In my last post I went over the story of my read-through of Ink Black Heart. I focused on my claim that each of the
Strike books has had its primary villain secretly indicated by a hidden reference to various Hermes-related figures, what may alliteratively be called “Mercury Markers”. This, aside from its predictive value, seems to be, on the face of it, a very strange thing to expect an author to do. I wish to make the claim that a move of this type is common for any author like Rowling who writes within Hermetic or Alchemical traditions. The central motif of the Hermetic tradition is this: a hidden word or sign, that will make itself readily apparent only to the “initiated” who have been informed to expect the word or sign, brightly highlights a Deeply Important Something that is going on “behind the scenes.” Below, I plan to track the main places I see similar effects being used and provide a more detailed account of where I see this being used in the Strike novels.
Mercury Markers, History and Theory
Ink Black Heart: Does Rowling Tip Her Hand About the Killer with a Hermes Reference and ‘Prince’ Parallels?
Evan Willis is a HogwartsProfessor faculty member with a special expertise in Rowling’s hermetic artistry. He was in communication with me throughout his first-reading of Ink Black Heart so I can testify that the journey he describes below is not something he made up after the fact. His long-awaited write-up of his thoughts on Strike6 exceeds even my very high expectations and it establishes I think his theory that Mercury markers are keys to Identifying Rowling murder mystery killers; enjoy! — John
Hours after it came out, I started on Ink Black Heart. I wanted to read it slowly so that I had adequate opportunity to test, theorize, and predict, and so only got to the end of it early this week. I sent off a couple comments and e-mails as I read indicating where my line of reasoning had gone so that I might document my testing, while trying my best to avoid spoilers (this site, along with Twitter, became very dangerous to go anywhere near).
My conclusions? That our parallel series idea still has deep predictive and explanatory power (Half-Blood Prince parallels are extraordinarily strong here), that the important Half-Blood Prince references are where it connected back to Philosopher’s Stone (pointing to a 1-6 connectivity in both series), and that Rowling has subtly indicated the identity of the killer in each of these novels very early on by inclusion of a passing reference to a mythological character with direct ties to the figure of Hermes in the near vicinity of their first appearance.
Join me after the jump for discussion of how I arrived at all three of these conclusions — and how I just missed identifying the killer before Strike and Robin did.
Rowling’s Love for ‘The Moving Finger’
I do! My favourite's The Moving Finger. https://t.co/XsfWofhBoL
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 14, 2022
This recent tweet from The Presence was not a revelation but a repetition of something she said to Val McDermid in 2014. I read Moving Finger in 2018 and discussed its importance to Serious Strikers in a post about the several important parallels between it and Cormoran’s adventures. Just for starters, can you say “faked suicide that is really a murder”?
I reproduce that post after the jump but you’ll want to read the comments from Strike Fans and myself at the original page for the full-influence dosage. If you want more about Rowling and Christie, the author with whom Rowling has the most in common, be sure to check out the seventeen posts on that subject at the Rowling-Christie Pillar Post. Enjoy! [Read more…]
Elizabeth(s) the Phoenix
The centrality of Elizabethan imagery in Troubled Blood is hard to miss. The Faerie Queene epigraphs and structuring, already well documented on this site, show the basis of the connection. That this work is meant to parallel Order of the Phoenix is also well documented. I want to suggest that Rowling has clarified much of the meaning of Order of the Phoenix using this imagery, which in turn continues and strengthens a long-running undercurrent in Rowling’s writing: a extensive set of references to 15th through 17th century English ecclesiastical, political, and philosophical history (earlier work directly touching this set of associations in Rowling’s work can be found in this 2009 post).
My core thought here is this: it is not just the one Elizabeth, Elizabeth I, who we are meant to consider. Instead, I think we are meant to focus on the societal and literary impact of four closely intertwined Elizabeths and their associations with the development of English Christianity and esotericism in its many forms. These four are Elizabeth of York, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth Stuart, and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia.
I’ll grant that this is a fairly large claim, and I may be hunting Crumple Horned Snorkacks (if I am, please let me know), but I think there is this strong thread here worth tracing.
[Read more…]
Guest Post: Agatha Christie’s The Clocks – TV Adaptation a Source for Strike?
In 2019 I wrote about Agatha Christie’s 1963 Poirot novel, The Clocks, a send up of the James Bond spy-thriller then in vogue: Agatha Christie’s ‘The Clocks’ or ‘Arabella Figg Meets Hercule Poirot.’ Chris Calderon thinks that the 2009 teevee adaptation of this novel for BBC1’s series ‘Poirot’ has a lot to tell us about the Cormoran Strike series that Rowling may have been plotting and planning at the time.
Make the jump to read the connections he has found between the show and the series! [Read more…]
Recent Conversation