Bronte Studios has begun filming the adaptation of Lethal White for BBC1 written by screenwriter Tom Edge. Tom Burke and Holliday Grainger are back in the lead roles as Cormoran and Robin and the actors who have played Charlotte and Matthew return as well. See the BBC1 announcement here.

The surprise? Robert Glenister, the brilliant narrator of the Strike audio book versions, has been cast as Jasper Chiswell:

Burke (The Souvenir, War And Peace) and Grainger (Animals, The Capture) lead a cast of acclaimed British actors including Robert Glenister, who most recently starred in Curfew for Sky Atlantic, other credits include Paranoid, Journey’s End and Live By Night as well as conman Ash “Three Socks” Morgan in the hit BBC One series Hustle. Glenister also read the audio-book versions of the Robert Galbraith books including Lethal White. Natasha O’Keeffe (Peaky Blinders, Sherlock) and Kerr Logan (Alias Grace, London Irish) also return as Strike’s ex-girlfriend and Robin’s fiancé respectively.

I guess this casting shouldn’t be that much of a surprise given Glenister’s accomplishments as an actor but the overlap is fascinating and curious. I mean, Stephen Fry and Jim Dale are famous comedians and actors, too, but they weren’t invited to take part in the remarkably large ensemble cast of the Hogwarts Saga film adaptations.

I look forward to the day (if I live long enough to see it — I don’t think this day will be coming anytime soon) when we learn the background machinations of The Presence in all things Cormoran Strike, from her planning and writing of the books to the adaptations for the wee screen and the serendipitous casting of Burke as Rosmer in the West End revival production of Rosmersholm the summer before Lethal White is filmed. I suspect that Glenister’s casting as Chiswell was as much a coincidence as Burke’s was, which is to say, “not an accident at all.”

I am not a fan of film adaptations, but I so admire Glenister’s readings that I confess to looking forward to seeing his version of Jasper Chiswell. You?

Ever since Rowling was outed as the author of Cuckoo’s Calling we have been discussing the mythological framework on which the Strike mysteries are written.We were talking about Cormoran’s mother Leda and her relations with rockstar Jonny Rokeby as a reflection of the myth of Leda and the Swan, an avian incarnation of Zeus, even before Joanne Gray broke the code of Strike and Ellacott being story stand-ins for Castor and Pollux.

Beatrice Groves, in a MuggleNet essay on literary allusion in The Silkworm, made a reference to Yeats’ poem, ‘Leda and the Swan’ as a gloss on Rowling’s swan twitter header. Does the Silkworm Expend Her Yellow Labors for Thee?

Rowling put up a rather aggressive-looking swan as a Twitter header during the period she was working on this novel, and a fanciful viewer could relate this image to Yeats’s famous sonnet on Leda:

The great wings beating still/ Above the staggering girl” (“Leda and the Swan”)

That was in February 2018. I didn’t even look up the Yeats poem then, I’m embarrassed to say now.

In March 2018 I was asked by Josh Richards, a brilliant novelist and literary critic out of St Andrews University, to read his The One and Only Sarah Jones. I was delighted to be among the first to read it (I hope you will one day have that opportunity, especially if you love Henry James).

Prof Richards included some notes as epilogue to the book in which he mentioned Yeats’ ‘Leda and the Swan.’ Incredulous that I had not found this in any of my readings about the Leda myth, I pulled down my copy of The Complete Yeats (thank you, Friends of the OKC Library booksale!) and took a look. Here’s an online source for you.

Leda and the Swan (W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939)

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
                    Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

If you’re like me, your ears perked up at that “shudder in the loins” line. Strike says that about Rokeby: “As far as Jonny Rokeby was concerned, I was just a shudder in the loins.” I was sure I’d heard Robert Glenister say that in his audio book rendition of one of the first three Strike mysteries.

Here’s the thing: when Strike bemoans that he was nothing to Rokeby but a “shudder in the loins,” he is of course quoting Yeats’ poem.

I thought, having forgotten Prof Groves’ citation on MuggleNet, that I’d made a major discovery or at least a significant confirmation of the Leda, Zeus, Castor, and Pollux theorizing here at HogwartsProfessor. I wrote to the merry band of HogwartsProfessor faculty and assorted Pundits to see if I wasn’t covering something already well known. The response was positive and enthusiastic, if I was reminded about the previous citation. One correspondent wrote:

The good news is that I haven’t lost my mind; I’ve only confirmed how powerful visual media are (I’d only seen the BBC1 show once and hadn’t even been that attentive). The bad news? Well, as my correspondent points out, we have to assume this allusion is a screenwriter’s conceit rather than a bon mot from The Presence Herself. We just don’t know how much input or supervision Rowling has with respect to the adaptations.

I post it now because I have a backlog of more than 200 post drafts I’m working through and this is certainly one of the more interesting.

Maybe he has. Maybe he hasn’t.

When asked about Robert Galbraith’s fourth Cormoran Strike novel two months after its publication last year, Tom Burke said he simply didn’t have the time or mental space to take Lethal White on.

Burke has starred in three series of the TV drama about Cormoran Strike, the former British military policeman injured in Afghanistan who becomes a private investigator in London.

Writing as Robert Galbraith, Rowling published the fourth Strike novel two months ago. It’s called Lethal White but Burke admits he hasn’t read it and has no idea what happens.

“It’s not that I don’t want to,” he says. “But my head has been full of Friedrich Schiller (the playwright of Don Carlos) and we’ve been touring the play with a cast of 13. When you tour you even start to calculate how few pairs of socks you can get away with – so taking a big hardback book would be a problem.”

That was 8 November 2018. His next play was, as we know, Ibsen’s Rosmersholm which opened on 24 April and closed on 20 July this year. Did he take the time to read Lethal White in the three months he had between starring in Schiller’s Don Carlos and taking the lead role in Ibsen’s classic? If not, is he reading it in preparation for filming the BBC adaptation this fall? Or will he, a la Michael Gambon as Dumbledore, just read the script?

I confess to hoping that Burke did not read Lethal White until he had a memorized knowledge of Rosmersholm. That would give him a truly unique perspective on Cormoran’s adventures in White and the intertextual relationship of  the play and the novel because I doubt there are many other serious Strikers who read Rosmersholm closely until every single epigraph in Lethal White came from that play.

If Tom wants the short cut to getting this relationship, of course, he can listen to the Reading, Writing, Rowling podcast about Lethal White which includes a discussion of Rosmersholm or he could read my longish post on the subject, ‘Lethal White: Ibsen’s Rosmersholm.’

More from Burke on Cormoran and Robin:

Filming for Lethal White is pencilled in for late 2019 and Burke looks forward to getting back to playing Strike. “Maybe this is there in many great characters but I think key to him is that deep inside he’s on the run. In some ways he can be a centred, grounded individual but then you realise he’s had an incredibly strange and darkly exotic childhood. All that ‘man’s man’ side to him may be an insulation for some very raw nerve – that’s what stirred my curiosity.”

Viewers may be hoping finally things will stir too between Strike and his former secretary – now business partner – Robin Ellacott, played by Holliday Granger.

Burke has no inside track on what may eventually happen. “I suppose it will have to develop in one direction or the other – but the author is so gifted with the slow burn of relationships without ever losing their intensity. When Holly and I have been filming we’ve found a real nuance there.

“Sometimes when you’re doing TV you’re aware there are voices behind the scenes saying these characters definitely need to share a kiss by the end of episode two. But maybe they never will. As an actor and maybe as a viewer you just want it to play out moment by moment and see where that gets you.”

Those are pretty insightful comments, frankly, about both the character and the author. He may be far too short and handsome for the part, but he certainly has the smarts.

Do you think the actor has read the fourth book yet? Why or why not? Does it matter? Do you think he’s been given some kind of heads up beyond the books in print about Strike’s “strange and darkly exotic childhood”? Let me know what you think in the comment boxes below.