What We Know Has to Happen: Seven Troubled Blood Near Sureties

Readers are four books deep into the Cormoran Strike series and we have in hand a list of things that happen in every book. Let’s clear the deck of the almost sure things to look for in Troubled Blood as something of a review of our experience thus far. (For more on this, especially the ring writing notes, see The Three Things about Comoran Strike Every Harry Potter Fan Should Know. If you want to see my predictions for Lethal White in this same format, go here; the scorecard of hits and misses is here.)

On to the sure-thing predictions for Troubled Blood –

1. There will be a Murder, Strike and Robin will Investigate it, They will come to a Seeming Dead-End, Strike will Have an Insight into Whodunnit, He Will Get the Proof He Needs to Convince the Metropolitan Police to Make an Arrest, and there will be a Reveal and Arrest.

Strike runs the C. B. Strike Detective Agency. Robin Ellacott-Cunliffe is his partner, though he retains final decision making authority (and responsibility). He has a history, to her amusement, of taking unlikely and unprofitable cases that turn into Big Deal media events. We know from the pre-publication synopsis and First Part release that Troubled Blood will not be an exception to this rule; the fifth mystery is a missing person cold case, which, while potentially profitable for the agency, does not promise to be successful or controversial. We can expect that Strike and Robin will solve the case and that it will make headlines in the process. There should be conflicts and positive exchanges with the Metropolitan Police during the book, a combative avoidance with newspaper and television ‘journalists,’ and, as in Lethal White, the presence of other Private Investigators looking into the Strike Agency for bad actors.

          2. There will be Revelations About Strike’s Personal and Professional History

In every book, Galbraith reveals something about Strike’s past life with Leda, Charlotte, and the Nancarrows or at Oxford and in the IEB. The first seven chapters of Troubled Blood continue this narrative slow release.

          3. There will be Revelations About Strike’s Former Fiancee, Charlotte Campbell-Ross

Ditto the Charlotte data. She calls Strike’s office, we learn from Robin in chapter three of Troubled Blood, and the Goddess of Glam says she “has something” to give Bluey. We learn from Robin that Charlotte safely delivered her twins in the year between Lethal White and the action of Troubled Blood.

          4. There will be Revelations about Leda Strike, Cormoran’s Mother, and Her Death

In some Strike books there are more details, in others there are astonishingly few ‘reveals’ about Leda Strike. Career of Evil  was loaded; Lethal White barely has a mention of her. Troubled Blood promises to be more like Strike 3 than Strike 4 in this regard; she already features in chapters one and four of the released Apple Books preview.

          5. There will be Revelations about Robin Ellacott-Cunliffe’s Personal and Professional History

We learned in Career of Evil about the crisis at university that kept Robin from finishing her degree and Lethal White was chock full of details about how this played out in her relationship with Matthew. Troubled Blood will probably not be as Robin history loaded as these two books, but I expect we will learn at least one new reason to despise her first husband.

          6. There will be Pronounced Echoes of Career of Evil, as well as Cuckoo’s Calling, in Troubled Blood

Lethal White was heavy with references to events that were shadows of similar events in the first Strike novel, Cuckoo’s Calling. Read ‘Cuckoo’s Calling: 25+ Lethal White Finds’ and ‘Lethal White: Add Seven Cuckoo’s Echoes.’ This, when added to Rowling’s history of ring writing, suggests strongly that she is writing another seven book ring cycle akin to the Harry Potter series. If true, there should be a bevy of echoes from Career of Evil, because Strike 3 is the correspondent to Strike 5 in a typical turtle-back ring.

There may also be pointers to Cuckoo’s Calling, too, believe it or not, because Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was largely a re-telling of the first Potter novel, Philosopher’s Stone;  ‘The Red Hen,’ Joyce Odell, soon after the publication of Phoenix in 2005 noted the more than fifty parallels between the fifth book in that series and the first, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

          7. There will be Pronounced Echoes of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, as well as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, in Troubled Blood

Cuckoo’s Calling a la Philosopher’s Stone was about Cormoran Strike’s coming into his own, his “becoming a name,” and his escape from a relationship and living situation that was more a prison than a home. To quote Louise Freeman’s summary of the rest: 

Book 2 centered on the havoc wreaked by a mysterious autobiographical book, Book 3 on a notorious escaped criminal stalking the protagonist and Book 4 on patricide of a government minister, set against the backdrop of a major sporting event.

Let’s focus on that last one, Book 4 of each series. Lethal White, her fourth Cormoran Strike mystery, if written in parallel with and as commentary on the Hogwarts Saga equivalent numbers, should be overflowing with echoes and parallels to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. And it is. See ‘Does Lethal White Echo Goblet of Fire?’ for the list we put up here after a first reading (I say ‘we’ because Louise Freeman and Evan Willis significantly expanded my first seven parallels in the comment boxes beneath that post) and ‘Lethal White: Every Goblet of Fire Link?’ for the exhaustive cataloging. There are more than forty echoes of greater and lesser resonance.

Ergo, Strike 5 will be heavy with references to Potter 5, and, for reasons mentioned above, to Potter 1, Philosopher’s Stone.

Tomorrow, we continue our countdown to Troubled Blood with a guest post from Oxford’s Beatrice Groves, author of Literary Allusion in Harry Potter. We’ll return the day after with a review of our previous guesswork about Troubled Blood, cf., Louise Freeman’s ‘Creosote-Colored Tea Leaves,’ and some added ring guesswork based on what we know from the revealed Parts 1 and 2. 

Feel free to drop your best guesses about Troubled Blood in the comment boxes below!

J. K. Rowling has recorded two and a half hours of ‘Tracks of My Tears‘ BBC programming that will begin airing on 21 September, six days after the release of Troubled Blood, the fifth in the Cormoran Strike series of detective novels. Today we learned from Ken Bruce, the host of the show, that the music of Strike 5 comes from a rock album popular in 1974:

The fifth book ‘Troubled Blood’ came out earlier this month, and heavily references the songs of Canadian singer songwriter Joni Mitchell, in particular her most successful album ‘Court And Spark’, which was originally released in 1974. …

Music has always played a big part in J.K.’s life and during lockdown she’s discovered many more songs and musical pieces that resonate with her busy and much travelled life. The first two tracks she’s chosen today come from Kate Bush and Emeli Sandé.

Ken also has the daily love song, record and album of the week plus another round of the legendary PopMaster Quiz.

Like you, I’ve read all of Troubled Blood’s Part One and its seven chapters and almost three of Part Two’s seven chapters. Each has been introduced by a quotation-as-epigraph from Spenser’s Faerie Queen, which we expected and hoped for based on hints Rowling has given and from the title (Thank You, Nick Jeffery!). The book itself has an epigraph from Spenser and from Aleister Crowley as well. The Crowley was not a surprise because Rowling had Crowley’s natal horoscope as her twitter header not long ago (again, Nick Jeffery) and the Whittaker clues and Marilyn Manson tweet had us leaning in that direction.

Joni Mitchell? Really? Do the epigraphs from ‘Court and Spark’ begin in Troubled Blood’s Part Three? Help Me!

Sorry for the snark and head shaking, but I confess missing all the allusions to ‘Court and Spark’ in the first Parts of Troubled Blood. If Joni Mitchell is the Blue Oyster Cult beating heart of Troubled Blood, it’s going to have to be in the center or back-half of the book. Please do share the connections you see that I have missed — and, remember, I was thirteen years old in 1974, and, like everyone else who can say that, I have that album all but memorized because you couldn’t go anywhere in the country that year shy of being ten miles off road in Death Valley and not hear ‘Free Man in Paris’ playing in the background.

Here are some links about ‘Court and Spark’ for those interested in learning more:

• The Rolling Stone review in 1974
• A Look Back at ‘Court and Spark’ after 45 Years (2019)

And here are urls about Ken Bruce’s ‘Tracks of My Years’ BBC radio programming:

• Program ‘Format and Features’
• Ken Bruce’s Turn at ‘Tracks of My Years’
• Adele Interviewed on ‘Tracks of My Tears’

Anyone out there want to make a guess about which songs from Kate Bush and Emeli Sandé Rowling will have chosen as representative favorites? I’m clueless once again. Well, Wuthering Heights… Beneath Your Beautiful?

Hat tip to Nick Jeffery once again for this ‘Tracks of My Tears’ find!

Our friends in the UK have watched three episodes of the Bronte Studios adaptation of Robert Galbraith’s Lethal White for BBC1. Stateside, of course, we do not have access to the BBCiPlayer in order to watch it online.

It’s been reported that the screenwriters deleted Jack’s appendicitis attack and emergency hospitalization (and the attendant scenes between Robin and Cormoran). The clip above suggests they moved the discovery of the pink blanket well forward in the story. Please tell us there are compensating, creative adaptations in this small-screen version of a big book! Your review is welcome, too, as a comment or Guest Post — get writing, Strikers!

And if anyone has a secret url to where any of the three available episodes can be watched by those of us on the western rim of the Atlantic, thanks in advance for sharing in the comment boxes below.