J. K. Rowling’s four Cormoran Strike novels, written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, have pretty much appeared under the radar at least relative to Potter Mania. They don’t win prizes, they don’t set records for copies sold per minute at each successive book release, and there have been no fan conventions or academic conferences dedicated to them. It is still a commonplace when speaking with Potter-philes, even Potter Pundits, to discover the person you are speaking with has not read the Strike novels even though the books are written by their “favorite author.”
I shouldn’t say they don’t win prizes, though, because three of the four books — and the first before Galbraith was outed as Rowling — have won awards for the audio-book versions as read by Robert Glenister. I’ve written about that before (see ‘Lethal White: The Robert Glenister Audiobook’) and my family’s enjoyment of these versions, exceeding I think our delight even in the Potter audiobooks, as good as those were.
I write about this today because CrimeFest, the annual gathering of crime fiction writers and readers in the UK, has awarded the Audible Sounds of Crime Award to Lethal White for best audiobook against competition including the venerable Ian Rankin (no small influence on the Strike books: Strike can be read as another John Rebus, a damaged veteran with relationship issues in Rankin’s novels, set free in London rather than Edinburgh), the preposterously popular Stephen King, and William Patterson writing with side-kick Bill Clinton. Glenister and Rowling have won the award for every Galbraith novel except Career of Evil, certainly the most, shall we say, challenging Strike book thus far.
If you haven’t downloaded or purchased the CD version of Glenister’s readings, I’ll go so far as to suggest you really haven’t enjoyed and appreciated Cormoran and Robin’s adventures as you might. It is a surprising, I confess, and delightful thing to see the experts and award-givers agree with me here.
Let me know what you think of the Glenister readings in the comment boxes below!
If, like me, you live under a rock and have never played ‘Never Have I Ever’ with fingers or drinks, 
The question asked at this Hogsmeade soiree of boy Slytherins is, “Never have I ever killed someone for the purpose of prolonging my life using dark magic.” I think it is the young Riddle who thinks, “Some of these are feeling very pointed.” Rule #1 of the game supposedly is that players have to be honest but one of the players thinks to himself, “Just drink or else they’ll all know how little you’ve done,” so part of the game, forgive me, especially with this lot, is social posturing and positioning.
And, how about this for a test of canon knowledge? If Dumbledore’s Army played this game at their first meeting in the Room of Requirement, it would be pretty easy to isolate and eliminate Harry Potter in violation of Rule #3, “It is not allowed to pick out the players by making statements knowingly to be true about them.” What non-dirty questions could Harry ask, though, at that point in his education and experience, that would make the Army in training all take a drink? 
A good friend from the Twilight years here at HogwartsProfessor keeps me up to speed on the author of that series, 
How unusual is that? Not very unusual, I’m afraid. One of the best-selling authors of the 21st Century publishes a book in late 2016 with a major house (500,000 copies printed…), just in time for Christmas, and uber fans of hers haven’t heard of it in 2019. Wikipedia, believe it or don’t, still doesn’t have a page dedicated to it. 
So why did Ms. Meyer decide to write a pulpy spy thriller, an ultramasculine genre that is notoriously tough to break into, particularly for female authors? 
She rarely holds book signings, and no longer reads reviews or online comments about herself. “At first I read everything, and I learned that was not superhealthy,” she said.
A few years later, Ms. Meyer returned to the idea and decided to write it as a novel. She keeps vampire-like work hours — a residual habit from when she began writing “Twilight” while she and her husband were raising their three sons — and worked on “The Chemist” from 9 p.m. until 3 a.m. The plot flowed quickly, but she struggled at times to devise unusual ways to kill, maim and torture people, so she consulted several experts in biochemistry and molecular biology, including Kirstin Hendrickson, a senior lecturer at the School of Molecular Sciences at Arizona State University.
I don’t know where J. K. Rowling is or what she’s thinking or doing now that she is abstaining from twitter-dom. It’s been a refreshing silence, frankly, and we can only hope it has been and will continue to be a refreshing and rejuvenating respite for The Presence.
Warner Bros. has some chutzpah. They already more or less run the world for Harry Potter fans, controlling all the rights, operating the theme parks, stage plays, both Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts film franchises, and meanwhile
Every time I visit a bookstore, I find another shelf overflowing with official Harry Potter merchandise. The US Potter books themselves keep getting released with different covers. Funko pop vinyl figurines, board games, and more bust out from the shelves. Saturation for Harry Potter merchandise has reached an all-time high, and as I mentioned, quality for the largest properties is at an all-time low. Now Warner Bros. is taking Pottermore, which began as an earnest, delightful, and free companion to the Harry Potter books before it was gutted and replaced by the official-movie-photo-riddled, listicle-laden, soulless entry it is currently, and moving the content to a site where they are going to charge fans for access to the Potter e-books and to get decent seats at their overpriced, under-planned stage show. Count me the f*%# out.
This is nothing new or especially lamentable. They had a display at the first HPEF fan convention in 2003 of Harry Potter products that included underwear and toothpaste. I bought a plastic plate there, a token which featured a picture of Harry catching a snitch, for my youngest son, now 18, who still treasures it. There’s a glut of products today that would not have been imaginable back then but the quality or ‘taste’ involved has not changed significantly.
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