The ‘Lethal White’ Pillar Post
Readers and film goers come to HogwartsProfessor.com for challenging discussion of popular literature and especially the novels of J. K. Rowling. There are Harry Potter fan sites which are much more popular than this one, but there are none that I know of that take Rowling and her work as seriously as we do or offer the insights about the artistry and meaning in play in the novels, screenplays, even the longer Twitter sequences she writes.
We may also be the only website that offers extensive, in depth, and fun commentary on and speculation about Rowling’s Cormoran Strike mysteries. There’s so much good material in our archives, in fact, on each of the four books we have from Robert Galbraith that the Serious Striker needs a guide or catalog for easy reference.
Hence the Pillar Post project. If you look on the left sidebar of the HogwartsProfessor homepage, you’ll see a list there of subject categories beneath which links are hiding a panoply of posts within that category. All the Strike novels’ Pillar Post listings, for example, are to be found by clicking on INDIVIDUAL ROWLING WORKS, posts about literary alchemy and ring composition are under KEYS FOR INTERPRETATION, and Hunger Games, Twilight, and Divergent discussion in AUTHORS NOT J.K. ROWLING.
I’ve really only just started this cataloging work; forgive me if the Pillar Post you want or need isn’t done yet. The ‘Literary Alchemy’ pillar only has urls sorted into categories, but The Hunger Games collection is done (just in time for discussion about the prequel) and, as of late last night, the Lethal White set is finished as well. (I shouldn’t say the Pillar Posts are “done” or “finished” because they will need to be updated, but the first gathering and cataloging is ‘up.’)
If I say so myself, the Lethal White Pillar Post is the equivalent of a very, very good published guidebook to the fourth Cormoran Strike novel. There are more than eighty entries that cover subjects as varied as the Cratylic names, literary alchemy and mythic context, and the novel’s ring composition, not to mention discussion of the science in the book, the historical Rattenbury for whom the mad terrier is named (Peeves!), and the literary allusions and influences (Rosmersholm!).
It has writing from Louise Freeman, Beatrice Groves, Joanne Gray, M. Evan Willis, Elizabeth Baird-Hardy, and others as well as myself, and frankly, it doesn’t get better than that crowd of Serious Strikers.
Did I mention the echoes of Goblet of Fire and Cuckoo’s Calling in Lethal White? All the links to those posts are in one spot on this page, too.
Check it out if you have a moment — and, if you have two moments, let me know what you think by writing a note in the comment box below! Let me know, too, if you’d like to volunteer to help gather together the urls for one of these Pillar Posts yourself; I could sure use a hand in completing this project.
I haven’t written about this since the publication of Lethal White, however, and I think some facts about the series that the fourth book largely nailed down may interest the uber Potter-phile. Here, then, is my list of three things about the Cormoran Strike novels that might encourage the most hesitant Rowling-reader and Wizarding World fan to give them a try.
Rowling has since allowed in an interview about her BBC adaptations of the mysteries that the books are obviously a series. There may turn out to be more than seven. The four books we have, though, in their structure and relationship one to another, are almost certainly a seven book set that may or may not run on from there.
If that weren’t sufficient evidence, Rowling/Galbraith inserts a page at the half-way point of Lethal White that reads ‘Part Two.’ That book, however, does not have a page in either its hard cover or paperback editions that says ‘Part One.’ As if to confirm that this is the second part of the series rather than just this novel, i.e., “we are half way through the seven books,” the story line in Letal White that begins in Part Two is a repetition of the opening chapters of Cuckoo’s Calling, i.e., Cormoran accepting a case from a berieved relation of the deceased who does not believe that the death was a suicide. See
I shouldn’t say they don’t win prizes, though, because three of the four books — and the first before Galbraith was outed as Rowling — have won awards for the audio-book versions as read by Robert Glenister. I’ve written about that before (see 
Every chapter-heading epigraph in Robert Galbraith’s Lethal White is taken from Henrik Ibsen’s Rosmersholm.
I am very hopeful that our Serious Strike Fellowship in London will be attending and reporting on this version of Rosmersholm, how it preserves and how it revises Ibsen’s classic (FYI, Social Justice crusaders do not come off well in the original), and how Burke chooses to play Rosmer, especially with respect to his responsibility for the suicide of his wife. Will it be a clue about Strike’s reflections on his culpability in his mother Leda’s supposed suicide and his denial of responsibility?
The irony is that Anteros was the god that Matthew and Robin really needed since it was the couple’s inability to grow their initial early infatuation into a more mature and lasting love that doomed their relationship.
Homer includes two famous couples in The Odyssey Book 3, Helen and Menelaus; Agamemnon and Clytemnestra—2 Spartan brothers married to 2 Spartan sisters. Both couples portray unfaithful marriages and Homer used them as counterweights to the faithful relationship and marriage of Odysseus and Penelope.