The World of Private Clubs in Strike
Meet me at Pratt’s Club. Park Place. Come at twelve, I’ll give you lunch!
Lethal White, Robert Galbraith
Robin and Strike’s investigations lead them into all corners of London, from run-down estates, old houses split into flats, to fashionable homes and offices, fancy restaurants and also into the private clubs which dot the city – the exclusive sanctuaries of the wealthy and connected.
The members-only clubs, where you must be approved and pay a hefty yearly fee to join, originated in the coffee and chocolate houses where important men of the day gathered to discuss politics and business in the seventeenth century. The first was White’s, founded in 1693, and established in St James’s Street by the late eighteenth century. St James’s at that time became the centre of London’s clubland where the upper classes gathered to meet, eat and often gamble throughout the Regency period, and many of those clubs still thrive today. They provide an elegant home from home to people who want, and can afford, a little more privacy and comfort than is available in London’s public places of entertainment.
Though Simpson’s on the Strand is open to anyone, the decoration immediately reminds Strike of a gentleman’s club when he goes there to meet Jerry Waldegrave while trying to find out what happened to Gothic writer Owen Quine (The Silkworm). Once an eighteenth-century gentleman’s chess club, Simpson’s speaks to Strike in an old and familiar language of hierarchy, order and stately decorum. Here are the dark, sludgy clubland colours that men choose without reference to their womenfolk: thick marble columns and solid leather armchairs that would support a drunken dandy and glimpsed beyond double doors, past the coat-check girl, a restaurant full of dark wood panelling.
Fancourt was sitting slantwise on a bright red couch, one arm along its back, a leg a little raised in an exaggerated pose of ease. A Damien Hirst spot painting hung right behind his over-large head, like a neon halo.
The Silkworm, Robert Galbraith
Their investigation into Quine’s brutal murder takes Strike to a far more modern club too, not on St James’s but on Dean Street in Soho, the preferred stomping ground of the TV and film industry in the capital. The Groucho Club gains its cachet not from its rather nondescript exterior, but from the fact that relatively few are allowed within the members-only club for the creative arts. Rather than leather armchairs and dark colours, the Groucho is filled with primary-coloured sofas and is hung with modern artworks. There Strike meets Michael Fancourt, best-selling and critically acclaimed novelist, and founder member. Over a glass of wine, Fancourt discusses the history and house he shared with Quine, and their friendship with an American writer who died tragically young, but Strike is forced to conduct his interview while hearing an ex-soap star on a nearby table holding forth about a recent job playing the sort of soldier Strike once was. Fancourt pays the bill, and is condescending when he does, dropping a Ben Jonson quote about a poor soldier in the process. Strike bests him by quoting Catullus in the original Latin, before limping out of the club a little closer to his goal of finding Owen’s killer.
The club was so noisy and packed it was hard to see much of it except glimpses of squashy sofas and a crackling log fire. The walls of the low-ceilinged bar were liberally covered in prints, paintings and photographs; it had the feeling of a country house, cosy and a little scruffy.
The Silkworm, Robert Galbraith
The hunt leads him to another club, also for the arts and very unlike the original London Clubs of St James’s. The investigation comes to a head in the garden of the Chelsea Arts Club, where publishers Roper Chard are holding a dinner for a children’s author, Larry Pinkelman. Pinkelman and Quine share an agent as well as a publisher, and Fancourt is also in attendance. So too is Nina Lascelles, the woman who helped Strike get hold of Quine’s shocking new manuscript. He hasn’t used her to get into the Arts Club, though; instead, Strike has recruited his half-brother, Al Rokeby, who has arranged an invite from a friend who is a member. Al is happy to help, and even, as the tension mounts and the killer is cornered, agrees to keep his phone on in case Strike needs him despite the club policy against them.
‘I didn’t think places like this still existed,’ she said in disbelief, after a minute’s reading off the monitor.
‘Places like what?’
‘It’s a gentleman’s club… very Tory… no women allowed, except as guests of club members at lunchtime and “to avoid confusion”, Robin read from the Wikipedia page, “all male staff members are called George.”’
Lethal White, Robert Galbraith
After the capture of the Shacklewell Ripper, Strike finds himself in the heart of traditional clubland after a disturbed young man arrives at the Denmark Street offices haunted by memories of a murder, and he and Robin are drawn into the world of government minister Jasper Chiswell (Lethal White). Pratt’s is on Park Place, just off St James’s. This is not an area of London that Strike usually visits on his own account, given that he has neither the means nor the inclination to buy from gentlemen’s outfitters, long-established gun shops or centuries-old wine dealers, but he realises he has been here before with his former fiancée, Charlotte. Strike is welcomed into the club where rich crimsons, greens and dark wood predominate and led to a cosy basement for lunch where the ceiling has sunk so low that it appears partially supported by a large dresser on which sundry porcelain platters are displayed, the topmost ones half embedded into the plaster. Pratt’s is the very antithesis of the smart restaurants where Strike tails errant husbands and wives, where the lighting is chosen to complement glass and granite. Pratt’s is dimly lit. Brass picture lights dot walls papered in dark red, which is largely obscured by stuffed fish in glass cases, hunting prints and political cartoons. The ambience is of cosy informality, as though a bunch of aristocratic boys have dragged all the things they liked about the grown-up world – its games, its drink and its trophies – down into the basement where Nanny will dole out smiles, comfort and praise.
Jasper Chiswell, who Strike thinks not particularly likeable, tells Strike over plain and unfussy food that he is being blackmailed. The investigation means that Robin will have to go undercover a few minutes’ walk away across the Mall in the Houses of Parliament, and as the case grows darker Strike will encounter his former fiancée in the flesh at a reception at the sixteenth-century royal palace which gives St James’s Street its name.
Robin had expected the Arts Club to be smart, but even so the degree of grandeur came as a surprise. From the white-jacketed waiters and the marble floors, to the oyster bar and extravagant modern chandeliers, the place gave the Ritz a run for its money.
The Ink Black Heart, Robert Galbraith
After artist Edie Ledwell is murdered in Highgate Cemetery, Robin and Strike are asked to meet with her producers and closest relative in one of London’s smartest clubs – the Arts Club in Mayfair. Over Wagyu beef, they are tasked with finding out who the online troll known as Anomie, who was harassing Edie, actually was (The Ink Black Heart). Meeting in the club means they can discuss the case in the luxurious quiet of a private dining room. Robin is impressed, but the delight Heather Ledwell takes in the meal she finds off-putting. They are here in this sleekly appointed club, eating this delicious food, because of the brutal death of Heather’s niece by marriage, and her frank enjoyment of her fancy lunch and her persistent eyeing-up of Strike seem both inappropriate and distasteful to Robin. She greets with relief Strike’s suggestion of a pint and a debrief at The Tottenham, their regular pub, which Strike treats the way some of his clients treat their clubs; a place you can recover, eat, or conduct business and take interviews away from the formal setting of an office.
Strike and Robin travelled together by taxi from their office to the Reform Club, a large, grey nineteenth-century building that stood on Pall Mall. ‘Sir Colin’s in the coffee room,’ said the tailcoated attendant who took their names at the door, and led them across the vast atrium. Robin, who’d thought she looked reasonably smart in black trousers and a sweater, which would also work for her surveillance job later, now felt slightly underdressed.
The Running Grave, Robert Galbraith
Robin’s most challenging undercover assignment, joining the cultish Universal Humanitarian Church, begins with a meeting in another historic London club (The Running Grave). The Reform Club was founded in 1836 and has always been home to politicians and thinkers known for pursuing a progressive political agenda. It was one of the first London clubs to admit women as members. Now white marble busts stand sentinel on square plinths and large oil paintings of eminent Whigs look benignly down from gold frames, while columns of fluted stone rise from the tiled floor to the first-floor balcony, then up to a vaulted glass ceiling. The partners still retreat to a pub for a debrief, however, after agreeing to help Sir Colin Edensor investigate the cult which has stolen his son.
‘I like this club,’ said Robin, trying to put Decima at her ease.
‘I chose it because it’s near your office, and we can be private. My father hates it,’ Decima added.
‘I can’t see how anyone could dislike this,’ said Robin, looking around at the understated elegance of the place; the wood panelling, the fresh flowers.
‘My father doesn’t approve of any clubs except his own,’ said Decima. ‘Anyway, this is always full of media people. The shitterati, my father calls them.’
The Hallmarked Man, Robert Galbraith
During their investigation into the mysterious body found in the vault of Ramsay Silver (The Hallmarked Man), Robin doesn’t just visit one of London’s most fashionable clubs, she meets the owner. Decima Mullins is sure that the unidentified body is that of her missing boyfriend, Rupert, whom her father employed at his eponymous club Dino’s. Decima much prefers Quo Vadis.
Robin goes to Dino’s to try and talk to Decima’s sister Cosima but finds herself invited in instead by Dino himself. The opulent hallway is full of artfully tarnished mirrors, and the walls are covered in midnight blue fabric patterned in gold, featuring stylised 1920s women and greyhounds. A real white canine Robin recognises as a Pyrenean Mountain Dog is waiting for Longcaster just inside the door. As he leads Robin upstairs, more burgundy-clad staff straighten like elegant meerkats at Longcaster’s approach. Robin refuses to be intimidated by this man or by his club, because she’s met far more frightening people than Dino Longcaster during her detective career, but the increase in alertness and nerves that seems to touch every member of staff they pass tells her that it might take a certain degree of gumption not to be frightened of Dino Longcaster.
Robin heard of the club before the investigation began. She’d considered taking her mother to the Michelin-starred restaurant attached to the club but decided against it when she found lunch was four-hundred quid a head. Strike wouldn’t pay that price, he says, unless they were chucking in the table and chairs.
Dino insists on choosing a cocktail for Robin. Along with the ‘Her Majesty’ made with Dubonnet and gin, he offers her styling advice: ‘there’s nothin’ cheaper lookin’ than black on a blonde.’ Robin leaves with useful information and fresh insight into the family. When she and Strike meet Lord Oliver Branfoot at a five-star hotel rather than a private club, Strike compliments her on her outfit. Robin doesn’t mention she chose the dusky pink version of the dress rather than the black because she also paid attention to Dino’s style tips.
London’s Clubs provide private and exclusive enclaves for its wealthy citizens, from style setters and creatives to aristocrats and politicians. As the agency grows more famous, and the mysteries they deal with become more complex, it might be safe to assume Robin and Strike will be entering through the discreet doorways and across the marbled hallways again in search of their secrets.
