I traveled to Swansea, Wales, in 2015 to begin my PhD work at Swansea University. One of my first tasks, while still in jet lag was to meet with new friends at a local pub and to sample Cormoran Strike’s favorite ‘taste of home,’ Doom Bar ale, the “number one cask beer” of the United Kingdom. It’s pretty good! Here are three facts about Doom Bar ale to keep in mind each time you read about the Peg Legged PI drinking one as he tries to figure out the murderer in this book’s mystery.

(1) Cormoran Didn’t Grow Up Drinking Doom Bar

As readers of HogwartsProfessor know better than other readers of Cormoran Strike (because of these researches), our favorite detective was born 23 November 1974. Sharps Brewery in Cornwall, however, didn’t begin brewing Doom Bar Bitter until 1994 when it was a small micro-brewery — and Cormoran was by then off at Oxford at age 20 and then into the Army not long after his mother’s death. When exactly he acquired a taste for the beer we don’t know except that it had to be along with the rest of the UK as an adult rather than from childhood and adolescent memories.

(2) It’s Not All Brewed in Cornwall

Unless you’re drinking Doom Bar in a pub from a “cask” (tap), the beer you’re enjoying is not from Cormoran’s beloved Cornwall, but Burton-Upon-Trent, Staffordshire (West Midlands, England). Doom Bar’s success as a microbewery was the reason Sharp’s was purchased for £20 million in 2011 by the monster of beer corporations, Molson Coors. The brewery in Rock, Cornwall, was not equal to making sufficient beer to meet demand, so, while “cask ale” is still brewed in the original Cornish factory, the bottled brew is made “under licence” 267 miles away at a contract establishment. It’s been out-sourced, in other words. Some drinkers consider this a “con and a fraud” because the beer is marketed as a Cornwall product, but a Sharp’s spokesman says that “the majority of Doom Bar is brewed at Rock.” It’s just that when Strike is “opening the six pack of Doom Bar he brought with him” (ch 7, p 61), it’s not a taste of Cornwall he’ll be having.

(3) You Can’t Have Any – in the US or at The Tottenham Pub

Why did I have to wait until going to Wales to have a sip of Doom Bar at the pub? As the UK’s favorite beer, you’d think it’d be as easy to purchase in the US as a Samuel Smith Taddy Porter or a Guiness. You’d be wrong! Doom Bar can now be had in “Italy, Sweden, and Japan” as well as the UK, but not in the United States. I purchased a bottled six pack (unaware that it was a Stafforshire product…) while in Wales for gifts to give to Strike fans here and to have on hand when Strike 4 was published. Little did I know that treat would be almost three years aging in my pantry!

If you want to drink a topical beer while reading Lethal White, however, there is an American microbrewey beer that might fit the bill. The parallel to Goblet of Fire’s ‘Society for the Promotion of Elvish Welfare’ (SPEW) embedded in the latest Strike novel is ‘Community Olympic Resistance’ (CORE). I really don’t think you’re supposed to cheer for the CORE gang — they’re a laughable bunch of self-important, privileged ‘resistance’ types very much in fashion in the US and UK since Brexit and the election of President Trump — but there is some very good beer made by a company in northwest Arkansas by CORE brewing company. I had a can of their E-Stop Pale Ale last week and it was as good if not better than the bottle-aged Doom Bar I enjoyed on 18 September.

As upsetting as the inability to buy Doom Bar in America is that it can’t be purchased and savored at the Tottenham Pub, now ‘The Flying Horse’, in London on Oxford Street, two blocks from Strike’s premises on Denmark and his favorite place to have a drink. They didn’t carry Doom Bar on tap when I visited — the bartender and waitress had never heard of Cormoran Strike — and I see that hasn’t changed since the BBC One television series debuted, though they do carry another Sharp’s ale and forty other beers. Go figure! It’s a beautiful place, just as Galbraith describes it, but it was purchased by Nicholson’s Pubs and the cognoscenti describe it as something of a tourist trap.

Let me know what you’re drinking — and thinking! — as you re-read Lethal White this week. Are you disappointed that Doom Bar was not the beer of choice for Uncle Ted in St Mawes while Cormoran was growing up? That it’s no longer a beer brewed exclusively in Cornwall? That we in the US cannot get a bottle or a Cornish Cask? Post me a message in the comment boxes below!

BBC One announced today that Lethal White is coming to the little screen in your living room.

Piers Wenger, Controller of BBC Drama, says: “We are delighted to announce that the Strike series will return to BBC One with Lethal White. J.K. Rowling, once more in the guise of Robert Galbraith, has delivered another brilliant, knotty and original crime story. We are honoured to be working with Jo and once more with Holliday and Tom as Robin and Strike, to bring this hit series back to BBC One.”

The details?

(1) It will be a “four-part drama,” longer than any of the previous adaptations, which, given Lethal White‘s length, is simultaneously a relief and a shock: great that they aren’t going to squeeze it the way they did Silkworm and Career of Evil so that the story is almost not recognizable, but, then again, only four parts? How are they going to break this story up so that it works in four installments?

(2) Everyone in the original teevee series is back. Bronte Film and TV, Rowling’s production team, are all on board again with Rowling, Neil Blair, and Ruth Kenley-Letts listed as Executive Producers and Tom Edge as screenwriter. Tom Burke, not quite six feet tall, will return as well as the diminutive Cormoran Strike, and Holliday Grainger, too, is back as Robin Ellacott-Cunliffe.

(3) We get some numbers in this press release. The BBC brags that each of its adaptations reached a big audience: “Each series was watched by more than 7 million viewers in the UK alone.” I guess that’s really good for ‘over there.’ In the US, a much, much more populous country, our top teevee shows get almost three times that number as their audience. And I doubt the ‘Strike’ adaptations on cable here managed even seven million viewers.

More interesting to me was the number of books the Robert Galbraith series has sold. 

The Cuckoo’s Calling was published to critical acclaim in 2013 and went on to be a global bestseller, followed in 2014 by The Silkworm and Career of Evil in 2015. All three books were number one Sunday Times bestsellers in both hardback and paperback and Little, Brown has sold in total more than four million copies worldwide across all editions.

Three books by J. K. Rowling writing under a pseudonym have sold “four million copies worldwide” in the five years of their publication. I know comparisons of this kind are simultaneously odious and inevitable but here it is: Deathly Hallows sold 8.3 million hardcover copies in the United States in the first 24 hours of its being on sale. Cursed Child, the best selling book of 2016, a story not even written by Rowling, sold 4.5 million copies in the US alone in its first year. I couldn’t find any numbers for the Fantastic Beasts screenplay beyond that it made #3 on the USA Today best sellers list the week of its release (Lethal White is now #2 there) — and it, of course, was only a transcript of the film’s final cut (sort of); few wanted to read the movie they could watch.

What are your thoughts about this news and these numbers? Are you looking forward to seeing the adaptation of Lethal White? What scenes do you hope they get right? Which ones will almost certainly get cut? Let me know in the boxes below!

Tomorrow I’ll share a literary reason why Strike will never sell like Harry Potter did and the Wizarding World does: ostrananie. Stay tuned!

On 24 August this year, Friend of This Blog Lesley Stevens wrote me from the UK with this prediction about Lethal White:

Here are two facts and some uninformed speculation late at night about the marketing effort being made for the promotion of Lethal White and its sales thus far.

The facts:

(1) The Marketing of Lethal White has been Low Key, at best, and so thin that “negligent” might be a good word for it. Rowling did one ‘interview’ with The New York Times as Robert Galbraith (she answered approved questions in writing rather than live and in person). She changed the banner on her Twitter page to a Lethal White header and listed herself as “Author sometimes known as Robert Galbraith.” And…

Well, that was about it. Her tweeting to her follower-audience of 14.4 million the week before and of the book’s publication focused on Brexit, volun-tourism, and — who knew? — Crimes of Grindelwald. Her publishers bought the requisite advertising in book review sections of the legacy print media — and Rowling moved on. Last week she did a Lumos event on Broadway with the Cursed Child crew and began the promotions for the next Fantastic Beasts film by sitting for an interview on the Today show.

She mentioned two times during these appearances that she was writing crime novels but never said the name of the book published six days before.

(2) Sales have been good, not great. On the ‘Rowling Sales Scale,’ of course, they have been less than pathetic, but it is not fair to judge any author other than Dan Brown or James Patterson with that unit of measure. I don’t have any numbers other than Amazon sales, lists in the moment and the best sellers of the week, and those results are not eye-poppers. Lethal White was at #13 a week ago and #2 today on the ‘Best Sellers of the Week’ lists and that is quite good (if being shut out of #1 by The Wonky Donkey must be a little humiliating).

What’s to complain about being #2 at the World’s Biggest Bookstore and at USA Today, which uses the Amazon list as part of its calculation? I’m afraid that this list, the week‘s compilation, inflates Lethal White’s success because it was the week of release and may include all the pre-ordered books shipping. If you look at the hourly count at Amazon today, Strike4 is #39. I have to suspect that the drop next week will be at least as great as the climb this week from #13 to #2. (Anyone more familiar than I with the Amazon algorhythms for calculating best sellers, please check in.) Rowling did not make either the combined eBook and print or the ‘Hardcover Fiction Best Seller’ list in tomorrow’s New York Times.

(3) The Uninformed Speculation from Effect Back to Cause? Rowling is not only happy that her Strike books are not being marketed with the push that would make them #1 best sellers on Amazon and in the print newspapers — interviews in a variety of magazines, broadcast media, and papers, outreach to the Harry Potter fandom through fan sites and conferences, and advertising buys and pushes at booksellers conventions, trade journals, and mass media — she insists that these efforts not be made. Rowling continues to act as if her experiment with the Robert Galbraith pseudonym is a live venture and she will only know if the novels are any good, that is, become best sellers on their own relatively speaking, which is to say, without invoking the magical name of ‘J. K. Rowling, author of the beloved Harry Potter novels’ on the cover of the books or in active promotion.

Which is nigh on unbelievable, frankly. That would suggest she is a prisoner of heroic insecurities and in need of oversized confirmation in a test that cannot be taken seriously because everyone knows ‘Galbraith’ is Rowling.

What else could it be? Again, look at the problem backwards. What have we learned since Lethal White was published just here on this web site? There is the possibility that Rowling does not want Harry Potter fandom’s legion of fine-tooth-comb serious readers going through the Strike books because of what they would discover. Beside the gaffes like “Basra, Afghanistan,” and “Ciarra Parker” that editors missed in reading Lethal White. She’d rather that no one (or relatively few readers) realize the books are an experiment in intertextual allusion and commentary on Rowling’s own Hogwarts Saga in structure and plot points. Not to mention the mythological underpinnings and probable direction of future books.

Let me know in the comment boxes below what you think of the marketing efforts, the sales figures for Lethal White, and why there seems to be so little effort to promote the novels of the world’s best selling author. It’s a mystery as least as difficult to figure out as the stories Rowling-Galbraith is giving us and a public domain puzzle we should be able to solve, I think, with the available clues. “The game is afoot!”