If you are like me, sometimes you just go on a reading binge, a period in which you consume voraciously the work of a given author, start to finish. In the last few years I have gorged on all the books I could find by P. D. James (21), Ian Rankin (32), Boris Akunin (17), Vladimir Nabokov (5), James Benn (12), Kate Atkinson (9), Lou Berney (5), Dan Simmons (5), Dolores Gordon-Smith (10), Agatha Christie (24), and Lev Grossman (5). These readings are not especially attentive and I haven’t re-read or charted any of these novelists’ stories but the effort in almost every case mentioned was at least border-line comprehensive. The Nabokov, Rankin, James, and Christie binges have resulted in numerous posts here, for which “Thank you, Bookfinder.com and Friends of the Oklahoma City Library.”

My most recent deep dive was into the work of C. J. Sansom, the author of seven Matthew Shardlake historical mysteries and two stand-alone novels, Dominion and Winter in Madrid. I finished Madrid last night, well, early this morning, to complete the nine book set and hasten to write something here about the experience if only to justify all the time I have spent in Sansom’s remarkable worlds this last month. As you may know, I had reason to think Rowling has read at least the first Matthew Shardlake novel, Dissolution, and decided to read all the others because they are a delight, frankly, and because I was hopeful of finding more Potter and Strike links.

Join me after the jump for my praise of Sansom’s writings, my one disappointment, and the single connection I think may exist between the Shardlake Tudor-era historical thrillers and Troubled Blood, the fifth Cormoran Strike novel. Read More “Troubled Blood: Strike – and Shardlake?”

The Peter-John Rule as explained in Christmas Pig 1: Jack Jones, Peter, John is that Rowling, after a historic and semi-Biblical understanding of Sts Peter and John (and James, St John’s brother, the Sons of Thunder) as representative of the two sides to faith in Christ, names her Bad Guys ‘Peter’ and her good guys ‘John.’ ‘Peter’ in this post-Reformation understanding stands for the formal and legal aspects of Christianity, ‘Church-ianity’ in current jargon; Catholicism with its scholastic bent, celibate male priesthood and hierarchy, and its legalistic front is the Petrine church in the Western binary of Vatican vs Reformed or Protestant churches. ‘John’ is the esoteric, inner, or real faith in Christ with the relatively free-form or ad hoc theologies of the Reformers and their insistence on individual conscience as the ultimate authority being the Johannine pole in the binary.  

Rowling adopted this rule as her own, the theory posits, because of her family history and experience. As explained here with confirming testimonial evidence from family here, her father, Peter John Rowling, was an abusive or negligent father or both. For starters, according to his oldest daughter, dad wanted his first child to be a boy, chose the name ‘Simon John’ for what he hoped would be his namesake (‘Peter’ in scripture was originally ‘Simon bar Jonah’), was disappointed he had a daughter instead, and never really let go of his disappointment. The name ‘Joanne,’ there being no female equivalent for ‘Peter,’ seems to have been chosen to assign her his middle name of ‘John’ as well as the mother’s ‘Anne’ name; ‘Joanne’ is from ‘Johannes’ the Greek original of ‘John’ and the second Rowling daughter was named ‘Dianne.’

Rowling characters, consequently, are named ‘Peter’ or ‘Simon’ if they’re bad men and ‘John’ or ‘James’ if they are good guys. Rowling’s father, of course, had both names, with ‘John’ appropriately as his middle name, his secret ‘inner essence,’ which loving and spiritual aspect of his , as one pundit put it, the surface and patriarchal ‘Peter’ aspect murdered. See the exploration of Rowling character names in Christmas Pig 1: Jack Jones, Peter, John  for the wicked ‘Peter’s and ‘Simon’ and the benevolent ‘John’s and James’ from Harry Potter to The Christmas Pig as well as Rowling’s jumping on the Spenser contra-Catholicism train in Troubled Blood. This has significance to those reading the Cormoran Strike novels because Strike’s father is named ‘Jonny’ and the rock star’s barracuda barrister is named ‘Peter.’

This Peter-John Rule, really more of a working hypothesis, has led to other insights in Rowling’s work, most notably, that Bad Dads are the origin of evil in the world, something like Satan, and Maternal Love in her work is divine, even a symbol of Christ’s love (Johannine theology stems in large part from the Logos Prologue to that evangelist’s gospel and from the “God is Love” teaching in his epistles). Discussion of the Mom-Dad, Christ-Satan symbolism in the parallels between Order of the Phoenix and Troubled Blood led to the first serious objections to the Peter-John Rule.

Louise Freeman noted that there were ‘John’s in Rowling’s books who were very bad guys indeed.

So, was it narrative misdirection to have the first batshit insane killer of the series named *John* Bristow? For that matter, “Janice” is a variant of “Jane” which also shares an etymology with John. So, though John may signal virtue in Rowling’s work, it’s also a variant of 2/5 (or six given the Raff-Kinvara partnerhip in Chiswell’s death).

‘Janice’ we can throw out as a ‘John’ derived name because it was clearly meant to be understood, as Elizabeth Baird-Hardy pointed out soon after Troubled Blood was released, as ‘Janus,’ the two-faced god of Roman mythology. John Bristow, however, is seemingly a pronounced exception to the Peter-John Rule; he’s the Bad Guy murderer in Cuckoo’s Calling, after all. Louise later pointed out that ‘Matthew John Cunliffe’ was also a ‘John’ without redeeming qualities. The other seeming exception to the rule is the universally deplored ‘Dolores Jane Umbridge,’ the star representative of law and government, the Petrine establishment in other words, in Order of the Phoenix.

I think, though, that a closer look at these supposed exceptions to the rule turn out to be demonstrations of it. Join me after the jump for how these ‘John’s and ‘Jane’ who are Bad Guys fit in and even highlight the meaning of ‘Peter’ and ‘John’ in Rowling’s work. It’s worth your time if you are a Serious Striker because John Bristow’s fate may be an important clue to the series ending in Strike7. Read More “Exceptions to the Peter-John Rule? John Bristow, Dolores Umbridge, Matt Cunliffe”