• The Ink Black Heart: Random Comments and What I Liked.

    ByLouise Freeman
    14 Comments

    This post is going to be a bit of a dumping ground for a few comments too brief to be worthy of their own posts.  Just a few notes about some of my favorite bits of The Ink Black Heart.

    1. Pat!  I thought she was amazing in this book and I am so glad Strike is finally liking and appreciating the quality of her work. Her shining moment was, of course, her detection of the package bomb and having the presence of mind to get away from it and seek safety behind Strike’s door. The remark about her uncle dying in an IRA bombing helped to remind us that the Troubles weren’t that long ago. I wonder if people like Pat, who were school age at the worst of the violence, were taught how to recognize bombs and what to do if they suspected one— the 1970’s equivalent to today’s active shooter drills in schools. Can any of our UK readers share any insights? And, we’ll have to add fruitcake to the menu of items to serve at our next Strike themed party (Doom Bar, red wine, creosote-colored tea, beef casserole, take-out curry, coffee-walnut cake and lots of chocolates).   Note to self: seek out good British fruitcake recipe.
    2. Flavia! The best kid to come along since Jack—  I’d be open to some matchmaking. You both love her for her intellect and curiosity while at the same time feel terrible for her with that awful family she’s stuck with.  I can only hope that, with Daddy Dearest dead and her cynophobic brother off to jail, she’ll get that puppy. I think she’s earned it.
    3. Robin’s new flat!  Like her, I’ll miss Wolfgang and I wish we had had a few more good talking scenes with Max before she moved, but I am glad she’s got her own digs at last. And Strike’s willingness to sleep on her sofa-bed?  Oh. yeah!  I can’t help but wonder what he looked like in those pajamas.  I am visualizing blue stripes like Uncle Vernon’s.
    4. New staff (not Nutley)!  Midge seems both confident and competent. I had expressed hope that she would arrive with a sexual orientation or relationship status that precluded any attraction between her and Strike, and I got my wish. I also like Dev and his alter-ego, Mr. Massoumi.  I knew I’d like him once we saw he was too decent to work for Mitch Patterson, who, I strongly suspect , hired Morris to replace him. If so, Strike and Ellacott got the better half of that deal.
    5. The blessed event!  I am very happy for Nick and Ilsa, but it appears that their marriage did indeed get permanently damaged by Nick’s reprehensible reaction to the last miscarriage.
    6. The missed kiss!  I may be in the minority here, but I’m glad the kiss didn’t happen. Both were drunk, and Robin was a lot more impaired than Strike. It would have felt wrong for him to initiate something then, especially if it went further than kissing, and I think they would have regretted it.
    7. Henry!  Not so much the kid himself, but the fact that Strike, contrary to his own expectations, could talk to him, and actually seemed to get on pretty well, or at least as well as any teenager is likely to get on with Mummy’s boyfriend.
    8. The anti-Kairos moment!  I was so glad Strike realized, once and for all, that any residual affection for Milady Berzerko is gone; and, interestingly, it was her indifference to her children that finally seems to have snapped the last thread. Between this, Jack and Henry, we are getting indications that Strike could be a successful Daddy some day, after all. I am just really hoping it is not with Madeline.

    That’s all for now. I hope to hear what other people especially liked.

     

  • Ink Black Heart: The Mythic Backdrop

    ByJohn
    18 Comments

    I originally planned this ‘Mythic Backdrop’ post as one of the ‘placeholders’ to be put up at HogwartsProfessor while everyone finishes reading the book as a place for those who are already done to share their thoughts about key subjects (see the homepage Pillar Post column’s ‘Ink Black Heart Discussion‘ on the upper left for the collection of those conversation starters and insight collectors). I think now, though, that, while welcoming feedback and insights from Serious Strikers, I will file this on that page devoted to Strike6 discussion under ‘Analysis and Theories’ rather than ‘First Impressions.’

    I do this because it seems more than credible to me that the reason Rowling-Galbraith switched the places of Troubled Blood and Ink Black Heart, a move that Louise Freeman’s literary detective work has made very hard to deny (see her brilliant compilation of the Strike6 evidence for the 5-6 Flip if that is news to you), is that the mythic backdrops of the Strike series, ‘Leda and the Swan’ and ‘Cupid and Psyche,’ all but require that the action and events of Ink Black Heart follow rather than precede Troubled Blood.

    Join me after the jump for a review first of Rowling’s neo-mythological backdrops to her Strike series and then exposition of the Ink Black Heart events that make it the seamless continuation of what happened in Troubled Blood from the perspective of the myths in play. Read More “Ink Black Heart: The Mythic Backdrop”

  • Ink Black: Headless Hunt in Highgate?

    ByJohn
    5 Comments

    I wrote in my pre-publication ‘Nine Guides to Ink Black Heart‘ that serious readers should be on the look out for ghosts haunting the sixth Strike novel. Fans of the Hogwarts Saga are used to crowds of departed souls appearing here and there, even enjoying some cranial polo on special occasions, but those who re-read the Strike series know the dead are ever present in these books as well:

    You don’t hear so much about the ghosts of Cormoran Strike, though, right? Which is a shame. Ghosts are a big deal in these mysteries and are all but certain to play a role just out of sight in Ink Black Heart. In addition to The Ghosts Haunting Troubled Blood, see Louise Freeman’s posts on the Ghost of Charlie Bristow in Cuckoo’s Calling and the Ghost of Freddie Chiswell in Lethal White. I have to think the cartoonist that is murdered in a cemetery will be haunting the investigation of her death — and inspiring the detectives with a nudge here and there. Given the meaning of Vanessa Ekwenzi’s first name vis a vis Nabokov (the “black Vanessa” butterfly), I’ll be especially attentive to her inputs if any on this case.

    The text within the text, after all, is set in a graveyard, and an especially spooky one at that. Of course there will be ghosts…

    Well, it was nothing like Troubled Blood with its persistent references to Margot Bamborough’s thoughts and the perceptions of the Creed victims pictured on the cover of The Demon of Paradise Park. And Vanessa and the Nabokovia butterflies were absent, full stop. I expect she and Oliver wed during the months of Ink Black Heart and will re-appear in Strike7 or 8 with a child or two — which, with Ilsa and Nick’s baby (and Strike and Madeline’s?), will ramp up the Murphy-Ellacott possibilities, naturally.

    But ghosts? I found this one tease that makes believe there are many more I missed on my first reading. The first thing said at the gathering in the Artists Club of the Strike Agency partners and Maverick Films’ Richard Elgar, Grant and Heather Ledwell, and the agent, Allan Yeoman, is Yeoman’s belief that “I know Edie would be glad we’re meeting” (157). That may seem to be a throw-away for tossers to break the ice, but has been a commonplace in the previous Strike novels for invoking or noting the presence, wishes, and even activity of the dead; review Greg Talbot’s repeated references to his father’s hopes and influence on events in the revived investigation of Bamborough’s disappearance.

    The subject for discussion, then, is what signs have you seen (or heard) in your experiences of Ink Black Heart of supernatural influence? What wild and wacky coincidences that favor the revelation of the guilty parties happen are there in Strike6 which may suggest ghosts on the move, manipulating the ether and the thoughts of the living to act out their revenge?

  • Ink Black: Has Strike Conceived a Child?

    ByJohn
    11 Comments

    Yesterday, Louise Freeman laid out the compelling evidence that Troubled Blood was originally meant to be Strike6 and Ink Black Heart Strike5. Using Ring Theory, Literary Alchemy, and the Parallel Series Idea in addition to her own detailed timeline, she offered the cogent argument that, for whatever reason, Rowling decided to switch the two. Speculation has already begun about why she might have shifted the two.

    This morning Serious Striker J. S. Malekson offered a plot possibility that would make flipping Strike novels 5 and 6 almost a necessity and bring the Rokeby drama back into clear focus: Strike’s dalliance with Madeline in Ink Black Heart has resulted in her pregnancy.

    Along the lines of things that were expected to happen in Strike 6 that didn’t happen, a thought struck me that something was going to happen in Strike 6 that had never occurred to me before Strike 6: Madeline becomes pregnant with Strike’s baby.

    Read More “Ink Black: Has Strike Conceived a Child?”

  • Flips, Pentagrams and Expanded Playlists: Why did the tone we expected in Book 5 wind up in Book 6?

    ByLouise Freeman
    17 Comments

    We have a lot of hypotheses about why we got such a nigredo-laden book in Strike 6.  They are:

    • 5-6 flip: which supposes that Troubled Blood was originally planned as Book 6, and The Ink Black Heart as Book 5.
    • The Pentagram model: which has the first five books completing the alchemical cycle and the start of a new one in Book 6.
    • The Extended Playlist model: Proposed recently by Kathleen, it suggests Galbraith is splitting the last 2, or possibly 3,  books of the 7-part series into two parts. Under this model, The Ink Black Heart would be either part 6a or 5b.

    I’m going to outline some of the evidence I see for 5-6 Flip based on one audiobook listen of IBH. As a refresher, recall that this model predicts 1) Career of Evil parallels, instead of or alongside parallels to The Silkworm 2) Order of the Phoenix parallels, instead or alongside those to Half-Blood Prince and 3) nigredo elements, instead or alongside albedo. Interestingly, though, one of the strongest pieces of evidence is none of these, but rather timeline- and calendar-based.

    One thing has always puzzled me.  Lethal White ended in mid-September 2012.  Troubled Blood began in August 2013, almost a full year later. This was the second year-long time jump in the series. There were two good reasons for the year-long jump in the middle of LW:  1) Book 4 absolutely had to be set in the 2012 Olympics and 2) no one wanted to read about a full year of Robin trying to make herself love the Flobberworm, develop panic attacks and feel emotionally distant from Strike.

    But why jump a full year between LW and TB? It would have been awesome to see Robin’s early days with Max (and Wolfgang! Sniff!), the curry nights with Nick and Ilsa, Robin’s friendship with them developing (and the dirt they dished on Charlotte), the start of the match-making attempts and the series of incompetent temps that culminated in the the decision to hire Pat. OK, we’d have to see the Flobberworm be a jerk for a year, but the rest would be worth that. Instead, that is all explained after the fact. Obviously, the historical floods of 2014 were important to the story, but as has been stated multiple times, you expect lots of rain in albedo, not nigredo books. Why not tell the nigredo story in that missing year and save the floods for albedo?
    That may well have been the original plan. The Ink Black Heart started in October (2014) and finished in June (2015).  Roll the dates back 2 years (Oct 2012-June 2013) and you have a story that fits quite neatly into that missing year.  This, I think, is good evidence that the IBH story was originally meant to be told in that time period.
    Second, I can definitely see the Ink Black Heart cartoon as a “text-within-a-text” as stated in Beatrice Grove’s excellent prediction post. But, to me, it doesn’t fit as well as Talbot’s True Book as an analog to either Bombyx Mori, or the Prince’s doctored text. First, those were all actual books. Second, our heroes didn’t wind up actually reading scripts or viewing the cartoon in search of clues to the killer; they instead had to search Twitter and chat rooms for what the fans were saying about the show. That gave it a very different feel to me, and had them examining many different people’s words and the social interactions embedded within the conversations, not the solo narrative of the text. The only person to seriously watch the cartoon was Robin, when she was studying for her moderator’s test, and she didn’t even get to take that.
    So, if The Ink Black Heart fits into that missing year, and the main mystery element is a less satisfactory match to the books of The Silkworm and the Half-Blood Prince, are there the decaying skeletons of Career, Order and nigredo buried in the text?  More after the jump! Read More “Flips, Pentagrams and Expanded Playlists: Why did the tone we expected in Book 5 wind up in Book 6?”