Of all the characters playfully enjoying the run up to publication day on Twitter, none is more intriguing than Anomie. He has tweeted only thirty two times since joining twitter in June, including the deleted “Sister from another mr.” tweet, which is a possible misidentification for Mary Elizabeth Coleridge. It is notable that an image search for “Mary Elizabeth Coleridge” delivers a photograph for Mary Mapes Dodge and another of Emily Dickenson, explaining both the error by Anomie and our Headmaster. I can in fact only find one genuine photograph of Coleridge online.
There are several clues that Anomie has left. An Emily Dickenson poem, shortly after the audio snippet was revealed:
Tweet, tweet. pic.twitter.com/sQ8ymi4AjN
— Anomie (@AnomieInkBlack) August 14, 2022
And a snippet from Cattulus 8– advice to himself.
Time flies. https://t.co/gqZ9DsMo4I
— Anomie (@AnomieInkBlack) August 21, 2022
There are of course the pictures we discussed on Monday to which Anomie left the following cryptic reply:
Look again. Look closer. Look not at the words.
Yes, I believe this is the same Anomie that posts on Twitter, where he has left similar messages:
The trick is always to look beyond the silhouettes and look in the shadows. https://t.co/SDogOm8Ty7
— Anomie (@AnomieInkBlack) August 11, 2022
What do you think these messages are hinting at? Let me know in the comments down below!
Obviously we don’t know what kind of “tone” Anomie adopts in the book. I will be intrigued to see whether it’s something like these tweets and comments online right now – short, cryptic, hinting without actually revealing. The book synopsis made me think more of the kind of verbose, semi demented rants more typical of your common or garden keyboard warrior. Can’t wait to find out!
Fascinating that Cormoran Strike fandom is being drawn into a real-world “quest to uncover Anomie’s true identity,” no?
There are clues about who this Anomie is, at least the one that commented here this week on a Nick Jeffery post’s thread (perhaps not the same person posting on Twitter?), that were captured by the WordPress platform which HogwartsProfessor uses. That data matches previous notes we have received in comment thread notes and emails via the ‘Contact Us’ option at the top of the page.
I confess to being simultaneously impressed and alarmed by the person playing this game. The commitment to the role, the suggestion that he or she has an advanced copy of the book in the mirrored action of story and the play performed here, and the sophistication of the tweets and their number (assuming that the same person is behind the 18 accounts of Strike characters) points to a degree of devotion — dare we say “obsession”? — to the series that is beyond any I have seen here.
Though Professors Freeman and Groves discount it, I want to believe that it is a Rowling, Inc., operation, i.e., a social media professional being paid to do this in Rowling’s office as a game the insiders, to include The Presence, play on breaks for grins and giggles. That hope is not matching up with the suspicious person who has contacted us before with ‘Anomie’s computer fingerprint, but I prefer imagining this is hijinks from Edinburgh than that we have a nut-job with an advance copy of Strike6 role-playing a fictional murderer.