Two days ago I posted an overview of the True Book’s appearances in Troubled Blood after writing up my working hypothesis, several corollaries to that idea, and the premises of my argument. That post was meant to preface a series of explorations of each of the seven mentions and illustrations we get of the True Book in Strike5; I suspect this series is best read in sequence but can be started at any point with other parts easily referred to if the reader wants more information. 

Today’s post is a close-up look at the first mention of this text, the fragment of Pitman shorthand that DI Bill Talbot left in the Metropolitan Police Bamborough case file that mentions the True Book. Cormoran shares it with Robin at the end of their Clerkenwell walk in conversation about this file on Halloween in the Three Kings Pub. It looks like this (Part 2, chapter 14, page 149):

Almost everything about the walk and consequent conversation in the last chapters of Part 2 are pointers to the revelations of Whodunnit at the end of Part 6 and Troubled Blood in general; Robin discusses the phone boxes, there’s a plastic nurse, the costume party backdrop in the pub with its Nativity associated name hints of the book-to-come’s occult touches and Christian backdrop. Oakden’s note about the Cross being the place to dig, the last piece from the file Strike shows Robin in the pub, is important in this regard with respect to how to interpret the prevalent cross symbolism in the text, a subject for a future post.

The Pitman shorthand note, however, is, as the first of seven passages and illustrations taken from the True Book, the natural key to its interpretation. It may even be a key to how to read Rowling’s work as a whole. For all that, join me after the jump for my attempt to answer four questions about this ‘note in a bottle,’ I mean, in a police file. [Read more…]

As promised last Saturday, I hope in the weeks prior to Ink Black Heart‘s publication to write an introductory review of the ‘True Book’ pages Rowling inserted into Troubled Blood. There are several glaring gaps even after two years spent discussing The Presence’s longest and most challenging novel; the most egregious fail is the absence of serious exploration of the book’s most unique quality, which is to say, the author-illustrated pages of its primary embedded text.

Today’s post is an overview of the series to follow in which I will take a closer look at each of these pages; I call this an “introductory review” because my primary aim is not writing anything definitive but to foster discussion of Bill Talbot’s True Book and Rowling’s purpose in deploying it the way she has.

Let’s start with my working hypothesis, several corollary ideas, and my argument’s three premises. [Read more…]