Running Grave Placeholder Post, Number Five!

It’s something of a Publication Week tradition here at HogwartsProfessor to provide an online space for Serious Strikers to share their discoveries as they find them, an alocal place for specific topics we have explored here in the past. It’s a community gathering place — and it creates a record of findings for topics that otherwise become hopelessly jumbled. The seven I am posting for Running Grave are:

• The Gaffes
• Deathly Hallows Parallels
• Cuckoo’s Calling Parallels
• Lethal White Parallels
• The Ghosts
• Literary Alchemy
• The Occult

Why ‘Ghosts’? Because Rowling-Galbraith, a la favorite author Nabokov and her own oft-repeated beliefs about the immortal soul, goes to some pains to populate her stories with shades of persons-past. In Harry Potter, the ghosts were comic (for the most part!), visible, and all but ubiquitous around Hogwarts. In Cormoran Strike, the shading is much more subtle but at least as important. See my ‘The Ghosts Haunting Troubled Blood‘ for an introduction to this subject and Louise Freeman’s subsequent posts about the specters just out of sight in Cuckoo’s Calling and in Lethal White,

Ghosts promise to be at least as big a deal in Running Grave; the excerpts of the first eleven chapters released and then recaptured pre-publication make this a surety. Beside the ghosts called down by or conjured up by the religious cultists, though, what evidence do you see of, say, Leda Strike’s influence from beyond the veil? Aunt Joan? Have at it in the comment boxes below!

It’s something of a Publication Week tradition here at HogwartsProfessor to provide the online space for Serious Strikers to share their discoveries as they find them, an alocal place for specific topics we explore here. The seven I am posting for Running Grave are:

• The Gaffes
• Deathly Hallows Parallels
• Cuckoo’s Calling Parallels
• Lethal White Parallels
• The Ghosts
• Literary Alchemy
• The Occult

‘Gaffes’ are first because everyone is shocked (and excited?) to find a mistake that Team Rowling missed in their editorial and continuity checks. ‘Deathly Hallows Echoes’ come next because of the fun to be had tracing Rowling’s playful Parallel Series efforts. The next two subjects are more involved because they require some understanding of Rowling’s ring writing (see the Ring Composition Pillar Post for an in depth look at the subject).

In brief, though Rowling has said repeatedly that her Strike novels are not a seven book series, they sure act like one, by which I mean, we find the same relation between books in her mysteries that we found in the Hogwarts Saga — namely, a story turn that echoes the beginning and parallels between books 2 and 6 and between 3 and 5.

This being the case, the last two elements of as seven book ring — the latch between the first and last books and the pointers in the fourth book, the turn, to the last book — should appear in Strike 7, series finale or not. Deathly Hallows had close to fifty fairly obvious echoes of Philosopher’s Stone and there were significant Goblet of Fire parallels as well (see Harry Potter as Ring Composition and Ring Cycle for all that).

So.

Please share in the comment boxes below the echoes you heard of Cuckoo’s Calling while reading Running Grave. Is there a faked suicide committed by a family member? Do we encounter characters from the first book in the seventh who are acting much as they were in Strike1 or in completely opposite mirror images of their earlier behavior? The floor is yours!

Early on 7 September, the seventh Cormoran Strike-Robin Ellacott novel, Running Grave, was given its second running start for readers who cannot wait for its full publication in 19 days. Unlike the first excerpt released on Amazon via the book-page’s ‘Look Inside’ feature, this one includes the full opening epigraphs (Hello, Dylan Thomas!), the complete table of contents — a Prologue, Nine Parts, and an Epilogue — and, remarkably, five more chapters, the first eleven of the nineteen in Part One.

You can read it via this link.

A HogwartsProfessor.Substack.com reader and Serious Striker, PercyL, shared this information on a comment thread there following my post about the Amazon release, an initial and briefer excerpt that disappeared without explanation several days after its equally mysterious appearance. I expected this new release to be old news by the time I finished work late yesterday, but only TheRowlingLibrary had reported it and even that announcement was via a re-tweet without comment. I cannot tell if the usual klaxon-horn voices in Strike fandom and social media are blissfully unaware of the release or studiously avoiding its discussion; even more bizarre for such a drop, none of the wire services or search engines I have checked are carrying news of the new excerpt on Apple.

I will be writing about the second excerpt later today on the Substack HogwartsProfessor site for subscribers (it’s free!) and I’m hoping that Elizabeth Baird-Hardy will share some of her first thoughts here. There will, of course, be spoiler alerts for those who want to know nothing about Running Grave before it is officially published on 26 September.

One bon mot, though, safe even for those who do not want to hear any plot points or speculation derived from the opening chapters: in offering eleven of the Part One’s nineteen chapters, Galbraith has shared the Part One ‘turn’ in chapter ten and the first turtleback lines between chapters nine and eleven. That turn’s pivotal moment is a remarkable pointer to what will be the primary reveal or twist in the novel’s last Part and about Strike’s essential transformation. Strike 7 promises to have its rings within rings…