JK Rowling’s crime books to outnumber Harry Potter series

The author says that she has “no end point in mind” to her latest genre of novels

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JK Rowling says that she will write a crime series that will run even longer than her Harry Potter books.

The author has already penned two crime novels under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith – the second of which was published in June, entitled The Silkworm.

During an interview with author Val McDermid on stage at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, she was asked whether it was true that was going to write seven books under her alias.

“It's not seven. It's more. It's pretty open ended,” said Rowling.

”I really love writing these books, so I don't know that I've got an end point in mind.

“One of the things I absolutely love about this genre is that, unlike Harry, where there was an overarching story, a beginning and an end, you're talking about discrete stories. So while a detective lives, you can keep giving him cases.”

She decided to use a pseudonym “to prove to myself that I could get a book published on the merits of the book ". Her identity was revealed three months after her first crime book, The Cuckoo's Calling, was published.

Rowling hopes that her crime novels offer a modern approached to the “genuine whodunnit style”.

“I love crime fiction. I've always loved it. I read a lot of it and I think, in many ways, that the Harry Potter books are whodunnits in disguise,” she said.

"I enjoy, I suppose, the 'golden age' book. That's very much what I was trying to do in these books - to take that finite number of suspects, the genuine whodunnit style, but make it very contemporary, bring it up to date, and make sure this is a credible person with a credible back story for nowadays."