In every respect, The Cuckoo’s Calling was a competently executed detective drama, moving intelligently between the different hallmarks of the genre. It was never, for example, the high concept thriller of Sherlock – there are no astounding deductions or leaps of intuition. Rather, this was a case of gradually unveiling each layer of mystery, plunging the viewer into a well-drawn world of colourful suspects. You could describe it as generic, perhaps, but in a way that’d be missing the point; it’s not so much that The Cuckoo’s Calling typifies the genre, but rather embodies and enlivens it.

An article I wrote recently about The Cuckoo’s Calling.

I was, I think, probably a little too positive about it. I don’t know. The Strike adaptations started to take up quite a lot of thought for me for a while; they were often very close to being good, but never quite working. I got the sense that much of what was entertaining about them was almost by accident – an adaptation struggling against the flaws of its source material, for the most part. Indeed, lots of what was good about the show was probably just a quirk of casting Holliday Grainger, who did a great job with a character who I suspect could otherwise have been very flat.

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