St Mawes - StrikeFans.com

St Mawes is a small coastal town in Cornwall where Cormoran Strike spent part of his childhood and continues to visit his Aunt Joan and Uncle Ted‘s house there.

As a child, Strike briefly attended St Mawes Primary School, where he met his longtime friend Dave Polworth.

In The Cuckoo’s Calling, when Strike goes to pick up the last of his few possessions from Charlotte Campbell’s apartment on Holland Park Avenue, he recalls there had been a photo of him and Charlotte on the beach at St Mawes, laughing together. It had since been replaced by a black-and-white photo of Charlotte’s deceased father.

Strike recalls Sundays in Cornwall as a child: everything closed but the church and the beach and the day consisted of “an echoing, whispering quiet, the gentle chink of china and the smell of gravy, the TV as dull as the empty high street, and the relentless rush of the waves on the beach.”

Strike remembers how the rain is different in Cornwall, remembering how it “lashed like whips” against the windows of the spare bedroom of his aunt and uncle’s house. Their house he remembered, smelled like flowers and baking.

In The Silkworm, Dave Polworth persuades Strike over the phone to come back to St Mawes for Christmas (2010).

Strike and Dave’s local in St Mawes is The Victory Inn, a pub situated on a small side street that slopes down to the harbour.

The fifth book, Troubled Blood, opens in St. Mawes. Strike is visiting his aunt and uncle, who live on a street called Hillhead.

In Chapter 1 of Troubled Blood, Strike is having drinks with Dave Polworth in The Victory for Dave’s 39th birthday.

Later, in chapter 2, Strike sits on a stone wall with a view of the sea when Anna Phipps approaches him about her missing mother, Margot Bamborough.

Strike arranges to meet Robin in Falmouth before she drives them back to London. He gets the ferry from St Mawes, but as he is walking down the steps to the ferry, Strike slips and injures his leg.