leave their marriage after finding proof of his infidelity, she is relieved, and in spite of the dangerous and stressful case they are working, her panic attacks lessen (Lethal White). After a week on the sofa of her police officer friend, Vanessa, she finds a temporary home with Nick and Ilsa Herbert and becomes a good friend of Ilsa in particular. After Robin moves in with a friend of Ilsa’s, an actor called Max Priestwood, they meet regularly for drinks and Ilsa regales her with stories about Strike’s former fiancée Charlotte, giving her tales titles like cheap thrillers: Night of the Bread Knife, the Incident of the Black Lace Dress and the Blood-Stained Note. Ilsa makes no secret of the fact she thinks Strike and Robin’s partnership should become romantic and although Robin asserts, she and Strike are perfectly happy with a friendship and working relationship, Ilsa remains cheerfully unconvinced. Robin is mortified by the thought that Strike might think she herself is complicit in Ilsa’s regular attempts to engineer foursomes that increasingly had the appearance of double dates (Troubled Blood).
After Strike accidentally gives Robin a black eye the partners discuss Ilsa’s matchmaking over whisky and curry in the office, which leads to Strike telling Robin she is his best friend. After the investigation into the disappearance of Margot Bamborough concludes though, Strike takes Robin for birthday drinks at the Ritz and a near kiss leaves them both confused about their own feelings and each other’s. Robin is panicked and embarrassed, and Strike takes up with the next intense and attractive woman he meets, jewellery designer, Madeline Courson-Mills (The Ink Black Heart).
‘Robin, she can smell something between you and Corm, and she wants to screw it up.’
The Ink Black Heart, Robert Galbraith
Charlotte turns up in the office and meets Robin for the first time during the Edie Ledwell investigation, (The Ink Black Heart). She tells Strike he is entangled in her divorce, adding strain to the already busy office, and stirs trouble with Robin and Madeline. Charlotte tells Robin Strike is seeing someone and quietly enhances Madeline’s jealousy which leads to more problems for Strike.
Robin meets Ilsa for dinner after meeting Charlotte, and shares that news, and the twin humiliations of her awkward moment with Strike at the Ritz and her failing to realise that the officer investigating the death of Edie Ledwell, Ryan Murphy, was trying to ask her out.
Ilsa, who has known Strike since they were at Primary School together in Cornwall, is pithy and accurate about her friend and his ex-fiancée. She’s confident Strike has only taken up with jewellery designer, Madeline, because he felt Robin rejected him and is amused to think Strike’s ego might have suffered a blow in the process.
‘Why are you smiling?’
The Ink Black Heart, Robert Galbraith
‘Sorry, I can’t help it,’ said Ilsa. ‘I’m just thinking how good that will have been for him, to think you were disgusted at the idea of kissing him.’
Robin explains her panic outside the Ritz was due to her fear Strike would regret it, and also because although she is now thirty, her only romantic relationship has been with Matthew. Undercover as the worldly and confident Jessica Robbins though, she finds herself being snogged in a bar by Pez Prince, a wirey and well-muscled artist and model bound up with the case. When Ryan asks her out again, and knowing Strike is with Madeline, Robin says ‘yes’. Seven months later when the investigation into the Universal Humanitarian Church begins, they are still very much a couple (The Running Grave).
Robin was also enjoying having a sex life again: a sex life, moreover, that was considerably more satisfactory than that she’d had with her ex-husband.
The Running Grave, Robert Galbraith
Ilsa is not put off, however. At the February christening of her and Nick’s son, Benjamin, she tells Robin how much Strike hates seeing her and Ryan together. She also, as the investigation into the Universal Humanitarian Church unfolds, tries to warn Strike against seeing Bijou Watkins, the “man-eating” lawyer who Strike meets at the christening. Strike doesn’t listen, though he later has to admit she was right. He also has to admit to himself, in the end, that Ilsa has been right about his feelings for Robin all along too.
Would this relationship go the same way as her marriage, through increasing levels of suspicion to a destructive explosion, or was she projecting old resentments onto Murphy, much as he’d done to her?
The Running Grave, Robert Galbraith
Meanwhile Robin, taking on the most challenging undercover mission of her career, wonders if she can detect in Ryan the same jealously and possessiveness that poisoned her relationship with Matthew. She tries not to talk too much about Strike to Ryan or mention his war record. Perhaps it’s no surprise then there is a certain guardedness in their relationship. She is also aware their goals in life might be different. Ilsa and Robin’s mother both tell her Ryan wants children, while she, devoted to her career, has decided she probably does not.
She is also still struggling with her feelings for Strike, having tried to keep her mind off her partner in the hope her feelings for him will wither and die. Still, when she returns from her undercover work and Ryan says, ‘I love you’, she says it back to him reflexively.
Not once did it occur to Robin that she might have imagined talking to Murphy, or any of her female friends, rather than Strike.
The Running Grave, Robert Galbraith
When undercover it is imagining talking to Strike which gives Robin strength, and him she longs to hear from when she is at Chapman Farm. Ryan is later upset when she doesn’t call him for help or reassurance after spotting danger outside the office.
Then Strike offers a revelation of his own, but we’ll have to wait until the arrival of The Hallmarked Man to see how Robin responds…