[[quoteright:220:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/the-silkworm-by-robert-galbraith-aka-jk-rowling-book-cover_9829.jpg]]

-->'''Robin:''' We can't all be literary geniuses.\\
'''Strike:''' Thank Christ for that, from all I'm hearing about them.

''The Silkworm'' is the second crime novel in the [[Literature/CormoranStrikeNovels Cormoran Strike series]] by [[Creator/JKRowling Robert Galbraith]].

[[TimeSkip Eight months after]] [[Literature/TheCuckoosCalling solving the Lula Landry case]], HardboiledDetective Cormoran Strike has become a minor celebrity and is doing rather well for himself. His HypercompetentSidekick Robin Ellacott is set to marry the man of her dreams in a few months, but secretly feels she is [[DudeWheresMyRespect unappreciated]] by her fiancé, who deplores her job, and her boss, who she believes fails to see her potential.

This tension is put to the test when Leonora Quine arrives at Strike's door, imploring him to find her husband, author Owen Quine, who has been missing for almost two weeks. Shortly before he disappeared, Quine was all set to publish [[MagnumOpusDissonance what he believed]] was his MagnumOpus — ''Bombyx Mori'', Latin for [[TitleDrop silkworm]]. There's just one problem: his publishers refused to release the book, which uses [[WriteWhoYouKnow facsimiles of real people]] in his WorldOfSymbolism, and his portrayal of said individuals was [[TakeThat spiteful at best]], and at worst could potentially constitute libel. With excerpts of the manuscript circulating among Britain's literary elite, it's up to Cormoran and Robin to find Quine before someone takes violent umbrage to his work...

Adapted into the second season of the TV series ''Series/{{Strike|2017}}''.

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!!''The Silkworm'' contains examples of:

* AccidentalMisnaming: Despite his new-found (and unwelcome) fame in the light of the Lula Landry case, most people still call Strike "Cameron Strick" or some variant thereon. Also happens to Fancourt.
* AlcoholHic: A drunk Jerry Waldegrave hiccups at the Roper Chard party while talking to Strike.
* TheAlcoholic: Jerry Waldegrave, who is drunk at the Roper Chard party Strike attends, and who has the "sonorous over-deliberation" of the "practiced drunk". The people at the office blame Waldegrave's wife for driving him OffTheWagon.
* AllLoveIsUnrequited: Robin realises she doesn't love Matthew as much as he thought when they're approaching the wedding. [[spoiler:Liz loves Fancourt.]]
* AnimalMotifs: Subverted. Owen Quine tries to use the silkworm as his motif, "because you have to go through agonies to get at the good stuff", but nobody really pays it any attention beyond brief curiosity about whatever the hell "Bombyx Mori" means. At the end, however, his attempt to do so gives Strike a vital clue: [[spoiler:the Bombyx Mori of the book had acid poured all over him to access his "good stuff", when in reality silkworms are boiled — a pretty major sign that Quine, who knew this, did not write the book]].
* ArtisticLicenseChemistry: "Vitriol's sulfuric acid, and hydrochloric acid derives from it"...no. [=H2SO4=] (sulfuric acid) and [=HCl=] (hydrochloric acid) are two totally different chemicals.
* AssholeVictim: Owen Quine comes off as a crude, pretentious, self-important ManChild who flagrantly cheated on his wife while she was saddled with the care of their mentally-handicapped daughter and who backstabbed many people close to him, including his mistress, in his unpublished manuscript, while lying to them about how they would be portrayed. The last detail gradually alerts Cormoran to the fact that [[spoiler:[[DownplayedTrope the manuscript everyone’s been reading isn’t the one Quine wrote]], and was purposely written as a setup to the murder. He still blackmailed Liz for years, though by her own admission he probably didn’t even think of it as blackmail.]]
* BadSamaritan: Inverted initially, then played straight. [[spoiler:Quine blackmails Liz over discovering that she wrote the parody that drove Fancourt's wife to suicide. Both of them pretend that it's money for his seriously disabled daughter, Orlando, but it eventually drives Liz to kill him.]]
* BlackmailIsSuchAnUglyWord: See above. [[spoiler:Quine blackmails Liz over writing the parody, which both of them pretend is charity.]]
* BlackComedy: Like the first novel, not so much but it's there.
** RunningGag: the impressive-looking leather sofa which turned out to be one giant whoopee cushion. Though the farting is noticeably omitted during the tense scene where [[spoiler:Cormoran and Robin corner Pippa in his office]].
** Similarly to the first book, where "over the edge" was used several times in reference to Lula's mental state, two characters refer to Owen as a "gutless bastard".
* BlindingCameraFlash: Strike is caught by surprise, and briefly blinded, when flash-popping paparazzi appear outside his office. Someone tipped the press off that he found Owen Quine.
* ChekhovsGun: Elizabeth Tassel's wheezing cough is actually [[spoiler:a side-effect of inhaling acidic fumes]].
* ChekhovsSkill: Subverted: When Robin and Strike are stuck in traffic, Strike instructs Robin with some tricks he learned from his friend Nick's dad, who is a cabbie. Three guesses to where Strike acquires a taxicab from later, [[spoiler:that Robin uses to intercept a fleeing Liz Tassel]].
* ClusterFBomb: Along with ''Literature/TheCuckoosCalling'', though not to the same degree as ''Literature/TheCasualVacancy'', Rowling isn't afraid to depict realistic speech.
* ComplexityAddiction: Lampshaded by Strike, and causes the downfall of the villain: the plot was so elaborate and precisely organized that once a single detail was discovered, the rest of the plan quickly becomes obvious to Strike and is rather easy to prove.
* ConvictionByContradiction: [[spoiler:Strike proves that Fancourt must have read ''Bombyx Mori'' before he claims he did, because in a TV interview with a known date, he [[FreudianSlip slipped]] and starts to refer to his wife by the name her symbolic counterpart in the book is called by. Technically an aversion, as Fancourt is not the perpetrator of the crime.]]
* CountryMatters: See "Cluster F-Bomb" above.
* CuckoldHorns: Present in ''Bombyx Mori'' and, eventually, one of the clues that helps Strike deduce the truth. "The Cutter", the RomanAClef stand-in for Jerry Waldegrave the editor, has horns. Strike figures out that the horns are an allusion to the old rumor that Michael Fancourt was the real father of Jerry's daughter Joanna. The thing is, Quine knew that to be impossible, because he knew from back in the day that Fancourt had once caught the mumps and as a result was rendered infertile.
* {{Deuteragonist}}: Robin Ellacott returns in this novel.
* DiscreetDrinkDisposal: When Leonora ducks out of the kitchen Strike pours the terrible tea she made down the sink.
* DramaticDrop: "The book slipped out of her lap and fell, disregarded, to the floor." This is how Robin reacts after Strike texts her with the news that he found Owen Quine, the man they've been looking for, murdered.
* {{Epigraph}}: Like the first book, there's one before every chapter. This time, however, they're all quotes from Elizabethan-era playwrights such as William Congreve, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, [[Theatre/TheDuchessOfMalfi John Webster]], and, yes, [[Creator/WilliamShakespeare the Bard himself]] (although [[Theatre/TimonOfAthens the play]] she references is one of his more obscure works).
* EveryoneIsJesusInPurgatory: {{Invoked|Trope}}. Quine and Fancourt actually write novels geared toward the people who analyze in this fashion.
* EveryoneWentToSchoolTogether: Fancourt, Liz Tassel, Owen Quine, and PosthumousCharacter Joe, who died of AIDS before the novel began, all went to Oxford together.
* FictionalDocument: ''Bombyx Mori'' first of all, but this being a story about authors and the literary world there are references to several other imaginary novels, including Quine's one semi-popular novel ''Hobart's Sin'', his novel ''The Balzac Brothers'', Joe North's novel ''Towards the Mark'' that Michael Fancourt finished up after North died, and passing references to a couple of Fancourt's novels.
* {{Foil}}: Leonora Quine is an excellent foil for Cormoran's [[Literature/TheCuckoosCalling previous client, John Bristow.]] John is an unusually extroverted man; fiercely protective of his surviving family; convinced that his sister's death was a murder rather than a suicide; [[spoiler:flies under the radar of both the police and Strike for the entire case; and is ultimately revealed to be Lula's killer]]. Leonora is an unusually introverted woman; shows subtle but devoted concern about her daughter's health at all times, even ahead of her own well-being; shows little to no interest in her husband's whereabouts following his disappearance, [[spoiler:and takes his death with an unusual amount of grace]]. [[spoiler:[[IncriminatingIndifference She is immediately tagged as a suspect in his murder]], and is even arrested at one point. Unlike Bristow, however, she is completely innocent.]]
** Robin is also turning into a good foil for Charlotte, particularly in the way that [[spoiler:both women have found themselves lying to their future husbands. While Charlotte had lied to Cormoran compulsively [[ItAmusedMe seemingly for kicks]], Robin is using her lies to protect what she feels is a crumbling relationship between herself and Matthew]].
* {{Foreshadowing}}:
** Matthew, complaining after Strike was late for their meeting at the bar, says "He'll probably arrive forty minutes late and ruin the service" (Robin and Matthew's wedding ceremony). This is exactly what happens at the end of the next novel, ''Literature/CareerOfEvil''.
** When ruminating about alcoholics, Strike remembers an "alcoholic major" whose 12-year-old daughter reported him for sexually abusing her. When Strike came to make the arrest the major swung at him with a broken bottle, and "Strike had laid him out." The alcoholic major is Noel Brockbank from ''Career of Evil'', and the whole story of the abused daughter and Strike punching Brockbank out is pivotal to the plot.
** Strike thinks about how this killer left no trace, no history of violence, "no bloodstained past dragging behind them like a bag of offal for hungry hounds." This is how Liz Tassel has been disposing of her bag of offal, Owen Quine's guts: by taking them out of her freezer a bit at a time, thawing the bits, and feeding them to her dogs.
** Strike says that Liz wants to meet for lunch. He notes that all these book people love their lunches, and wonders if the killer doesn't want to run the risk that Stike might find the guts in their freezer. The guts are in Liz's freezer.
** In an interview, Fancourt flippantly says that he might write an introduction for ''Bombyx Mori'' when it's published. At the end Strike tells Robin that Fancourt actually will write an introduction for the real ''Bombyx Mori''.
* FreudianSlip: PlayedForDrama. See ConvictionByContradiction above.
* FunnyBackgroundEvent: While in a public train, Strike and Robin discuss a witness who reported seeing a woman in burka, and start speculating on how someone in that outfit could have carried out the very grisly murder without detection. A quiet woman wearing a hijab is mentioned just before the conversation starts, and she gets out as soon as possible, having presumably assumed the worst. Whoops.
* GenderBlenderName: Orlando is a...unique name for a girl, but [[Literature/OrlandoABiography appropriate]] given that Orlando is the daughter of a writer known for gender-blending themes.
* GenderConcealingWriting: Given that Rowling does not use a [[TheWatson Watson]] for the Cormoran Strike books she sometimes has to write obliquely when telling the reader that Cormoran has figured out who did it, while not leading the reader know just who did it until TheReveal. She kind of cheats in this one, however, as Cormoran tells Robin that "someone" cooked up the murder plot and "they" got Quine to the Talgarth Road house "where they wanted him"--this coming immediately after the passage where Cormoran is said to have told Robin who the killer is.
* GoodCopBadCop: Done completely accidentally by Robin and Cormoran when Cormoran drags a hostile Pippa into the office. Robin's calm, gentle understanding and Cormoran's fury lead to Pippa coughing up quite a bit of info. Cormoran realizes this after the fact, marveling at the good cop/bad cop routine they just pulled off.
* {{Gorn}}: ''Bombyx Mori'', the novel-within-a-novel which is one of the hinges of the plot, is pretty gruesome. [[spoiler:As is the murder of Quine, which exactly echoes the ending of his (or rather Tassel's version of his) book.]]
* HeelFaceTurn: [[spoiler:Kathryn Kent and Pippa become, if not exactly friends, then at least cordial towards Cormoran and Robin, despite the former's unfortunate first encounter with Strike and the latter spending the better portion of the novel trying to stalk and then stab him.]]
* HypercompetentSidekick:
** Amongst her many talents, Robin turns out to be an expert driver who has taken advanced driving courses and has practiced those skills.
** Lampshaded at the end of the book: [[spoiler:Strike mentions that he will have to get another temp to stand-in for Robin while she goes on the surveillance course Strike bought her as a Christmas present, and Robin half-jokingly replies "I hope she's rubbish."]]
* {{Hypocrite}}:
** Liz Tassel points out that Michael Fancourt is one. He is furious at both Liz and Owen for the anonymous parody believed to be written by Owen of his wife's work that drove her to suicide. Tassel points out that Fancourt had made a career out of similar writings. [[spoiler:And then it ''really'' gets thrown back in Liz's face when it turns out she wrote the parody in the first place.]]
** Robin silently starts believing that her fiancé Matthew is this for complaining about Robin working long hours, when he himself does as well.
* HypocriticalHumor: Kathryn Kent's blog is [[RougeAnglesOfSatin rife with misspellings and grammatical errors]], yet she has a tongue-in-cheek "Keep Clam and Proofread" coffee mug.
* INeverSaidItWasPoison: Subverted. [[spoiler:Strike realises that Quine didn't write the book because he knew how silkworms ''actually'' were killed to extract silk.]]
* InvitedAsDinner: InUniverse, ''Bombyx Mori'' ends with Bombyx thinking that he's been invited to a feast as the guest of honor. Instead all the other characters kill an eat him. Owen Quine's killer proceeds to gut him and arrange seven plates for a dinner, evoking the ending of Quine's book.
* {{Irony}}: Owen Quine is said to be an excellent literary mimic, writing spot-on parodies of his friend [[GayBestFriend Joe North]] for their own amusement while North was trying to finish his first novel; on a less amusing note, he also wrote the parody that led to Michael Fancourt's first wife's suicide. [[spoiler:He is killed in a complicated scheme which, among other things, involved Elizabeth Tassel becoming an excellent literary mimic of her own, imitating his early style to create a fake ''Bombyx Mori''. It also turns out ''she'' wrote the parody of Fancourt's wife's work.]]
* JerkassHasAPoint: despite the deep {{Irony}} of it all, Liz Tassel does have a point about Fancourt's dead wife. Someone fragile enough to kill themselves over a nasty minded parody has no business trying to be a published writer, a profession that is full of critics and potentially harsh criticism. (And that's just the fans!)
* LateArrivalSpoiler: Zig-zagged. It is mentioned that Lula Landry's [[NeverSuicide suicide was actually a murder]] (though that should have been obvious from the start), but her killer is never identified by name.
* MathematiciansAnswer: As Strike is going in to see Leonora Quine the policeman stationed outside says "Can I ask who you are, sir?" Strike's only answer is "Yeah, I expect so."
* MostWritersAreWriters: The book is built around a literary scandal and most of the supporting cast are novelists or publishers. They're pretty uniformly depicted as [[SelfDeprecation neurotic, praise-hungry, self-hating narcissists]]. One character even quips that if you want a sense of camaraderie in your profession, you should join the army and train to kill people - if you want all your colleagues to hope for your downfall, write novels.
* MostWritersAreMale:
** Liz Tassel complains about this trope. Men like Owen and Fancourt are happy enough to have women review their work, and are especially happy with their female fans, but Lord forbid a woman actually dare to write a book herself.
** Fancourt actually provides a rather distasteful explanation for this: women with children simply cannot write good literature, apparently. [[note]]Now remember who "Robert Galbraith" actually is.[[/note]]
* NoodleIncident: A couple more references to Robin dropping out of university and abandoning her psychology degree, including Robin ruminating about how Matthew's mother had regarded her as "forever tainted" by the circumstances in which Robin dropped out of school. The exact reason why Robin dropped out isn't explained until the next novel, ''Literature/CareerOfEvil''.
* {{Not}}: The traditional version is used by Leonora Quine. She explains to Strike that since her husband has gone missing, somebody has started putting dog excrement through their letter box. "Three or four times now, at night. Nice thing to find in the morning, I don't think."
* NotMyDriver: Manages to feature a ''heroic'' example.
* {{Paparazzi}}: This time, Strike ''himself'' comes in for that treatment at one point.
* PrisonRape: Strike reminds [[spoiler:Pippa]] of this as part of a (''probably'' not serious) threat.
* ProductionThrowback:
** A magazine cover featuring Creator/EmmaWatson is mentioned at one point, possibly indicating that the Cormoran Strike novels and the Harry Potter universe are not in the same continuity.
** Strike visits a used book store on Charing Cross Road. A used book store on Charing Cross Road was previously mentioned in ''Literature/HarryPotterAndThePhilosophersStone'' right next to the Leaky Cauldron, which Muggles cannot see.
** Robin was rushing to catch an 11 o'clock train at King's Cross like the Hogwarts students on the first day of school.
* RedHerring: More so than ''The Cuckoo's Calling'' (and reminiscent of ''Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets''), there are clues suggesting at least four or five plausible suspects.
* RevengeViaStorytelling: Quine promised that he would write a novel in celebration of his loved ones, such as his mistress Katherine and their surrogate daughter Pippa. However, the novel itself is a violent revenge fantasy, lashing out at all his co-workers, his wife Leonora, and his onetime friend Michael Fancourt. His editor Liz is depicted as a violent rapist, for instance, and the others are subterranean monsters. [[spoiler:But double subverted. That isn't Quine's book, which depicts Katherine and Pippa positively. Liz wrote a parody of it and hid the real book before killing Quine in revenge for blackmailing her. So the story is a double revenge: against Quine himself and against other literary figures.]]
* RomanAClef: InUniverse. Owen Quine's book ''Bombyx Mori'' is a thinly veiled and very nasty portrait of practically everyone he knows in the literary world.
* SaidBookism: Kathryn Kent "ejaculated" a sentence near the end of the novel. Rowling also used this HaveAGayOldTime synonym for "exclaim" a couple of times in the Literature/HarryPotter novels.
* SeekingTheMissingFindingTheDead: Cormoran is hired by Leonora to find her missing husband, but his corpse is found instead in a quite grotesque murder scene.
* ShoutOut: "Cormoran" turns out to be the name of the Cornish giant who is the villain of the classic tale ''Jack the Giant Killer''. Appropriate, given how tall Strike is. [[spoiler:It also becomes more appropriate in this novel, when he takes down one of the "giants" of the British literature industry, Elizabeth Tassel.]]
* ShoutOutToShakespeare: DoubleSubverted. At first, the epigraphs preceding each chapter quote plays written by seemingly every pre Victorian-era playwright except The Bard; though when Shakespeare is eventually quoted, it’s from ''Theatre/TimonOfAthens'', one of his least-known plays.
* SmallNameBigEgo: Owen Quine definitely fits the bill. While his first novel ''Hobart's Sin'' was critically praised, his later novels were panned and he never enjoyed much commercial success or fame. This doesn't stop him from believing himself to be a misunderstood genius.
* StreisandEffect: InUniverse, as Robin observes that, if someone didn't want ''Bombyx Mori'' to be published because it was insulting or libelous, murdering Quine was the worst thing they could have done because it would draw a ton of publicity. (The answer is that the killer actually wanted the book read.)
* SummationGathering: Subverted. All the characters except Leonora Quine gather together for the climactic chapter, but Strike didn't summon them; they were at a party for another Roper-Chard client. And Strike doesn't drop TheReveal on the whole group, instead pulling two of them outside.
* TakeThat: When Strike meets with Culpepper, he cracks some snark about phone hacking and even threatens to inform the police that Culpepper had expected him to do it. Culpepper is a journalist for ''News of the World'', which of course was shut down for just that. [[TwentyMinutesIntoThePast (The book takes place in 2010, just under a year before the scandal became public.)]]
** And which best-selling author was a victim of the hacking?
* TextualCelebrityResemblance: Owen Quine's wife Leonora is compared to a long-haired [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_West Rose West]] [[spoiler:by the British press when she is first arrested for Quine's murder]].
* TrueArt: InUniverse, a subject of much discussion, as ''Bombyx Mori'' fits two parameters:
** TrueArtIsAngsty: InUniverse, the novel is stuffed with violence, rape, mutilation, BodyHorror, and it ends with a hideously gruesome murder and cannibalism.
** TrueArtIsIncomprehensible: InUniverse, there's also loads of obscure symbolism and lore, such as a character named [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic%C5%93ne,_or_The_silent_woman Epicoene]], for your super obscure Renaissance literature references. However, also a SubvertedTrope in that the book is full of very thinly veiled caricatures of people Owen Quines knows.
* TwentyMinutesIntoThePast: Follows eight months on from ''The Cuckoo's Calling'' and is therefore set in November-December 2010, with some contemporary political stories being mentioned, such as [[http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11741289 Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke announcing cuts to the legal aid budget]].
* WhoMurderedTheAsshole: Although the lead suspect is Owen Quine’s wife, the ''Bombyx Mori'' manuscript [[TakeThat granted a motive to just about everyone he’d ever come in regular contact with]]. [[spoiler:[[SubvertedTrope At least the version of it that Liz passed off as his]].]]
* WritersSuck: The London literary community is apparently an absolute cesspit of grudges and affairs.