Two weeks? A little more than Ten Days! Lethal White, the fourth Cormoran Strike mystery from J. K. Rowling writing as ‘Robert Galbraith’ is almost here.

What have you heard about it among your Potter-phile friends? Have you scheduled the day off on 18 September so you can devote yourself without distraction to a close reading? Are you planning to go to a Midnight Madness Release Party at your local bookstore?

Of course you’re not. There is next to no buzz or excitement about Lethal White, which is a mystery worthy of some reflection and detection, no? How about the clues, then; what do we know?

The Cormoran Strike mysteries are receiving next to no marketing push in the United States and, for a Rowling title, advance orders on Amazon are pathetic. The book is at #129 overall on the world’s largest bookstore’s listing and isn’t even in the top 50 for the categories of ‘Crime’ or ‘Mystery.’ Kindle? It is sitting at #289 there.

Things are a little better in the UK. At Amazon.co.uk. The book is at #21 there — but is being outsold by two math texts for school at #10 and #16 and by new releases from Robert Louis Stevenson (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, #12), Shakespeare (Macbeth, #18), and Dickens (Tale of Two Cities, #21). Something tells me this is not a big book-selling season in Brittania or they use a different calculus for their best seller’s lists. On the book’s page there, Amazon lists the hardcover as #75 in “Books > Fiction.” Kindle has it at #42 at this writing.

I called the airport bookstore to see if I might once again get my Willa Wonka golden ticket and an early copy of Lethal White. Get this — they not only didn’t have a copy to sell me (as they did three days before Career of Evil was supposed to be for sale), I was told it wasn’t on their list of books to be sold this month. They only sell the books anticipated to be best sellers, twenty each month. Robert Galbraith’s Lethal White was not on the list.

What’s going on? Three thoughts after the jump. [Read more…]

I thought that the point of the BBC1 teevee adaptations of the Cormoran Strike mysteries was to create sufficient interest in the story and the characters that ‘viewers’ would become ‘readers.’ I was able to see the first two adaptations via a pirated posting of the episodes by an Iraqi on YouTube; I have not seen the ‘Career of Evil’ adaptations.

I have watched the two film clips of Strike 3’s adaptation and read the synopses of each episode that the BBC has posted online. Here they all are: [Read more…]

I have made five posts in the run-up to the publication of Lethal White in September and suspect there will be quite a few more before the avalanche of discussion after we have the book in hand. These posts, separately and taken together, are a great way to warm up your Strike sagacity and to review possibilities in the upcoming book (Speculatus!). Today I have gathered them in one place in our first Lethal White Round-Up, a list I will update before and after 18 September. Enjoy!

Lethal White: The White Horse Evidence

Rowling/Galbraith has been hinting pretty heavily that the fourth Cormoran Strike adventure will feature a white horse of some kind. In this post I review the ten points of evidence, from the ‘lethal white’ equine genetic disease to the unicorn of Elizabeth Goudge’s The Little White Horse, a favorite of Rowling’s, with stops at Jack and the Beanstalk, Rowling’s white horse thumb drive, and Ngaio Marsh’s Off With His Head! Evan Willis adds in the comment thread the possibility that the white horse could be the Uffington White Horse. I think Rowling/Galbraith’s pale pony, though, is heroin whose street name is “white horse” but that will take some extra effort to understand.

Lethal White: Rokeby, Jagger, Heroin

The first step in understanding the central place of heroin in the coming Strike adventures is Leda Strike’s death from a heroin overdose, the overarching mystery of the series. Our peg legged private investigator, Leda’s son, thinks it was murder but has no proof. I suggest in this post a good jumping off place for figuring out Leda’s death is in noting the remarkable parallels between the life as we know it of Jonny Rokeby, lead singer of the Deadbeats rock band, and Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. Heroin, it turns out, was a big part of Jagger’s life in the period corresponding to Leda’s relationship with Rokeby, a drug arrest in the Deadbeats, and the band’s most successful album.

Lethal White: Is Strike Rokeby’s Son? The Dates Don’t Seem to Add Up

Which brings us to a seeming glitch in the text, a gaffe that highlights Strike’s lack of resemblance to and relationship with his biological father. Strike was conceived and born in 1974, the only year in rocker Rokeby’s reproductive era that he was not married. Book Strike says he was “the extra-marital accident” that caused Rokeby “a marriage and millions in alimony.” If the Rokeby Wikipedia date entries are correct, then Strike has a mistaken understanding of his past. Might the DNA test establishing Rokeby’s paternity, not possible until the mid 1980’s, been fixed or faked?

Lethal White: Three Galbraith Mistakes in Cuckoo’s Calling – Are the Wikipedia Dates a Fourth?

Cuckoo’s Calling was Galbraith’s first effort at detective fiction and there are several mistakes, what Harry Potter fandom called ‘Flints’ after the Slytherine Quidditch player who was at Hogwarts for at least eight years. There is Strike’s surety that the murderer will have to have kept Rochelle Onifade’s cellular phone, the two runners moving in proximity away from the murder scene, and there having been a “conviction” in the trial of Leda Strike’s accused murderer. In the face of these proofing errors, I acknowledge that maybe Galbraith’s editors just blew the dates in the Wikipedia entry for Rokeby. But I don’t think so. Not really.

Lethal White: The White Horse is Heroin — John’s Heroin Dark Lord Speculation

Heroin Dark Lord is a theory that attempts to explain the seeming holes in the Cormoran Strike back story in order to reveal the probable Big Bad Guy and High Stakes in Play for the next novels in the Galbraith adventures. In it, I connect the dots of (a) the Rokeby-Jagger heroin parallels and Leda’s mysterious death from an overdose of a drug she never used with (b) the facts that Strike testified against a crime syndicate “drug ring” leader in London in a vice squad joint operation before he went to Afghanistan, the world capitol of heroin production. I offer a story that theoretically at least covers the mysteries of Rokeby’s supposed paternity, Leda’s death, and the seemingly at random IED explosion in Afghanistan: Rokeby’s involvement with the heroin drug trade and, as likely as not, a murder he committed himself or caused.

I should probably call this Heroin Dark Lord, 1.0, because I’m already thinking of variations, expansions, and corrections (did SIB Strike pull Anstis to safety instead of the other person in the troop carrier because Anstis had information about what they were investigating that the other soldier wouldn’t?). I think it is an important start, though, in understanding where Rowling is going with her as always magisterial narrative slow release. If she is writing in parallel with the Hogwarts Saga, we probably won’t know for sure at the end of Goblet/Lethal White; we may meet Rokeby in the Little Hangleton graveyard but the Prophecy equivalent – why Leda was murdered — will have to wait for Strike 5.

Enjoy the Round-Up — and please do share your thoughts about Heroin Dark Lord or any of the other posts in this first Lethal White collection in the comment boxes below!

J. K Rowling has a variety of writing signatures, that is, things she does better in story than anyone else. There are her uses of literary alchemy and ring composition, for example, that make her work unique. My favorite Rowling device, though, is her narrative slow release, the ability to tell a satisfying, even thrilling stand-alone story while giving us clues and pointers to a larger, over-arching story that will play out in later novels of the series. This post is my best guess about the Larger Story we’re being told in the Cormoran Strike detective thrillers. 

In Harry Potter the larger story behind the stories was the Prophecy and Harry’s destiny to confront Lord Voldemort in a death match. We got pieces of that story in the first four books, learned the Prophecy at the end of the fifth, and books six and seven of the Hogwarts Saga were the play-out of Trelawney’s inspired vision and the lead-up to the final battle between Tom and Harry in the Great Hall. 

In Cormoran Strike, the back story about which we are learning in every installment is the mysterious 1994 death of Leda Strike, the Peg-legged Private Investigator’s “super-groupie” mother. The accepted story is that she died of a heroin overdose, self-administered. Her husband at the time of her death, Jeff Whittaker, was tried for murder but found not guilty (in Cuckoo’s Calling it is mistakenly reported that there was a trial and a “conviction;” in Career of Evil we learned this was an error). Cormoran and his sort of adopted brother Shanker believe that Whittaker was guilty but have no proof.

Stray points of information about Leda, her relationship with Jonny Rokeby (Cormoran’s supposed biological father), and the Doom Bar Detective’s military experiences, to include the explsion that cost him the better part of a leg, are scattered throughout the first three books. My theory, which for lack of a catchy alternative I’m calling Heroin Dark Lord, is an attempt to weave together the various clues we’ve been given to make an engaging back story mystery with international-political-order high stakes, a Moriarty-like villain, and insuperable odds against our hero winning in the end.

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.

After the jump, the fan fiction story I’ve written as a speculative exercise to grasp the anomalies and odd facts of the story we have so far. Let me know what you think —

[Read more…]

Yesterday I pledged to write out the wildly speculative theory of the crimes Jonny Rokeby committed that moved him to agree to fake a paternity test and seem to be Cormoran Strike’s father. I explained there that the idea largely depends on the fact that the divorce dates listed in Rokeby’s wikipedia profile don’t match up with Cormoran’s conception and birth days in 1974.

I noted as an aside that this could just be a Wikipedia error. Because Wikipedia pages are not heavily vetted, mistakes creep in. This is less true of global celebrities and public figures, whose pages millions of people visit, reporters use as source material, and the subjects have a consequent interest in monitoring, but it happens.

I’m obliged to note before I offer the Heroin Dark Lord theory details that the Wikipedia entry may be mistaken because the author and editorial team just didn’t catch the detail error. Rowling approved, she says, the changes made in Goblet of Fire that made the Little Hangleton graveyard shades appear in the wrong order out of Voldemort’s wand. And there are at least three other flat out mistakes in Cuckoo’s Calling that make a date slip in the Rokeby Wikipedia page credible.

Here are the three mistakes in Cuckoo’s Calling. Do you think the Wiki divorce dates are a fourth? [Read more…]