Cormoran Strike: Cuckoo’s Calling
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Cormoran Strike: The Silkworm
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Cormoran Strike: Career of Evil
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Cormoran Strike: Lethal White
Lethal White has been a focus at HogwartsProfessor since the publication of Career of Evil in 2015. This Pillar Post for ‘Strike4’ is a gathering and organizing of more than eighty of the more important articles that discuss Lethal White directly or indirectly. This list was most recently updated on 22 June 2019.I urge the first time visitor researching the subject to listen to the ‘Reading, Writing, Rowling’ podcast about Lethal White which gives a fun introduction to and fire-hose survey of the key topics. From that beginning, either work your way down the list or jump to the subjects which most interest you.
Happy surfing!
Introduction/Overview/Key Points
- The ‘Reading, Writing, Rowling’ podcast on Lethal White (Kathryn McDaniel, Louise Freeman, Beatrice Groves, John Granger)
- The Top Ten Things We’ve Learned About Lethal White Since Publication Day
- The Three Things about J. K. Rowling’s Cormoran Strike Novels Every Harry Potter Fan Should Know
- Lethal White: The Ring Structure
- Lethal White: The Cratylic Names
- Lethal White: Autobiographical Elements
- Lethal White: Flints and Head Scratchers
Lethal White as Turning Point of Seven Part Ring Cycle
- The Missing Page Mystery
- The Missing Page Mystery, Part 2
- Does Lethal White Echo Goblet of Fire?
- Lethal White: Every Goblet of Fire Link?
- Lethal White: Cuckoo’s Calling Retold?
- The Cuckoo’s Calling Echoes (25+)
- Seven More Cuckoo’s Calling Links
- Lethal White: The Big Change at the Turn (End of the Strike Agency in Strike5?)
Literary Alchemy and the Mythic Context
- M. Evan Willis: The Mythic Context and Hermetic Meaning of Cormoran Strike
- Guest Post: Mythological Leda Strike – Cormoran, Zeus, Castor and Pollux (Joanne Gray; prepublication)
- Guest Post: Rowling’s Mercurial Hermetic Artistry from Snape to Strike (M. Evan Willis; prepublication)
- The Swan Symbolism
- More Strike Swans: Historical and Film Connections (Elizabeth Baird-Hardy)
- Harry Potter and The Hanged Man: Part 1 Rowling’s Most Loaded Tarot Reference
- Harry Potter and The Hanged Man: Part 2 The Historical and Occult Interpretations
- Harry Potter and The Hanged Man: Part 3 Its Meaning in Rowling’s Written Work
On ‘White Horses’
- The White Horse Gallows: Karmic Legacy of Empire in the UK?
- Charlotte Campbell: The Broodmare of Lethal White (Louise Freeman)
- Every ‘Rosmersholm’ White Horse Reference (Odd Sverre Hove)
- Taylor Swift’s ‘White Horses’ (Louise Freeman)
- Lethal White: The White Horse Evidence (pre-publication list of pointers)
- Lethal White Horses (Pre-publication; Beatrice Groves, MuggleNet)
Louise Freeman’s Lethal White Posts
- ‘He Strangled It Up By the Horse’ Provides a Breath of Fresh Air: Lethal White First Impressions
- Rattenbury the Wonder Dog — The Secret of Lethal White’s Yapping Terrier
- Piecing Together Cormoran Strike’s Childhood: Could Rokeby be the Snape of the Series?
- Science in Cormoran Strike: Narrative Misdirection or Plain Old Error? Part I: DNA and Paternity Testing
- Science in Cormoran Strike: Narrative misdirection or plain old error? Part 2: Pharmacology
- Misattribution of Arousal: More Evidence of Robin’s Psychology Training
- The Flobberworm’s Flat: Is Robin Entitled to a Share of the Proceeds?
- Charlotte Campbell: The Broodmare of Lethal White
- Taylor Swift’s ‘White Horses’
Series Mystery Possibilities
- Lethal White: Is Strike Rokeby’s Son? The Dates Don’t Seem To Match Up
- Bookending the Past: Cormoran Strike’s Real Father? (Joanne Gray)
- Lethal White: The Daddy Chiswell Evidence (Joanne Gray)
Literary Allusions and Influences
- Henrik Ibsen’s ‘Rosmersholm’
- Every ‘Rosmersholm’ White Horse Reference (Odd Sverre Hove)
- London Production of Rosmersholm: Starring Tom Burke (Cormoran Strike)
- London Production of Rosmersholm (2): Starring Tom Burke (Cormoran Strike)
- Agatha Christie’s The Moving Finger
- Allingham: The Fashion in Shrouds
- Rowling’s Favorite Poem Found in Oz : Whitman’s “Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances”
- Dorothy Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise, Ian Rankin, P. D. James (ChrisC, pre-publication)
- Cormoran and Robin: Echoes of Homer’s Odysseus and Penelope? (Joanne Gray)
- Cormoran and Robin: Echoes of Homer’s Odysseus and Penelope (2) Joanne Gray
- Ben Jonson’s ‘Every Man In His Humor’ A Meaningful Model for Strike Stories? (prepublication)
- Ian Rankin and Cormoran Strike (prepublication)
- The Three Fates Meet The Weird Sisters: Cormoran Strike, Harry Potter, and the Question of Fate, Free Will, and Choice (prepublication)
The National Health Service Sub Plot
- Lethal White: Ghosts of Aneurin Bevan? Lorelei Bevan, Dodgy Doc, and the NHS
- Lethal White and the NHS: Rowling Speaks
Miscellaneous:
- Marketing Efforts and Sales
- Most Common Pub Names
- The Personal Assistant Drama
- Possibility Two: Court Ordered Silence
- The Robert Glenister Audiobook
- Lethal White Wins CrimeFest Award
- On ‘Doom Bar Ale’
- BBC1 Adaptation a ‘Go’
- A Review of the Legacy and Online Media Book Reviews
Rowling Interviews, Twitter
- Pre-Publication: The Lethal White Music Playlist (Louise Freeman)
- The Graham Norton Interview
- On ‘Galbraith Meets Graham Norton’ (Beatrice Groves)
- Rowling as Labour’s Tweeting Prophet
- New Political Maturity from Rowling?
Prepublication Predictions and Speculation
In a nutshell, the theory is that Jonny Rokeby was responsible for Leda Strike’s death, a ‘hit’ that he arranged to insure that she would never reveal what she knew about crimes he committed as a Deadbeat, crimes to include murder, in conjunction with heroin and the drug trade. The ‘White Horse’ that Rowling has been teasing readers with this past year may involve an actual stallion but the larger meaning of the clues is heroin, for which ‘white horse’ is a street euphemism.
- Lethal White and Strike Speculation 101: The Trouble with JKR/Galbraith Dates (Heroin Dark Lord 2.0: The IED Explosion)
- Super Lethal White Speculation Podcast! Reading, Writing Rowling, Episode 14: Cormoran Strike – and Harry Potter?
- Fifteen Things That Have to Happen in ‘Lethal White’ (With Ten Fun Predictions Pre-Publication for the Serious Striker)
- Guest Post: ‘Lethal White’ Deadly Heroin (Joanne Gray, Six Months Prepublication)
- ‘Lethal White’ Teaser Extract Published
- Lethal White vs Crimes of Grindelwald
- Two Weeks ’til Lethal White Publication: How Is Rowling’s Latest Novel Selling?
- Lethal White: What We Can Expect (Eight Months Prepublication)
- Two Robert-Galbraith.com Revelations
- Cormoran Strike #4 Title is ‘Lethal White’
- Guest Post: Why No ‘Cormoran Mania’? (ChrisC)
- Five Reasons Harry Potter Fandom Isn’t Excited about Cormoran Strike — Yet
Postpublication Scorecard
- Scorecard for Lethal White Predictions: Bulls Eyes, Near Misses, and Air-Balls
- Parliament Prediction Hit (see Name That JKR Twitter Header Ceiling!)
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Lethal White: The Swan Symbolism
The story ends — its very last words — with “twin swans,” a return to the beginning as evident bracketing:
Head bowed against the rain, [Robin] had no attention left to spare for the magnificent mansion past which she was walking, its rain specked windows facing the great river, its front doors engraved with twin swans. (p 647)
Brad Bellows told us, in a comment attached to Evan Willis’ post on the hermetic and mythological meaning of Lethal White, that “the paired swans Robin fails to notice in the final line, actually exist, on Swan House, built in 1876 by R.N. Shaw, overlooking the Thames.” Mr Willis in that post had suggested this might be Jonny Rokeby’s home in keeping with his theory that, per Leda and the Swan/Zeus mythology, that Strike’s mysterious paternity, the pairing of his super-groupie mother with the other-worldly rock-star, explains why Rokeby remains off-stage but ever-present. The myth holds that Leda has twins, two sets of twins actually, with two fathers for each set; Castor and Pollux are the off-spring of Leda with the swan who is Zeus and with the king of Sparta, her husband. Robin and Cormoran, great driver and former boxer, are the novel’s stand-in for Castor the horseman and Pollux the pugilist. [See the discussions of this mythology and the Strike mysteries in the Gray/Granger and Willis posts on the subject.]
While the predominant symbolism of the story is white horses, which occur so frequently that Strike remarks on it and Billy Knight laughs about it (pp 394, 496), white swans occur often enough, not only as the story’s framing brackets but in references to individual birds on signs (see Robin’s noting and overlooking the Swan pub sign on pp 56 and 166), that we are obliged to consider their meaning beyond markers of Leda mythology in which the books are set. Swans, as you might expect in a Rowling novel, have an alchemical meaning as well, one that we will explore after the jump.
The story begins — its first words — at the Cunliffe wedding reception with a photographer trying to get a picture of the newlyweds that includes two swans in the pond behind them. The swans stubbornly refuse to come together, but, as soon as Robin rises to separate herself from Matt (with the intention of looking for Cormoran), they swim side by side. The clueless father of the groom observes, “You’d think the buggers were doing it on purpose” (p 3).