Bill Talbot was the first Detective Inspector to handle the Margot Bamborough missing person case. In the last months of 1974 and the first months of 1975, he used occult means, principally astrology and tarot cards but also invocational magic in the end, in order to find the missing general practitioner or to reveal her killer. He believed the Essex Butcher, the name given by Fleet Street to the serial killer later identified as Dennis Creed, was responsible; the point of his otherworldly charts and card spreads as well as his interrogations of suspects consequently was to discover which person in the extensive Line Up he compiled was this madman. Talbot maintained both a police file for the prosaic researches he and his team of Metropolitan police did and a separate ‘True Book’ for his independent occult investigation.

He failed. In fact, he seemed to have lost his mind. Talbot’s son Gregory explains to Strike in Troubled Blood that Mrs Talbot had him “sectioned,” that is “detained under a ‘section’ (paragraph) of the Mental Health Act 1983,” because of his claim that he had successfully invoked the Whore of Babylon and that doctors discovered he was suffering from an “overactive thyroid.” The detective was put on medication for hyperthyroidism which helped him recover his wits and his disdain for the occult but not in time to save his career. He was forcibly retired and spent the rest of his life regretting how he ‘blew’ the Bamborough case.

Here’s the thing. Hyperthyroidism as a rule doesn’t have anything to do with mental health, not to mention causing those so afflicted to enter a “psychotic state.” Why did Talbot’s excess thyroxin result in his discarding pretty much everything he knew about how to investigate a case professionally and pursue occult means instead? [Update: Not True; hyperthyroidism can cause psychosis.]

I’m pretty sure that Rowling-Galbraith, in making her astrology and tarot consumed detective suffer from an “overactive thyroid,” is playing with the occult community’s ‘received opinion’ (via Manly Hall and others) that the pineal gland is the Eye of God and the locus of human contact with the psychic realm. Join me after the jump for the connection in belief if not in endocrine fact between the thyroid, the pituitary and pineal glands, and the netherworlds. Believe it or not, I think the surface disdain for and substantial truth of the occult ‘findings’ of Bill Talbot in Troubled Blood reveal something essential in Rowling’s artistry and her meaning in this series, not to mention the trajectory of Strike’s transformation. [Read more…]

It is a reasonable conclusion for anyone who follows the news via Twitter and the tabloids that 2020 was a horrible year for J. K. Rowling. She was effectively blacklisted by the cognoscenti for her stand against transgender activist overreach and lost hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. Harry Potter fandom did its best to demonstrate their group-mind with the Zeitgeist by uniformly condemning her as a “transphobe” and making her ‘She Who Shall Not Be Named’ (or pictured!) at The Leaky Cauldron, MuggleNet, and The Harry Potter Lexicon.

Pretty grim, no?

Yesterday, however, the British Book Awards — known as the ‘Nibbies’ because it used to be the ‘National Book Awards’ and, y’know, ‘nibs’ go with pens, ‘bibs’ with babes — announced their short lists of author-nominees in nine categories for 2020: Audiobooks, Children’s Fiction, Children’s Illustrated and Non-Fiction, Crime and Thriller, Adult Fiction, Fiction (Debut), Non-Fiction (Life-style), Non-Fiction (Narrative), and Pageturner. Rowling in her annus horribilis managed to take in three nominations across these categories. Troubled Blood was nominated for both the ‘Crime and Thriller‘ and the ‘Audiobook’ awards and The Ickabog for ‘Children’s Fiction.’

Rowling is no stranger to the Nibbies, as you’d expect. She was ‘Author of the Year’ in 2000, received two ‘Children’s Fiction’ awards (1998, 1999), one ‘Book of the Year’ (2006), an ‘Outstanding Achievement Award’ in 2007, and most recently a ‘Bestseller Award’ in 2017 for Cursed Child. She was even given a special award last year for Philosopher’s Stone as the Most Important Book of the Last Thirty Years.

She has, in brief, won more ‘Nibbies’ than any other author and the argument could be made that she deserved many more ‘Bestseller Awards’ than she received. I suspect that even today the Harry Potter titles in backlist are outselling even the best selling new releases not written by Rowling-Galbraith.

So how bad was 2020 for Rowling-Galbraith, really?

She lost twitter followers, certainly, and continues to shed them at a rate of a thousand a day — but she hasn’t posted since December and has retained fourteen million followers, the largest author platform and one all but forsaken for prudential reasons, marketing be damned.

Fantastic Beasts despite all the Covid 19 hullaballoo wrapped up filming last week and Cursed Child re-opened in Melbourne. No doubt other theaters will re-open soon around the world in short order.

I suppose being cast out and blacklisted by Harry Potter fandom sites for her heroic stand against the tide of political correctness and in defense of young people being all but forced into irreversible surgeries and ‘transitions’ was a downer. She has written, however, that her inbox has been flooded with e-owls of admiration and gratitude from doctors, health care providers, parents, and transgender people who have been effectively silenced by the online bullies of transgender activism. At least one major publication, too, gave her an award for bravery in writing the truth.

Rowling got her life back by turning away from Twitter, Fantastic Beasts and Cursed Child are on course, and she published two best selling books which were nominated for a record three Nibbies, all against unprecedented and hurricane force gale winds. If this was her worst possible year, a time that any other author would consider a pinnacle of success, she’s doing more than all right.

Congratulations are due to Rowling and her team of helpers for successfully navigating in 2020 the counter currents generated by and the outrage of the Professionally Offended classes. Here’s hoping she wins one or two British Book Awards this year as a rebuke to all the naysayers and nattering nabobs of negativism.