🗡 THE GOLD DAGGER (1/2)#CWADaggers

Tom Benn: Oxblood
William Boyle: Shoot the Moonlight Out
Robert Galbraith: The Ink Black Heart
George Dawes Green: The Kingdoms of the Savannah
Vaseem Khan: The Lost Man of Bombay
SG Maclean: The Bookseller of Inverness pic.twitter.com/dh6sGpPTZs

— The Crime Writers’ Association (@The_CWA) April 22, 2023

On this ‘Long List,’ the first stage of CWA nominations, Rowling-Galbraith is the Pachiderm in the room; her sixth installment of the Strike series is, I’m guessing here, correct me if I’m wrong, by far the best selling one of the twelve novels listed and the only one slotted pre-publication for adaptation for television. I think it’s a fair bet, too, that it is the only novel to have been reviewed in major metropolitan dailies around the world (and lauded for the most part).

This by no means is to suggest that The Presence’s elephantine status in any way guarantees that she wins. I think it is far more likely to count against her, especially as much of the Chattering Class is still mesmerized by Transmania. The CWA is dedicated to awarding their Daggers to the best book — and they passed over Troubled Blood, which frankly was, outside of perhaps the seventh Harry Potter novel and The Christmas Pig, was the best thing Rowling has written to date.

Ink Black Heart is much more of a stretch for readers, especially those not already enchanted with the Robin-Cormoran back story, so I have my doubts about her chances. The recent turning of the tide in the Trans Wars, visible in articles like last week’s ‘Why Harry Potter is a Literary Masterpiece‘ in The Telegraph and in the news that Max will be filming a new adaptation of the Hogwarts Saga for television with Rowling and Bronte Studios having key roles, though, means perhaps she won’t be fighting against the current as much as she was with Strike5.

The good news potentially about this nomination is that Rowling may do an interview about Ink Black Heart to help her chances as she did for Troubled Blood’s Silver Dagger nomination. Those questions were generic ones asked of every nominee so we learned little from the exchange that we didn’t know from close reading of the book (“most meticulously planned book I’ve ever written;” yawn). Here’s hoping that Rowling-Galbraith will one day sit down with some Serious Strikers who are not just fan girls/guys and ‘shippers to answer questions more challenging than “What makes a book a ‘thriller’ in your view?”

I was researching Emile Coue, a French ‘New Thought’ expert of the inter-war years, yesterday and remembered that I had first read about him on a skiing trip to Canada in the mid 70’s. The book was a madhouse collection of stray information called The People’s Almanac and I was consumed with it when I wasn’t on the slopes (my cousins will testify to this, I think, because I entertained them each night — I thought I was entertaining them, at least — with trivia and bizarre historical facts and figures from the text). It’s available online here; the Coue article is on page 561 and his most famous book, Self-Mastery Through Conscious Auto-Suggestion, can be downloaded here.

On page 562, though, was something much more interesting: a short piece on Aleister Crowley and his obsession with the Yi King, what is now referred to as the I Ching or The Book of Changes. More after the jump! [Read more…]