Mystery Mile is a Margery Allingham thriller featuring Albert Campion in his first leading role. If you want the plot, the whole story really, there is a servicable telling of the tale on the book’s Wikipedia page. There is a reason, however, that Rowling has said Allingham was her favorite writer of the so-called Four Queens of Crime — Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, and Ngaio Marsh were the others — and reading her work, as we’ve seen before with The Tiger in the Smoke, as often as not gives you a name or two that Rowling lifts (Johnny Cash!), a plot point or twist, or something as important as the psychopathology of Lord Voldemort.

Without spoiling the story of Mystery Mile, I think I can say now ‘where’ and ‘from whom’ Rowling found a model for her Tales of Beedle the Bard embedded text in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

The Mile story turns on the secret identity of the leader of Simister (that’s not a typo), an international criminal organization, a gangster extraordinaire reputed to be more than one hundred years old. A retired judge learns a clue to the mafioso’s name is hidden in a children’s book but even the best cryptographers of the FBI and of Scotland Yard cannot break the code.

Albert Campion, of course, solves the puzzle in the text after a quick look at the Table of Contents.

How many stories do you know that feature a kid’s book with an embedded text, the book being embedded in the text as a mirror of our own attempts to figure out who the bad guy is from the clues we’ve been given? Me, too. Just one.

This is early Allingham and not one of my favorites. I hope you’ll give it a read even so and let me know what you make of the children’s book key that unlocks this mystery and how it compares to Beedle‘s role inside Deathly Hallows.

In yesterday’s post I wrote about J. K. Rowling’s lists of correspondences between the four Hogwarts Houses and the traditional four Elements — fire, air, earth, and water — as well as with the four playing card suits – diamonds, hearts, clubs, and spades — and how the two lists each make sense intuitively but do not line up with one another. I shared there something I had learned about Rowling from Eglantine Pillet’s Chestnut Hill talk, ‘Harry Potter: A Fool and a King,’ in which she quoted this paragraph from an unauthorized biography of The Presence:

One [of her friends from school] recalls, ‘Jo would entertain us with her brilliant wit and colorful stories. She was very inventive and clever at reading tarot cards and palms and weaving a story around it which was pure make believe but had us alternately gripped and then laughing’ (Sean Smith, J. K. Rowling: A Biography, p 62).

Just think what Richard Abanes and Michael O’Brien, leaders of the ‘Harry is the Gateway to the Occult’ brigade in the fin de siecle years of this century, would have made of that. I shudder to think.

What it made me realize, though, is that Rowling’s simultaneously hilarious and pathetic Professor of Divinations may be her embedded character, a snapshot of herself placed inside the story as a bit of comic metafiction. I think the character Rowling played in her Comprehensive School cafeteria, the gypsy figure doing funny readings of tarot cards and palms that had her friends “alternately gripped and then laughing,” i.e., readings that were close enough to the truth to fascinate but done in camp, mock New Age fashion to make fun of those credulous enough to believe in such things.

And we know Rowling is not afraid to put images of her self into her books. Not only is Lula Landry’s rags-to-riches and struggles with celebrity in Cuckoo’s Calling a shadow-play of Rowling’s experience but Kathryn Kent, the wannabe writer in The Silkworm, seems a there-but-for-the-sake-of-chance-discovery-went-I character. And most of the characters in Casual Vacancy seem to have been drawn to varying degrees from Rowling’s personal experience.

How is Sybill Trelawney, though, a picture of J. K. Rowling? Rowling writes about her seeming doppelganger at some length on PotterMore with some especially interesting notes about why her first name is ‘Sybill’ rather than the expected ‘Sibyl.’ But she neglects to mention the Squire Trelawney connection from Stevenson’s Treasure Island, the financier and clueles wonder that sails in search of treasure with a ship load of pirates, a man who could be said to play a similar role to Sybill Trelawney in his story. First, though, some lower hanging fruit for establishing Sybill Trelawney as Rowling’s embedded image in the Harry Potter novels —

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In a 2012 interview with the BBC about the publication of Casual Vacancy, her first post Potter work, Rowling said that there were two times during Harry’s seven years at Hogwarts (and the eleven years, 1997-2007, it took to get his adventures into print) that she wished she’d had more time to polish the work in question:

I’m proud of [Casual Vacancy], I like it, and if you can say that, however nervous you are on publication day, you’re streets ahead of the game. Because to put out something you’re not that happy with or that you think “God, I wish I’d had another year to rework it”, and I have been in that position, is very different.

When were you in that position?

There were a couple of the Potters and I definitely knew that they needed another year. There’s one towards the beginning and there’s one towards the end, that I definitely felt that about. I had to write on the run and there were times when it was really tough. And I read them, and I think “Oh God, maybe I’ll go back and do a director’s cut”. I don’t know.

After the jump I’ll share my best guesses about which two books these are and invite your counter selections!

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