What connects Dune, The Lord of the Rings, On the Highway, Cloud Atlas, and Inherent Vice? Reply: they’re all books which were described at one level or one other as “unfilmable”. Add to that record, then, The Ink Black Coronary heart, the sixth instalment in a collection of personal detective novels by Robert Galbraith, a pseudonym for kids’s author-turned-political lightning rod, JK Rowling. Set amid the trolls and edgelords of web subcultures, this profoundly “on-line” story proves a problem for the BBC – will they be capable to flip it into one other gripping instalment of Strike?

We choose issues up within the aftermath of the occasions of 2022’s Troubled Blood: the non-public relationship between Cormoran Strike (Tom Burke) and his enterprise associate Robin Ellacott (Holliday Grainger) – a will they, received’t they of epic proportions – is as unsure as ever, however their skilled alliance stays sturdy. It must be. When a younger artist, Edie Ledwell (Mirren Mack), involves their company asking for help with a stalker, Robin declines to assist. However when she’s later discovered murdered, the Strike-Ellacott crew are drawn right into a harmful world that revolves round Drek’s Sport, a fictitious online game spun off from Ledwell’s much-loved cartoon, The Ink Black Coronary heart. Can the key to who killed her be discovered within the sport’s chatrooms? Or is there one thing else happening associated to the alt-right fascists in the actual world?

Those that have learn the e book will know that a lot of the motion takes place in verbatim transcripts of chat logs from inside Drek’s Sport. Naturally, this is able to not make for notably scintillating tv, and so a lot of the proceedings are relocated to the actual world. The Ink Black Coronary heart is a two-sided whodunit: who killed Edie and who’s Anomie, the mysterious determine operating Drek’s Sport and, seemingly, the particular person pulling all of the strings? “We discover out who Anomie is,” Strike asks Edie’s legal professionals, once they’re employed to analyze the nameless harasser, “and what do you propose to do about it?” In spite of everything, what will be carried out a couple of spooky digital presence? It is a sport of cat-and-mouse the place the mouse can scuttle off beneath the floorboards of digital ephemera.

There are a couple of huge points with the interpretation from web page to display. Lowering the centrality of Drek’s Sport is arguably vital, but it surely additionally robs the story of its most fascinating dynamic: characters in the actual world – the rakish life mannequin, the disaffected former PA, the susceptible hypochondriac – could, or could not, be the voices behind the nameless members within the sport. This creates an intriguing shadow play (a whoisit in addition to a whodunnit) inside the novel that’s largely disbursed with in its display adaptation.

However the larger downside is contraction. The Ink Black Coronary heart is a doorstopper – over 1,000 pages in paperback, or virtually 33 hours in the event you want the audiobook. Right here, it’s condensed to simply 4 hours, which can not do justice to the multi-threaded story, or the sheer quantity of doable suspects (a few of whom solely get a scene or two earlier than the denouement). There was some considered slicing (together with removing of one of many e book’s extra controversial storylines) however the collection remains to be caught between two stools. A much less trustworthy adaptation would possibly’ve labored higher over the quick run; an extended run would possibly’ve labored higher with the specified constancy to its supply.

Filming an “unfilmable” e book signifies that compromise is inevitable. However the compromises made for The Ink Black Coronary heart each defang it and render the thriller too abridged to be actually satisfying.

All the identical, each the books and their diversifications aren’t actually about crime, however the chemistry between Strike and Ellacott. Robin, rising from a disastrous marriage (“I screwed up my marriage in lower than a 12 months,” she confesses); Strike, nonetheless drawn, inextricably, into the video games of his ex, Charlotte (Natasha O’Keeffe). As soon as once more, Burke and Grainger do tremendous work as individuals navigating their means in the direction of romance with all of the alacrity of the Ever Given cruising down the Suez canal. In a TV panorama the place exhibits routinely get canned after one or two seasons, there’s vanishingly little room for a correct slow-burn relationship. However right here we now have one of many few convincing, and compelling, long-term love tales left to the format.

The Strike collection continues to have an old-school allure about it. Most detective dramas nowadays attempt to be reasonable, severe and brooding – it may all be very exhausting. Strike, in the meantime, appears content material to be a throwback, which, paradoxically, makes it way more refreshing.

‘The Ink Black Coronary heart’ is out there on BBC iPlayer