As Daniel Radcliffe was rehearsing his heart out for Michael Grandage’s production of The Cripple of Inishmaan, J K Rowling was mounting her own attempt to move on from Harry Potter with the help of another differently abled hero, Cormoran Strike, the detective at the heart of her whodunnit-in-two-senses, The Cuckoo’s Calling.
But where an actor casting himself baldly against type risks giving the type still more power, leading to a performance discussed solely in negative terms (“un-Potter-like”), a novelist can achieve freedom from expectations not by striking out in a new, foolhardy direction (“Ian McEwan does comedy”) or pretending to write under a different name, but by actually writing under a different name. That is, until someone tweets about it and someone else turns the tweet into a newspaper column.
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