For serious readers and fans of Robert Galbraith’s ‘Cormoran Strike’ mysteries, it’s been a busy week. There have been a relative flood of stories about the three novels because of the ‘Strike’ BBC1 television show premiere in advance and to promote the 27 August broadcast of the first ‘Cuckoo’s Calling’ episodes. No news about the publication date of the fourth novel, ‘Lethal White,’ but I’m hopeful, even confident that the five ‘Strike’ adaptations of the first two novels being broadcast this month and next are preamble to ‘White’s rollout in October or at the holidays.My thoughts this week have been about Ian Rankin, the Edinburgh writer of detective fiction. His only relationship with the Cormoran Strike stories seems to be the kerfuffle he caused in 2007 when he told a book festival in his and Rowling’s adopted home-city that his wife had seen Jo Rowling scribbling away at a murder mystery at their neighborhood Starbucks (back then Rowling lived on the same street as Rankin and Alexander McCall Smith, which avenue became known as ‘Writer’s Block’). The Presence denied it and Rankin said he’d been joking.
That only became interesting in 2011 when Rowling signed with Little, Brown and specifically with an editor who specialized in working with very successful writers of detective fiction. Because the world didn’t know that Casual Vacancy was in the works, The Guardian speculated that her first post Potter novel would be a detective piece, as Rankin had suggested. Rowling denied this and said that the rumor started because she and Rankin had discussed how much whodunnit atmosphere there is in the Hogwarts Saga. Her representatives at the time, Christopher Little, said rumors that she was writing crime fiction were “unfounded.”
Which wasn’t true, of course. The rumors started in 2012 because of the editor she had made a deal with and the 2007 comments were about Rankin’s wife and what she had supposedly seen. And Christopher Little, though he didn’t know it, had already been passed over for Neil Blair as Rowling’s agent and may very well have been unaware of what she was writing. Still, a non-story.
Here are three other notes about Rankin and Rowling beyond this not-really-news story:
In my conversation last week with Oxford’s Beatrice Groves at the Potter Pundits Summer School live webinar, we were able to answer all the questions the global audience in attendance asked as well as many of the ones I was sent beforehand by those who couldn’t be present in the virtual classroom. You can watch 
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