Way back in March 2022, after recording an episode to The Strike and Ellacott Files podcast with Beatrice Groves, we discussed the possibility of creating a database of all the Twitter headers that J. K. Rowling has used to signal what has been on her mind. The fruit of that idea was the (newly update) All J. K. Rowling’s Twitter Headers. Reviewing the full list in all its glory prompts the fact that this year has been a vintage year for header clues, likely all hints for The Hallmarked Man. Any guesses as the what they mean? Let me know in the comments!

1st February 2024 The façade of Freemason’s Hall in London. The headquarters of the United Grand Lodge of England, discussed here.

16th February 2024 Identified by @LudicrousMonica as La Coupee, a narrow isthmus that connects Greater and Little Sark.

16th March 2024 A detail from a silver Nef, identified by @PoolsVB.

7th April 2024  The Crieff Hydro Hotel, identified by @Badly_Wired.

31st May 2024 an iron bridge called The Iron Bridge in Ironbridge.

16th June 2024 The red lift at The Savoy in London, identified by @IrisThinksMeh. Discussed by Beatrice Groves here.

27th June 2024 Identified as Gods Own Junkyard by @CasualNaming.

10th August 2024 an excerpt from “The Golden Journey to Samarkand” by James Elroy Flecker, identified by the Strike and Ellacott Files podcast. Discussed by Beatrice Groves here.

27th September 2024 Not a red herring, but a blue goldfish! A blue oranda, the meaning of whose name is parsed by John Granger here.

11th October 2024 A second swan image after the 18th August 2017 one.

1st December 2024 Wild Court alley in London WC2. John Granger discusses here.

Way back in March 15th J. K. Rowling released the title of Strike 8 as The Hallmarked Man, an event that usually occurs shortly after the manuscript of the book is announced as finished. We first heard of her working hard on the book the previous May 7th, before The Running Grave was released. Most people who were tracking progress were fairly confident of an Autumn 2024 release. Those hopes have been dashed, and it now looks more and more likely we will have to wait for Autumn 2025. See below for Rowling’s tweets keeping the fandom updated on progress. One reason for the delay might be the revelation that she has six books in various stages of development, with the next non-Strike book likely to be a futuristic story that she has been planning for more than a decade!

Do you have more books in the pipeline?

I’ve got six books in my head. I’ve got the one I’m currently writing. There’ll be two more Strikes, and then there are three more books that I really want to get to. [She taps her head] I always gesture to the back of my head. I’m sure an MRI scan would prove it’s got nothing to do with the back of my brain, but I always find myself doing this when I’m talking about where it comes from. God knows. But I do have other stories in my head that I really need to get out.

The Times, May 5th 2024

 

 

The latest brouhaha involving Rowling and the Transphobia Thought Police online oddly enough features an institution that features in one of her novels, perhaps the best single piece she has written to date, namely, Troubled Blood. Let’s quickly review the scandal at Skegness and how all the usual players in the ‘Transgender Thespian Troupe’ have said their formulaic lines before noting Rowling’s connection to the venue in question (and the likelihood she has been there in person).

In brief, Rowling tweeted out her disappointment that Butlins in Skegness had responded with deferential apologies to critics of how their security staff had removed biological men from a women’s restroom at that resort. Per The Independent:

Jae Roberts, one of the transgender women who claims to have been forcibly removed by security, shared a post on Instagram explaining her version of events.

“Butlins security just dragged five trans people out of the women’s toilets. Got slammed against a wall and dragged downstairs for intervening,” she said.

Roberts alleged she and the other trans women were asked to leave the toilet by security, which sparked chants of “let them pee”. She then claimed guards had returned with “reinforcements”, who began to forcibly remove the trans women from the bathroom.

A spokesperson for Butlin’s said: “We were very concerned to hear about this incident. Much to our disappointment, our third-party security contractor did not follow our processes despite being thoroughly briefed.

“Once we were made aware they were immediately removed from duty for not handling the situation in line with our processes. We are in direct contact with those involved and are reviewing how we work with contractors.”

The company added the security guard’s suspension had nothing to do with the trans women’s gender identity but the manner in which they were allegedly removed from the toilet.

Rowling responded to this bending-of-the-knee to those who believe that biological men “identifying” as women have the right to female-only spaces by tweeting them to clarify their policies so holiday goers would know where they want to spend their money, i.e., ‘Tell the world whether you’re on board with men in women’s spaces or not so those who agree with you can choose Butlins for their holidays and those who disagree will not.’ Her words were:

Does Butlins think the desire of cross-dressing men to enter women-only spaces is more important than women’s and girls’ right to privacy and dignity? Hopefully Butlins will explain their policy, so women and families can make an informed choice about where to go on holiday.

This is, in essence, the threat of a boycott by the great majority of people who do not want women and girls to have to share restrooms with biological men. Butlins is in a jam because they tried to thread the needle of not offending the “transgender” population or the media elite who champion this group’s “rights” while maintaining its policy that men are not allowed in their women’s restrooms.

The “usual suspects,” of course, promptly castigated Rowling for “frothing up rage” against a persecuted minority and for once again demonstrating to all the world that she is “transphobic.” (The successful weaponization of supposed phobias by same sex attraction champions and Muslims is of course being mimicked by “transgenderism” advocacy groups, with similar if relatively muted results.) Those who believe Rowling is a bigot and bully were confirmed in their opinion and her fans on the Gender Critical side of this controversy once again rallied to her flag.

If this Skegness Scandal has any future repercussions, then, it will be in how public venues choose to respond. Will they tell their security contractors to let the “transgender women” who are biological men to use women’s restrooms lest they suffer the bad publicity consequent to enforcing that space as a women’s only place? Or will they take the much harder course of guaranteeing the safety of their women’s restrooms in order to avoid being castigated by J. K. Rowling on her twixter feed to more than 14 million followers, a drubbing that will be carried as a feature story by media outlets locally and globally?

For struggling venues such as Butlins, reduced to three parks from a high of ten, this is a tough choice; it’s a lose-lose, frankly, for them which is a real victory for sanity in public spaces. Rowling has succeeded in insuring that their choosing to do the easy thing and fold to “transgender” bullying will experience an economic consequence at least equal to the loss of -TQ business. If there is “news” in this otherwise meaningless tabloid fodder, it is that Rowling is taking a new tack in her offensive to restore women’s rights in the UK, a decidedly economic push to prod businesses to stand up to bullies and do the right thing.

For those of us who are Rowling Readers, this is news to file away for future reference because, of all the ‘Golden Threads’ that run through her work start to finish, the most obvious and undeniable is ‘Violence Against Women.’ Rowling’s extracurricular crusade to champion the rights of women and children contra the rip tide of “transgender” over-reach is in lock step with a constant plot-point and theme in everything she has written.

This specific story, though, has the extra attraction for Rowling Readers of involving a location, Skegness’ beach resort, which Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott visit during Troubled Blood, and a business, Butlins, at which a murder occurs in the same novel.

One of the suspects in the disappearance and suspected murder of Margot Bamborough, M.D., was Steve Douthwaite. The Strike Agency expends significant effort in locating Douthwaite forty years after that crime and finally find and confront him in Skegness, where he works for his wife’s Bed-and-Breakfast inn for holiday goers. One of the landmark conversations that Robin and Strike have in the course of their relationship takes place looking out over the sea in Skegness after their interview with Douthwaite, now ‘Diamond,’ in which Strike sings ‘Trelawney’ to his partner and reveals his fealty to Cornwall.

And Butlins? After the police realized that Douthwaite was not a credible suspect in the 1974 Bamborough disappearance, he changed his name to ‘Jacks’ and took a job at the Butlins in Clacton-On-Sea, an east of London resort that has since closed. While there, though, Carl Oakden tracked him down for his book about Margot Bamborough from which source Janice Beattie learned his new name, ‘Stevie Jacks,’ and where he was hiding. She visited him and promptly murdered the young woman he fancied in order to send him a message. He got the message, changed his name again, this time to ‘Steve Diamond,’ and got a new Red Coat job at the original and much larger Butlins holiday camp in Ingoldmells near Skegness in Lincolnshire, England. He met his wife Donna there and settled down to a life-in-hiding only punctuated by his serial sexual trysts with women. Peaceful, at least, until Strike tracked him down.

So, has Rowling visited the Butlins in Ingoldmells, Skegness, though it never appears in  Troubled Blood? My bet is that she has. She captures the flavor of the holiday camp and the life of a Red Coat in telling detail in Troubled Blood, so I think she has visited one. Of the three Butlins still in operation, the Clacton-on-Sea venue having closed and been demolished in 1983, the Bognor Regis location is probably closer to London than Ingoldmells, but Rowling clearly visited Skegness to capture its distinct qualities for the time Strike and Ellacott spend there in Troubled Blood. If I were a betting man, I’d wager that Rowling made a trip to the Ingoldmells Butlins and spoke to a few Red Coats.

Which would mean that her tweets this past week expressing her disappointment with Butlins in Skegness would have been colored by her knowledge of the place. In a case of art-anticipating-life, she had brought to life a cowardly male character of easy virtue as a Skegness Butlins Red Coat, a man who ran from doing the right thing in the Bamborough case because of his fear of crossing the murderous Janice Beattie. How curious that, in the here and now ‘real world,’ Rowling is calling to account the Skegness Butlins for their failing in courage and principle.

 

 

I am struggling with the Casual Vacancy Pregnancy Trap post, largely because my copy of this book is a ‘Large Print’ edition that I find it difficult to navigate. Or is it because the Byzantine (labyrinthine?) structure of this book, the least popular of Rowling’s work despite Potter level sales, makes searching it a needle-haystack effort? Regardless, still a work in progress because I have to find the passages about Pregnancy Traps to make the case — and there are three Pregnancy Traps in Casual Vacancy if read diagonally and in ‘Small Print.’

So here is a quick post about Rowling’s twixter page changes and long-form tweets:

We’ve moved from the Oranda goldfish to a swan in Rowling’s header. A quick word search reveals ‘swan’ appears in every book except Running Grave and they have been the subject of intense Serious Striker speculation. Here are five quick links; use the search tool in the sidebar to find many more.

• The Swan Symbolism in Lethal White

• More Strike Swans: Historical and Film Connections

• Liminal Women: Mermaids and Swan Maidens in Galbraith’s Strike Novels

• The Alchemical ‘Swan’

• Strike-Ellacott Podcast’s series of three posts (Parts I, II and III) on the Tannhäuser opera.

The good news is that Rowling is hinting that we’ll back to the swans in Hallmarked Man, but, no, I won’t be speculating about the indefinite number of possibilities in hopes of a bullseye. I have Pregnancy Traps to discover and explain…

On to the latest Trans Wars tweet! Here Rowling takes a time-out in the exchange of snark and grenades between sides (and, really, Trans Terrorists, when are you going to realize that Rowling owns this venue the way Nadal played on clay courts? Give it up, already) to define her terms. She explains that the “umbrella term” has become whatever one wants and the sense in which she uses it. [Read more…]