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 —

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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…]

I concluded yesterday’s post on the Rokeby-Jagger connection with the promise that I’d take a second look at the Wikipedia entry we’re given in Cuckoo’s Calling about Jonny Rokeby and why the dates don’t seem to “match up” with the story we’ve been given about Rokeby’s supposed paternity. Here goes!

We are told in Cuckoo that one of the Deadbeats is arrested on drug charges in 1975 while on a tour of the US. Their best-selling album (“multi-platinum”) also came out in 1975.

Cormoran was born 23 November 1974, the year before.

Do we know that birthday for sure? Or is it a Wiki-date? All the following discussion hangs on this date being correct.

StrikeWiki gives the year as “C. 1974” while StrikeFans says it definitively was 1974 (Rowling confirmed the day, not the year, in a 2015 tweet [note Ian Rankin’s comment on that thread; he’s a fan]).

Strike’s birthday party in Silkworm at Lucy’s home is celebrated on Saturday 20 November 2010. On p 110 we read, “Lucy appeared with the homemade cake, blazing with thirty six candles and decorated with what looked like hundreds of Smarties.”

Lucy is one for details, especially to do with observances of holidays and birthdays, we’ve been told, because of her nomadic upbringing. The candle number is correct.

Strike turned 36 in 2010, ergo, he was born in 1974.

Which presents a problem. From the Cuckoo Wiki page on Rokeby that Robin reads: [Read more…]

I posted yesterday about why it is more than credible that Rowling/Galbraith’s fourth Cormoran Strike mystery, Lethal White, will involve a white horse of some kind. Today and tomorrow I want to begin my explanation of why I don’t think it will necessarily involve horses of an equine kind, however much I look forward (with Robin) to reading about Cormoran’s first horse-back ride.

To cut to the quick, I think the Lethal White ‘white horse’ that Rowling has been teasing readers with is heroin from Afghanistan rather than albino American paint horses or unicorns.

My first piece of evidence in this speculative argument is Jonny Rokeby and his resemblance to Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones.

Evan Willis has argued here that he doubts Jonny Rokeby, as the Zeus figure in the Leda and the Swan mythological drama underlying the Strike mysteries, will make an appearance in the novels. That is a more than credible position considering the Aeschylus and Virgil parallels Willis cites. Karen Kebarle, though, is almost certainly closer to what’s likely in Strike 4; she said in a just recorded ‘Reading, Writing, Rowling’ episode about Lethal White that the great failing of the Strike series when compared with Harry Potter is the absence of a villain, a Moriarity, as much more powerful and dangerous than Cormoran as Voldemort was to the Boy Who Lived. If Willis is right and Rokeby remains just a haunting presence off-stage, Strike will only be fun detective stories.

Perhaps it is just wishful thinking on my part that this won’t be the case. Rowling has invested so much in the mysterious death of Leda Strike, though, that I think we’re fairly safe in assuming that solving this case is as large a part of the continuing drama as the relationship cum romance of Robin and Cormoran.

Moving forward, then, with the idea that Rokeby is the Voldemort/Moriarity of the Strike series,  what do we know about him and what, if anything, does he have to do with white horses?

The first thing we know about Jonny Rokeby, lead singer of the Deadbeats, is that his life runs as a fairly obvious caricature of Mick Jagger’s.

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We have less than a month before the publication of Lethal White so it is time for some serious fun. Speculating about where Rowling/Galbraith is headed is a delight, especially when Strike parallels with corresponding Potter novels and Rowling’s twitter and website postings are mixed in with what we have in the first three mysteries, parallels and postings we didn’t have in the run-up to any part of the Hogwarts Saga.

To start us off, I plan on posting three pieces about the meaning of the Strike 4 title, Lethal White, especially with respect to the growing consensus that it has something to do with horses. I first want to summarize the evidence for the equestrian bent (“White Horse!”) in the writings of some Potter Pundits, then point out the many parallels between what we know about the fictional Jonny Rokeby and the real life of Mick Jagger, and conclude with a discussion of the more likely meaning of Lethal White, namely, that it is a reference to heroin from Afghanistan and to the death of Leda Strike, the over arching story of the Doom Bar Detective’s series.

So, what evidence is there that Lethal White is all about horses and white horses at that? I came up with ten suggestions, not an especially magical number but one large enough to demand serious attention. [Read more…]