Leda Strike

Legendary ‘supergroupie’ Leda Strike was Cormoran Strike’s mother. Born in St Mawes, a place she found suffocating, she briefly married a fairground worker called Strike at eighteen, leaving him again after a fortnight. She then lived a precarious life with a succession of boyfriends in squats, and house shares around London. Her favourite band was The Blue Oyster Cult, and she was photographed in the nude, with her tattoo of the title of their song Mistress of the Salmon Salt on display. Strike’s unusual second name, Blue, is in honour of the band. Strike is her oldest child, and she had a daughter, Lucy, by another rock musician, Rick Fantoni.

She was what she was,’ repeated Strike. ‘I loved her, I can’t sit here and say I didn’t. And she might’ve been a fucking nightmare in loads of ways, but I know she loved us, too.’

The Running Grave, Robert Galbraith

People sometimes asked why social services never got involved with Leda Strike’s family. The answer was that Leda had never stayed still long enough to present a stable target. Often her children remained in a school for mere weeks before a new enthusiasm seized her, and off they went, to a new city, a new squat, crashing on her friends’ floors or, occasionally, renting. The only people who knew what was going on, and who might have contacted social services, were her brother Ted and his wife Joan, the one fixed point in the children’s lives, but whether because Ted feared damaging the relationship between himself and his wayward sister, or because Joan worried that the children might not forgive her, they’d never done so.

After Leda marries Jeff Whittaker, a sadistic failed musician, Lucy leaves to live with Ted and Joan permanently. Strike stays, refusing to be driven out, and leaving only to go to university at Oxford to read history. Leda has a son, Switch LaVey Bloom with Whittaker, but she dies from a heroin overdose only a year later. Strike, and his friend Shanker, who Leda took in after a street-fight, are convinced Whittaker murdered her. Leda never took heroin and hated needles. Whittaker was acquitted of her killing, but their son Switch was adopted by Whittaker’s grandparents.

Leda had had a bottomless compassion for underdogs and an incurable optimism about human nature that had never failed her. That, indeed, had been the problem: her naive, unconquerable conviction that genuine evil was only found in the repressions of small-town respectability.

The Running Grave, Robert Galbraith

Strike has for many years concentrated on the positive memories of his mother, her affection, stories and enthusiasms, and believes the constant moves have made him a better detective, able to adapt to any surroundings. Lucy’s feelings have always been more complicated, and as Strike grows older, he begins to understand how profound Leda’s failings as a mother were.