Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott are such thoughtful, insightful, and self-aware people whose penetrating intelligence is their shared defining characteristic — they mull over and detect as their vocation what other people (and the Metropolitan Police) miss in the minutia of daily living — that we are lulled into the conviction that they are ‘picking up on’ or ‘getting’ the important clues in their own lives about the mysteries they live within. As a rule, though, Robin the wannabe psychologist and Sherlock Strike are clueless about their own lives; self-reflective as each is, they ignore or otherwise neglect the strong signals and suggestive events that surround them.
We trusted the teen Harry Potter, our de facto narrative lens in the Hogwarts Saga, to catch the key clue he sees but which he does not understand and this inevitable but misplaced trust in the good guy-orphan was the means by which Rowling created the narrative misdirection the fooled us every year in that series, her signature ‘big twist’ at the story climax and denouement. In the Strike mysteries, as Oonaugh Kennedy observes about book-smart people being the most naive about their sex lives (Blood 270), the Amazing Memory Man and the Jungian Jungfrau are in the dark as often as not and oblivious to clues Rowling-Galbraith is giving the reader by putting them in the pair’s individual and shared blind-spots.
Strike explained to Robin when she observed that Cynthia Phipps’ joke about Anne Boleyn’s decapitation was rather tasteless given that Creed may very well have cut off, boiled down, and powdered Margot Bamborough’s head that this was a function of self-blindness. “She’s lived with it for forty years,” said Strike. “People who live with something that massive stop being able to see it. It’s the backdrop to their lives. It’s only glaringly obvious to everyone else” (Blood, 411). Our problem is that, though the author is being more than fair in presenting the back-drops to the lives of Strike and Ellacott, the mysteries are not “glaringly obvious” to us because we put such trust in our brilliant narrators that we neglect the unanswered questions in their lives.
I thought, as we begin the run-up to the publication of Ink Black Heart, that it would be a useful exercise to create a catalog of these mysteries hidden in plain sight, especially those highlighted in the massive and still opaque Troubled Blood. I’ve collected two batches of these off the top of my head, one for the series as a whole, the other just from Troubled Blood, that I think we may learn more about in Strike6 and I hope you’ll contribute those you see that I have missed. The first batch today, then, after the jump, to be followed tomorrow with those specific to Troubled Blood. Read More “Cormoran Strike: Unanswered Questions”
