Five Minute Audio Teaser from Hallmarked Man Now Available Online

The marketing blitz for Hallmarked Man is in full swing. As it should be with only three weeks until its publication.

The author is conversing with fans on Twixter and Apple Audio Books has dropped a five minute teaser from Strike8, what I presume are the opening pages of the novel.

The epigraph was a surprise to me, the big reveal of the first pages was also the shock it was meant to be, and I was startled, too, by what this beginning suggests we’ll see in the end.

Thoughts on all of that after the jump! (I’m discussing the five minute clip, so of course there will be spoilers.) [Read more…]

The JKR 60th Birthday Party Kanreki Celebration Index: Links and Blurb summaries of the 31 Lake and Shed Conversations of Rowling’s Life and Work in July 2025

Last month, Nick Jeffery and I logged a marathon of Kanreki ‘Lake and Shed’ posts at our Substack site in celebration of Rowling’s life and work at her 60th birthday. Nick has been re-posting links to that work here at the weblog and now I have assembled below an easy-to-access-and-reference single place for readers to find any part of this fun series. Enjoy!

Introduction to the Kanreki Project

On 31 July 2025, Joanne Murray, aka J. K. Rowling and Robert Galbraith, celebrated her 60th birthday. This specific celebration is considered a ‘second birth’ in Japan or Kanreki because it is the completion of the oriental astrological cycle. To mark JKR’s Kanreki, 還暦, Dr John Granger and Nick Jeffery, both Nipponophiles, read through Rowling’s more than twenty published works and reviewed them in light of the author’s writing process, her ‘Lake and Shed’ metaphor. The ‘Lake’ she said in 2019 and 2024 is the source of her inspiration and the ‘Shed’ is the alocal place of her intentional artistry, in which garage she transforms the biographical stuff provided by her subconscious mind into the archetypal stories that have made her the most important author of her age.

Join us after the jump for the complete compendium of the Harry Potter, Cormoran Strike, Fantastic Beast, ‘Stand Alone’ stories, and Golden Thread posts! [Read more…]

The HogPro Kanreki Project – Lake and Shed Readings Dumbledore to Running Grave

Dr John Granger and Nick Jeffery continue with our Lake and Shed reviews of the twenty-one stories written at least in part by J. K. Rowling. Join us for our celebration of Mrs Murray’s 60th birthday, and her Kanreki, 還暦, or calendar re-birth.

Nick lays out the drama surrounding the third Fantastic Beasts franchise film and his favorite part of the movie (hint: it’s about “confusion”). John reveals why Jacob gets a Snakewood wand and one without a core as well as why he thinks Kowalski is the embedded author in this series.

Nick covers the front and the back of making Lake readings of Strike6 without a lot of circumspection and John talks about the eerie feeling he had while reading this book that the author was ‘having a go’ at him. Enjoy!

Nick confesses to feeling stumped about what to say as his ‘Lake’ contribution to the discussion — before his epiphany on a long walk with Addie that almost every buoy or pillar in Rowling’s metaphorical place of inspiration finds its reflection in the seventh Galbraith mystery. John refuses to go into any detail about the work’s ‘wheels within wheels within wheels’ ring structure but shares instead the symbolic depth of Mama Mazu’s mother of pearl fish pendant.

The HogPro Kanreki Project – Lake and Shed Readings Troubled Blood to Christmas Pig

Dr John Granger and Nick Jeffery continue with our Lake and Shed reviews of the twenty-one stories written at least in part by J. K. Rowling. Join us for our celebration of Mrs Murray’s 60th birthday, and her Kanreki, 還暦, or calendar re-birth.

Nick discusses Rowling’s history with the Clerkenwell neighborhood. John talks about Troubled Blood as a double re-telling of The Faerie Queene, Book One, with Strike and Margot as the Redcrosse Knight and Oonaugh and Robin as Una.

Nick discusses Rowling’s many interview statements about the Things which were lost and how many of them match up with things she has lost; he takes a deep dive into the Blue Bunny episode outside the Gates of the City of the Missed and Rowling’s embedding herself and her daughter Mackenzie in the story. John talks about the Blue Bunny and his being “found” or “saved” as an allegory of the human condition written in the Rowling shorthand-symbols for (and obsessions with) love, salvation, and what is real.

Nick by the Lake shares the history of the Murray Family and their beanie pig toys as well as a likely source for the defenestration of DP (in Esquire magazine, no less). John talks about the promise and the limits of reading literature through a biographical lens and then explains the anagogical meaning of the Power palace kangaroo court trial of CP and Jack. Both share their reasons for thinking that The Christmas Pig is the perfect distillation of everything Rowling is doing as a writer, to include the relationship of her Lake inspiration to her final Shed product.

The HogPro Kanreki Project – Lake and Shed Readings Grindlewald to Troubled Blood

Dr John Granger and Nick Jeffery continue with our Lake and Shed reviews of the twenty-one stories written at least in part by J. K. Rowling. Join us for our celebration of Mrs Murray’s 60th birthday, and her Kanreki, 還暦, or calendar re-birth.

On the Lake side of things, Nick explores the Johnny Depp casting scandal and the lead-up in 2018 to the 2019 Tweet Heard Round the World. John explains that the cut scenes from this dog’s mess of a movie point that the shooting script, i.e., what Rowling wrote and approved before David Yates butchered the film in the editing room, was all about Leta Lestrange. More important, John makes the Shed point that every Rowling book features a text of some kind that the characters struggle to understand — and that Crimes of Grindelwald has ten of these, a veritable library of interior texts to interpret.

Nick takes the ‘Shed’ point and lays out the controlled demolition of her reputation among Group Thinkers on the Left in the lead up to Ickabog’s publication and John shares the meaning of ‘The Ickabog’s Song,’ the embedded text of the tale, as interpreted by Daisy Dovetail (an embedded author?).

Nick discusses Rowling’s history with the divinatory art of astrology and the occult resources and reference works she brought into play in writing a novel whose primary embedded text is a murder scene’s astrological chart. John talks about the astrological clock structure of twelve houses in which Galbraith tells this remarkable story.