I think it was on Joe Bouchard's FB page that I first heard that "Robert Galbraith"/JKR was about to release "Career of Evil" and that it was the third book in a crime investigation series. I immediately decided to initially seek out the first two books to set me up before I read it, as I hate trying to insert myself into an already established series. I want to be there from the start to appreciate all the later subtleties and nuances that might crop up in future volumes.

I'll admit it now - I've never actually read the Harry Potter books, so I had no idea if I would enjoy her writing style or not in this rather different genre, a genre with which I'm pretty familiar and generally appreciate... author permitting, of course...

I had seen a couple of the Harry Potter films on telly but didn't think much of them, to be honest... it felt to me like she'd taken Terry Pratchett's "Unseen University" idea - i.e. a school for wizards - and basically nicked it. She didn't go as far as having an orangutan for a librarian, but she might as well have done...

Whilst reading the Strike books, I soon got the impression that grisly crime fiction was not really her forte. The prose wasn't awful, but it was pedestrian, and there was nothing much of interest there to encourage me to keep reading any further. I didn't like her characters or portrayals, and the plot/storylines felt perfunctory... in short, other people do this sort of thing much better...

However, for me, the elephant in the room was Strike, the central character: she made him a tall, stocky veteran ex-Military Police Special Investigator!! Wow. Zero marks out of 10 for originality on that one. OK, so she chopped his leg off, and stuck him in a London office as opposed to itinerantly wandering the American highways and byways armed only with a creased passport and a folding toothbrush, but come on, now... a bit more thought was required here, surely...? Like Lee Child's characters always say: "You don't mess with the Special Investigators..."

If it wasn't for the fact that I had to read the first two in order to set me up for reading "Career of Evil", I would certainly have abandoned the books after the first one. I knew then that it was going to be a hard slog...

I hate it when I don't like the books I'm reading but I've already determined that I have to get through them for whatever reason. I had to do it with the Bourne books (those early Ludlum ones are long, boring and painful), and Tom Clancy (that guy needed a bloody good editor), for example, and so here I was again... I gritted my teeth and fatalistically ploughed on.

Finally, I got to that third book. If you haven't seen it, or know much about it, you might be interested to find that every chapter has a BOC reference for a title - sometimes accompanied by a lyric fragment, sometimes not...

At first glance, you think - wow, that's a pretty neat literary device, but that's only really true if they have some bearing on the content that follows... also, you begin to wonder if she took any plot inspiration from those references? You wonder if it was possible to construct a list of song titles and then spin a story out of them...?

Then, on second glance, you notice a glaring disparity amongst the list of titles - on top of the fact that there are some blatantly odd choices amongst them, a number are repeated, some more than once - for example, four - yes four - chapters are entitled "Before the Kiss"!! WTF?

What initially seemed to be an interesting idea actually turns out to be poorly-executed and half-hearted, as if she, or her editor, had thought up the idea but then couldn't really be bothered seeing it through to the end with any degree of conviction...

The fact that some of them had a lyrical fragment attached to them and some didn't was an inconsistency that jarred with me somewhat...

It gets worse - then, when you actually read the book, you noticed that these headings had nothing really to do with the contents of the chapter - they're just sort of bolted on to the start of each chapter with no rhyme or reason for it... it was almost as if they were chosen at random from say, an internet search...

This might explain, for example, the downright weird inclusion of "The Girl That Love Made Blind", obviously not a BOC song, but instead an Albert demo you can experience via the magic of youTube... a BOC fan would have known that this was an inconsistency...

Here's a list of all the chapter titles, so you can get an idea of what I'm talking about, if you haven't seen them already:

After noticing the randomness and repetition of the titles, I began to get the distinct feeling that this wasn't the work of an actual fan - this was the work of someone given the job of fulfilling a specifically themed task, and deciding to cut a few corners in order to (sort of) achieve it.

Maybe JKR wasn't such a "big BOC fan" after all...?

But this is surely a conundrum that is easily solved. All I have to do is check out the interviews, both in print and on the radio, that she gave around the time of the book's release and see what she says about it...

To be honest, I'd actually be very happy to see some actual proof that BOC has such a high profile advocate, but in my usual mean spirit of "trust then verify", I'd just like to see her say the words...

So I looked...

There are a number of reviews of the book online, some with interview segments with Rowling, but not many seemed to be particularly interested in addressing/exploring the BOC angle.

One or two did, however... Here's what the New York Times said in their review (20 Oct 2015):

It's bollocks, of course, it wasn't BOC's "more portentous, doom-laden lyrics"... it was just any old (song title) port in a storm, really... but at least they mentioned BOC...

NPR did a couple of Rowling interviews and a podcast on the launch of the book, and here's a short mention off their website interview transcript:

Hmmm... that's a rather vague and non-specific answer, wouldn't you say...? Far from answering the specific question of "why BOC?" in fact, she completely side-stepped it.

If she was a "sucker for guitars" then why not use song titles from say, Wishbone Ash or Thin Lizzy or (fill in your own guitar band name)...?

Presumably, if you're reading this, you yourself are a BOC fan (this is a BOC site, after all) so let me ask you this: how would you have answered that question? Would you have made some vague comment about liking guitars in general or would you have actually mentioned just what it was that drew you to BOC specifically...?

I know I bloody would...

On the same day (Mon 2 Nov 2015), the BBC Radio 2 Bookclub did a feature on the book with Simon Mayo interviewing Rowling and this is how it started off:

So a bit more BOC bang for our Buck there with this one, and some information from which we can draw some reasonable inferences.

She says she'd made Strike's mum a "fan" of "stadium rock" and so she was looking round for a specific band to fit that bill, and she'd heard that BOC had the reputation of being an "amazing live act"...

Note that she doesn't say she'd actually seen BOC live and so personally knew they were great live, or anything like that. She was just going on "reputation"... which is a shorthand version of saying she was going on research...

And that's fine... authors have to do that all the time and things work out better when they do... and do it right...

Having selected a suitably apt "stadium rock" band to enamour Strike's mum, Rowling also says she initially thought of using some of their lyrics in her text but when she sat down and looked at their back-catalogue, she decided the lyrical content was so rich that she'd be able to use them more widely throughout the book.

The implications of this is that she was NOT familiar with them before she started "researching" them, and so is unlikely to have been a fan of them specifically prior to that. After all, if she was already a fan, she wouldn't NEED to research their back catalogue...

The long and the short of it seems to be that she had a literary need for a rock band, and BOC (luckily) ticked her boxes...

I chuckled when I heard the bit about "so many of the lyrics apply to my plot"... you can argue that there may well be tenuous links to a few, but the rest of them packed their bags, got on a bus, and left "tenuous" far behind in the rearview mirror long ago...

So... we have seen that JK Rowling has been given various opportunities in the media to declare her undying devotion to all things BOC but has consistently failed to do so. Yet the publicity on BOC-flavoured media outlets, social and otherwise, is that JKR is a "big fan".

Buck Dharma himself was quite stoked when he heard about it, saying he was "flattered that J.K. Rowling cared enough to dive deep into the BOC catalog to source the book, even going to the post-SONY records."

So even Buck thought she must have been a "big fan" because she "cared enough to dive deep into the BOC catalog"... well, as we've already discussed, coming up with a list of BOC song titles doesn't mean you care, it just means you've got access to a computer...

That's why I was interested in an ARTery feature by Jim Sullivan on the wbur website which was written from a BOC perspective:

• BOC Finds Itself Tangled In J.K. Rowling's 'Career Of Evil' || by Jim Sullivan [15 Dec 2015]

In the article, Eric Bloom is asked for his reactions on being chosen as the object of Strike's mum's affections:

That's a pretty measured response - clearly, and quite refreshingly, EB hasn't fallen for the hype of it all. He doesn't know if Rowling is a fan or not, and wonders what the trigger was for her to select BOC as her muse...

Here's a slightly different response:

"The Girl That Love Made Blind" is repeatedly touted as proof that Rowling MUST be "a huge Blue Oyster Cult fan" but that's actually the proof that she probably isn't...

Let's say you're researching BOC - initially, you're looking to make a list of song-titles, so you Google away, and jot down any that you come across, maybe including some of the youTube links that crop up with the search results for later examination.

Once you've got your list of titles, you then examine them. Now, bearing in mind, an actual BOC fan wouldn't need to do this research because they already know all the tracks. For example, like most fans, I can recite every track off every album in order - that's just how fans are...

But let's say a fan did it just as an aide memoire, their list would not include Albert's "Love Made Blind", just as it wouldn't include "Half Life Time", or "TNT" etc or a Stalk Forrest tune or something off Buck's Archives and so on, because they know that they're not actual BOC songs... they have the contextual background knowledge to weed those out before they made any list...

A non-fan wouldn't know that - they'd see the youtube video of "Love Made Blind", see Blue Oyster Cult mentioned in the title, see the Imaginos backdrop behind the video and, lacking contextual awareness, add the song to the list...

That's why...

Since the "Career Of Evil" book came out, George Geranios has posted a number of interesting BOC demos (amongst some other stuff) to his youtube channel. I am absolutely certain that had the book been written today, some of those would have been picked up by a youtube search on "Blue Oyster Cult", and would definitely have found their way onto the list of potential chapter headings under the guise of BOC tracks without the compiler of the list realising that they weren't really...

"Gun", "The Only Thing that Lasts Forever", "Things To Come", "Late Night Street Fight" etc... any of those could have been shoe-horned in somewhere as a chapter title because they - how did she put it? - "fit the plot so beautifully"...

I'm just glad we didn't end up with this:

• Seriously...?

So, you might be wondering, if not BOC, then who?... which bands/music does JKR actually listen to?

In a 2015 interview with Lauren Laverne for The Guardian, there was the following exchange:

So, apparently, she was a Morrissey/Smiths fan... and yet, during the week of 21-25 Sep 2020, when Rowling was invited to select and discuss her favourite and most memorable songs on Ken Bruce's "Tracks of My Years" on BBC Radio 2, these are the ten songs/bands she chose:

1. "Cloudbusting" by Kate Bush
2. "Heaven" by Emeli Sande
3. "Big Country" by Big Country
4. "Court and Spark" by Joni Mitchell
5. "All Along The Watchtower" by Jimi Hendrix
6. "River Song" by Dennis Wilson
7. "Ramble On" by Led Zeppelin
8. "Waitress" by First Aid Kit
9. "Ain't No Sunshine" by Bill Withers
10. "Dream On Dreamer" by Brand New Heavies

The reasons behind her selections are detailed here.

So, no mention of Blue Oyster Cult, of course, but no mention of Morrissey, either...

If you check out the link above, you'll see that she describes herself as a "mad Joni Mitchell fan", but weirdly, she only got to be so after researching her music for a book. I think we're seeing a pattern of behaviour here - it's almost like she has to do research in order to learn how to try to portray herself as a music fan...

Who knows, after researching all those BOC song titles for "Career", maybe she'll learn to become a "mad BOC fan" one day also...

OK, this is not strictly in the remit of this article, but I'm sort of broadening the scope out a bit to look at the TV series.

I think everyone was pretty excited by the idea that the BBC were going to film the book, and judging by the chapter headings in the book etc, we were all hoping for a soundtrack packed chock full of BOC...

Yeah, right...

Anyway, it turned out that the BBC were actually doing all the books, with the first two being shown consecutively. "The Cuckoo's Calling" was shown in three parts, starting on 27 Aug 2017, and was followed by a two-part adaptation of "The Silkworm", starting on 10 Sep 2017.

I checked them out. They were OK but nothing special. It didn't hurt that the guy playing Strike was Tom Burke, who's not bad - he was Athos in The Musketeers series...

I paid special attention to the music in the shows. Musically, both had a consistent sort of haunting main theme at the start, which was sometimes reprised as background within the programmes, so it was looking like the chances were they'd be using that again in the third instalment... I had been hoping that we'd get to hear "Career" blasting out over the credits (either start or ending), but it was clear that they had their credits music already in place and wouldn't be changing that just because the next part of the series was named after a BOC song title... bummer...

We had to wait nearly 5 months for "Career of Evil" which came in two instalments, beginning on 25 Feb 2018. Overall, drama-wise, it was alright - it was reasonably watchable - I've seen better, I've seen worse... It seemed to stick quite closely to the book, up to a point - what was missing were the bits from the villain's p.o.v. - I did wonder how they'd present that part of it as the idea is that you're not supposed to know which of the three suspects it actually is and that would have given the game away, but they got round it by not presenting it...

From a BOC p.o.v., however, I have to say it was a bit underwhelming. In the first episode, there were a couple of BOC song excerpts and 2 or 3 band namechecks/song references; in the 2nd episode there was nada, except for a brief bit of Reaper over the start of the end credits, but even that got cut off for the real credit music...It looked like a very forced inclusion - it had all the hallmarks of someone saying at the end of the final edit:

I did a quick tally of all the mentions and here are the results:

Song excerpts [episode # and timestamp in brackets]:

Band name/lyric references [episode # and timestamp in brackets]:

Prior to the UK broadcast, Buck Dharma was soliciting opinions from anyone who had seen it, saying he "didn't know how much they paid attention to the BOC angle in the screen adaptation"...

On being told the answer, he said: "I'm not surprised the people who did the video adaptation had no particular reverence for the source material... I'm sure it'll be here eventually. I look forward to seeing it. "

Something I bet he would be surprised at was the absence of any "Blue Oyster Cult" (or Patti Smith) acknowledgments in the closing credits - the world and his dog got a mention, so far as the production crew were concerned, but not BOC...

I thought you had to give acknowledgments in the credits if you used someone's music in your show...? Cheeky buggers...

Anyway, all the adaptations are still up on the BBC iPlayer, if you want to check them out - here are the links, but they only work in the UK, so if you're based elsewhere, you'll have to spoof a UK IP address with a VPN:

The Cuckoo's Calling || The Silkworm || Career of Evil

NB: Since this page was written, the iplayer has changed how it works - you now have to sign in and it all seems to be linked to your TV license etc, so the above VPN suggestion is probably not going to work...

OK, so there's no evidence to point to JKR being an actual BOC fan, but, at the end of the day, does it really matter?

And the answer is: of course not. The important thing is that, for whatever reason, BOC got selected as the literary device for this book, the McGuffin, if you like, and that it surely raised the band's profile.

The band have been championed by other artists before - I don't just mean in the literary field, but also animation, film and music also, and this latest inclusion has surely helped consolidate their already impressive resumé.

Here's roadie Sam Judd's opinion:

When you hear that BOC are (extensively) mentioned in a high-profile book, as a fan, you are naturally delighted but you do wonder if it will have any tangible results for the band - will more people get turned on to BOC as a result? In short, will it result in increased record sales for the band?

Here's something I read in an Indian blog post that suggests that it just might:

When Buck was shown the above blog post, here was his response:

So, no, I don't think JK Rowling was a BOC fan, big or otherwise, at least prior to her writing the book, and I'd actually be surprised if she'd even heard of the band before undertaking the research, but that said, and all taken with all, the experience would appear to have been a pretty positive one for the band, presumably both culturally and financially (although I've seen no quantifiable metric to support that).

Plus, and here's the important part, we got to hear 47 seconds of "Mistress of the Salmon Salt" playing on primetime BBC... even if they weren't bloody credited...

I just wish it was a better book...