The backdrop story to the Cormoran Strike series, its inciting incident if you will, what sets everything in the protagonist’s narrative arc of transformation in motion, is the death of Leda Strike. Cormoran, her first son and her only child with rockstar Jonny Rokeby, leaves Oxford and joins the Army to become a Red Cap investigator like his surrogate father Ted Nancarrow in the wake of his mother’s death. The death is considered a suicide but only because the chief murder suspect, Jeff Whittaker, Leda’s husband at the time, was found not guilty when he was tried for her murder. Strike still believes that his step-father killed his mother.

It has been taken as a working premise here at HogwartsProfessor.com that the detective is correct in his assumption that Leda did not take her own life. The three grounds for that premise are, in brief:

(1) Rowling’s modus operandi is that the story will have a defamiliarizing ‘big twist’ a la Austen’s Emma so the accepted narrative of Leda’s death, the public notion as well as Cormoran’s private belief, must be wrong;

(2) the first and fourth books of the Strike series, which is being written as a seven story ring, involved murders staged as suicides so the big reveal of the seventh should be one as well and the seeming suicide of Leda Strike, because it is the series back story, should be the suicide revealed as a murder in the finale; and

(3) the Strike series is written in parallel with the Potter novels and, just as Lily Potter’s sacrificial death in love for her son precipitated the Dark Lord’s near demise and the overarching story of the Hogwarts Saga, so the murder-suicide of Leda Strike serves as the catalyst to all the action in the Strike series. The first seven story ring of Strike novels requires a revelation of how and why Leda Strike actually died just as Deathly Hallows featured a blow by blow revisiting of Lily Potter’s death and her son’s revenge on her murderer.

Why Series Strikers and the Royal Society of Rowling Readers spend so much time on this subject, speculation about who killed Leda Strike, is, of course, largely the fun of guessing where the Presence is taking us before we get there (and the hope of winning the No Prize of figuring it out first). It reflects, beyond that in-house competition, the knowledge we have about Rowling as a writer, which is to say her ends and means. Read about all that at ‘The Value of Interpretative Speculation or Why We Know that Dave Didn’t Kill Leda.’ There are two things about Rowling as writer that we have only figured out recently, namely the Divine Mother/Bad Dad signatures and her Peter/John distinction, that we have not incorporated into this speculation. Join me after the jump for why I think those characteristic Rowling ideas, ones found in almost everything she writes, suggests that Shanker, the Strike series character ‘Who Has Not Been Named,’ killed Leda Strike — because she told him to kill her. [Read more…]