My brain it seems has a mind of its own and refuses, at least for the
present, to read any more Iris Murdoch; so I left several of her novels
only partially read on my Kindle and looked for something less taxing on
Amazon Prime. I saw nothing interesting and so added a couple of
channels one of which contained the British detective series /Cormoran
Strike.
/
/Cormoran Strike /was created by J. K. Rowling who apparently has gotten
tired of writing /Harry Potter /stories/. /Strike is ex-Royal Military
Police Special Investigation Branch who lost the lower half of his right
leg to an IED in Afghanistan. He previously studied at Oxford, but left
in his second year to join the Army following the death of his mother.
Strike is somewhat like a film-noir detective: always has a cigarette,
drinks too much, has complicated relationships with women, but he
doesn't have the typical smart mouth. He walks as funny as I do. In
his case however it is just acting. The actor Tom Burke resembles Stacy
Keach in the /Mike Hammer /series/. /He even has a Stacy Keach split
lip. Strike like Mike has a good friend who is a police detective,//but
he isn't nearly as fierce as Mike. In fact in the early episodes when
he finally confronts the killer, Camoran Strike loses his prosthesis.
He is wallowing around on the floor on his back, and might have lost the
fight if it weren't for the unexpected appearance of his secretary.
Also, I don't imagine the Rowling or the BBC will ever allow Strike to
carry a gun.
Rowling didn't make Strike easy for the TV producers to film.
Presumably they couldn't find an actor with the correct sort of
disability (if they looked for one); so they had to train Tom Burke to
walk funny. They show him climbing stairs pretty much the way I have
to. There are several scenes where you see his missing leg, but they do
that with Photoshop-like editing.
In the current (February 27, 2020) issue of /Science News /is the
article "Antidepressant could treat Covid-19, "Fluvoxamine prevents mild
cases from worsening, data suggests." In the study group no patients
who took fluvoxamine were hospitalized, whereas 12.5% of the patients
who did not take the drug were hospitalized. I felt a little like that,
i.e. not needing to be hospitalized from reading too much Iris Murdoch
thanks to having taken a few episodes of J. K. Rowling. :-)
Lawrence
