After the jump are some ‘ratings’ of sorts for posts at HogwartsProfessor.com, ratings created by the interior number crunching program in the WordPress platform on which the site runs. It generates ‘Top Ten’ lists of the most visited posts for the week, month, and lifetime of this weblog.
Would you have guessed that only two of the seven new posts that went up last week would be in the top ten of posts viewed that week? That a post I wrote before Deathly Hallows was published in 2007 would be the most visited piece in the last seven days?
Me, neither. But there’s a pretty simple explanation. Today’s post is a break from Agatha Christie’s influence on Rowling and Galbraith for some ‘inside baseball’ reflection that only the true HogPro All-Pro will enjoy; join me after the jump if that’s of any interest to you!
One of my PhD thesis advisers was in the UK earlier this year and picked up a copy of Patty O’Furniture’s 
The author behind the pseudonym is Bruno Vincent, which I have to suspect is still another pseudonym. He has written 
The picture used for the back cover of the adult edition of Bloomsbury’s Goblet of Fire in 2000 features a picture of J. K. Rowling leaning against a bookshelf. The titles of the books on the shelf are just almost legible; with a little luck and maybe a reference list, you can read the letters on the spine if you magnify significantly and have any clue to guide you. 
DGS: I’m absolutely certain she has. On the back cover of the adult UK edition of Goblet of Fire, because the books were published with two covers, one with the children’s covers and one with the adult covers, on the back cover of that, there’s a wonderful bookcase shot and, obviously, because I love looking at people’s bookcases, I looked at this in fairly close detail and I was delighted to see there were three Agatha Christie paperbacks. I recognized them immediately because I’ve got the same books.
I’m on something of an Agatha Christie binge this week (see 
First, there is Hercule Poirot, the detective on the spot in this novel. It is set-up largely as was Murder on the Orient Express (1934) to which several allusions are made; Poirot is on vacation, stumbles upon a murder, is asked by the presiding gendarmes to solve the crime, and is confronted with a host of suspects all of whom have ample motive to do the deed, even to work together to kill the much-despised victim. The twists on the Orient Express model are masterful and worth the price of admission — and suggest lines of reflection for the Cormoran Strike reader who is aware that Galbraith is largely echoing and writing commentary of sorts on Rowling’s Hogwarts Saga in ‘his’ parallel novel numbers.
Then there are the references to Shakespeare’s Hamlet throughout the novel. If you read Christie’s earlier mysteries — and I’ve just finished Murder at the Vicarage (1930), her eleventh novel and first Miss Marple story — you find that they don’t feature the intertextual depth or number of literary allusions that the so-called ‘mature’ works written after the war do. There are 
And, last, beyond Ginny-Ginevra and the wicked Mrs Boynton’s resemblance to Dolores Umbridge, both excellent catches made by Dolores Gordon-Smith (she read Appointment because she saw it on Rowling’s bookshelf in a Goblet of Fire publicity shot!), there no great Potter or Strike echoes to be found in this novel. Unless you think the description of a character as having “basilisk’s eyes” in the key scene of confrontation with Mrs Boynton merits a mention; that is, after all, the fantastic beast Harry must defeat to rescue Ginny-not-yet-known-as-Ginevra in Chamber of Secrets…
The Pale Horse and Appointment with Death are not great Agatha Christie pieces, alas. Both seem liked hurried pieces to meet publisher deadlines, albeit always with wry observations, a rewarding twist, and an implicit and challenging moral. I recommend them to the serious student of all things Rowling and Galbraith, however, because they are I think undeniably in the author’s famous “compost heap” of everything she has read from which her imaginative works have grown. Please do let me know what you think about Appointment with Death if you’ve read it or decide to read it!
The Rowling Library online magazine is a delight and I always find something in it that I enjoy.
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