Less than a day until we can read Lethal White! Here are my promised lists of the things that almost have to happen, because they occur in every Strike novel, and my predictive wish-list, the events I think could happen and I kinda sort of hope will happen.

The Fifteen Things that Have to Happen in Lethal White

1. Crime-Detection-Solution: There is a murder committed and Cormoran and Robin figure it out. Duh.
2. The News Media is Shown in a Bad Light: Reporters are slimy, border-line criminal agents who hound the innocent and bend the truth to their own ends. Strike’s Denmark Street offices will be the scene in Lethal White of journalists and photographers accosting Robin and Cormoran as it has in the first three books.
3. The Metropolitan Police Fail Again: We’re promised time with a new cop, Vanessa Ekensi, in Lethal White, a character given significant play in the teevee adaptation of Career.  I doubt very much, though, that she will prove in the end to be any more helpful than Carver, Anstis, and Wardle have been. Strike will have to find a way to prove the murderer’s guilt outside the theory accepted by the Met.
4. Leg Issues: Strike will once again re-injure or otherwise struggle with his amputated leg.
5. Matt and Robin Will Fight: She sleeps on the couch at least one night in every book. The question in White, though, seems to be if she will leave the loser at last when she learns what he did to her phone before their wedding in Career.
6. Sex-Dead Body-Police: Strike is lucky with the ladies but fornication with the lovely seems to bring him some bad luck. He tends to find a dead body after such trysts and wind up being interrogated by the Met on the next day (note the English Renaissance poetic conceit of conflating sex and death, not to mention the universal joining of sinful pleasure and punishment).
7. Robin Promotion: Whether she remains Ms Ellacott or Mrs Cunliffe in Lethal White, the fourth book will end with her elevated status in Strike’s office (yes, assuming that the firing near the end of Career only cemented her true-partner status in the firm).
8.  Shanker Re-Dux: Every book has given us more of Strike’s childhood chum. Here’s hoping that Lethal White will explain the “favor” Strike “called in” in Cuckoo to get information to trade for the Lula Landry file — remember, Shanker does nothing for free, not even for Brother Strike — and why Strike felt he had to ask Shanker in Career if he’d finked on him to Digger Malley. Was Shanker somehow part of the Joint Ops between SIB and the Met Vice Squad back in the day? He’s a known drug dealer after all.
9. Profanity: Robin will say “Bugger” or “Sod you.” Strike will bellow “Bollucks.”
10. Leda’s Death: The narrative slow release about the circumstances of the death of Strike’s mother will continue. Who found the body? What happened at the funeral? Her estate amounted to what exactly?
11. SIB Data: We will learn in Lethal White as we have in every bhook so far more of Strike’s memories about his career as an Special Investigative Branch soldier. There’s a trip to Angola, time in Bosnia, a case in Iraq, and of course the “wrongful death” investigation in Afghanistan that we know nothing about except that the last cost him half a leg. How about the medal he earned?
12. The Charlotte Virus: In every book Strike feels the stirrings of his feelings for Charlotte. He describes it as a virus which has reservoired in his body, a disease that prevents him from having real feelings for and relationships with other women. Look for an outbreak of this illness in Lethal White.
13. Psychological Condition: We learn about a mundane or relatively exotic psychological condition in every Strike novel. Rochelle and Lula had their issues in Cuckoo (not to mention “bat shit insane” Bristow), Orlando is mentally challenged in Silkworm (and every writer and publisher is a narcissist), and we meet people in Career, the trans-abled, who want to cut off their own limbs. The excerpt from Lethal White published in The Guardian has already shown us ‘Billy,’ a character with a tic of sorts that Louise Freeman tells me may be “motor stereoptypy rather than a true tic.” Robin and Deebee Mack studied psychology — and we should see more fruits of that in White.
14. Epigraphs: Before every chapter and Part of the book not written by a psychopath. We have a clue that this Strike adventure will feature Catullus; we can be almost sure, though, that there will quotation headers as there have been in the first three books, from Virgil to Jacobean Revenge Dramas to Blue Oyster Cult.
15. Childhood Chum: Strike, if Lethal White is like the first three books, will feature a meeting or conversation with a friend Strike made in Cornwall or London as a boy. Me? I’m rooting for his best mate, Dave Polworth, to make an appearance in Strike 4, especially if Charlotte returns (Dave understands she is bad news…).

There’s more, of course, and I hope you’ll add your ‘Have to Happen’ nominees in the comment boxes below before reading Lethal White. How about Galbraith showing us the murderer in the central chapter of every book so far? (be sure to count the chapters and mark the middle before you begin reading Lethal White early tomorrow morning). And a birthday, funeral, wedding ‘formal family event’?

On to the SWAGs! [Read more…]

Joanne Gray recently and brilliantly blew up my Heroin Dark Lord 1.0 Big Back Story theory with her observation that Strike could not have been blown up by Digger Malley in retaliation for his testimony as a Red Cap against the Harringay Crime Syndicate in 2008 because Strike tells us flat out in Part 1, Chapter 7 (p 53) of Cuckoo’s Calling that his foot “had been ripped from his leg two and a half-years before.” StrikeFans’ timeline puts that thought of Strike as 30 March 2010. ‘Two years six months’ prior to that is September 2007.

I want to try and re-figure ‘Heroin Dark Lord’ before we read Lethal White, but it hasn’t been easy. The deeper you get into the Strike stories, the more frustrating it can be to make the dates line up. That Strike struggles with Charlotte’s dates concerning her pregnancy — it is the cause given for his ‘final’ break with her — makes this problem curious and perhaps meaningful, I’ll allow. Rowling likes to have her characters struggle with problems the reader is having as well.

But still, some of the date problems are just mistakes the author has made and the editor didn’t catch. [See this post for three mistakes in Cuckoo’s Calling alone if you think Rowling and Company don’t sometimes sleep at the wheel.]

My first task here, then, consequent to Joanne Gray’s find, is to answer the question, “Can we get an exact date for the Viking troop carrier blow up in Afghanistan?” My tentative answers are ‘Maybe.’ And ‘Sort of.’ [Read more…]

We’re getting close! Just as was done before the release of Career of Evil, Galbraith’s publishers have released a teaser excerpt from Lethal White, to be published in only three days. You can read in this Guardian excerpt the context of the first meeting with Billy that was included in the book blurb last month. “He was murdered up by the horse.”

Every Galbraith novel thus far has begun one or several chapters in with the first meeting of Strike and his new client in his office: John Bristow, Leonora Quine, the leg of a murdered girl, and now Billy.

More important, we also have our first parallel with Cuckoo’s Calling, namely, the Cormoran B. Strike office having a new secretary. Denise, of course, is not as promising as Robin once was.

Is her presence a sign that Robin is on the Radford case mentioned in Career and for which we have a chain of command diagram? Or that Robin, having been fired, is no longer working for Strike? Or she is on her honeymoon and this is a ‘temporary solution’? Or that things are just looking up for celebrity detective Strike after solving the Ripper case in Career and the office can afford the help?

I guess it’s time for me to write up my predictions — and to regret not having done it earlier! (I think I can add that Denise won’t be with Strike long….) Let me know what you think of the excerpt, our first taste of Lethal White, in the comment boxes below.