I was scrolling the almost 400 drafts of posts for Hogwarts Professor that I have started over the last twenty years and never finished and found this one from early in my PhD researches. It’s about P. D. James, a writer much admired by Rowling, perhaps admired and studied even more than Agatha Christie (if there is a fascinating overlap in those influences concerning The Duchess of Malfi). I confess to being surprised that I never put this up; I can think of no single post I have written that required reading an author’s complete works — unless I’ve written somewhere about the inimitable Boris Akunin. [Quick search of site for ‘Akunin’ — no, but I did only get one post out of the Shardlake series.] It’s long overdue, as I hope you’ll agree, because of the several important names found in the James novels and the fascinating plot point parallels with Potter and Strike series. Enjoy!
Beatrice Groves, author of Literary Allusion in Harry Potter and a great lover of detective fiction from her youth, urged me as part of my dissertation reading year to do a deep dive into P. D. James, the Queen of the genre post Christie. The prompt was because of a connection between the Cordelia Gray character in P. D. James’ Unsuitable Job for a Woman and Robin Ellacott in the Cormoran Strike novels.
Perhaps the most interesting piece is the one you would guess, ‘namely,’ the names connection.
- Felix, Cover Her Face
- Arabella (cat who is murdered in a fashion suggestive of the petrification in Chamber),
- Pettigrew (a solicitor “cursed with a name like that”), Unnatural Causes
- Morag, Shroud for a Nightingale
- Orlando (a child who died young),
- Rose, Innocent Blood
- McGonagall (reference to poet as “arguably Britain’s worst poet ever”),
- Remus (dog), Devices and Desires
- Peverell, Original Sin
- Wardle (police surgeon), Original Sin, and
- Venetia, A Certain Justice
I think the Arabella, Pettigrew, McGonagall, and Peverell hits rate as significant Potter links, especially the Peverell Family connection (see Original Sin for that; better than the Vanity Fair reference and the Gaunts?). Orlando, Wardle, and Venetia, too, are lifts or hat tips we find in Strike.
How about quotations in mysteries? Cover Her Face includes a put down of “psychological thrillers with highbrow quotations at the beginning of chapters.” Skull Beneath the Skin looks down on a set of quotations “all from the Penguin Dictionary of Quotations or the Oxford Dictionary,” and in Children of Men the professor notes about the four lines of Horace in Latin in a friend’s suicide note, “He probably found the Latin in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.” It might be worth a check of both P. D. James and JKR’s literary allusions to see how many are in the Oxford Dictionary… [2024 note: I purchased six editions of the ODQ and could find no link.]
Potter sources of some potential:
Close but not quite a mother Molly knitting sweaters for beloved child: Unsuitable Job features a birth mother who was not allowed contact with her son so she knitted him “endless sweaters” and Innocent Blood‘s murderous mom who gave up her daughter knits her a sweater as her first and last gift to her.
Children of Men has a prisoner escape from the regime’s island to which evil-doers are transported and left to be tortured (and eaten!) by the bad guys there. If that weren’t echo enough of Sirius Black and Azkaban, the passage in which Theo learns about this adventure begins with a reference to the “black dog on my shoulder.”
I think the Cordelia Gray – Hermione Granger connection Prof Groves made in 2018, with the Shakespearean first and resonant last names, is a keeper, too.
Strike sources of some potential:
It is a Dalgleish truism that motive is not the key to solving mysteries: “Motive is the last thing you look for” (Cover Her Face), “Where, when, and how would eventually have why revealed to him” (Unnatural Causes), etc.
Unnatural Cause‘s first paragraph turns out to be the opening of a mystery inside the book while being a perfectly apt paragraph on its own. Dalgleish and a publisher discuss the possibility of a writer plotting his own murder to be akin to his book’s death scene as a publicity stunt to sell more books, which author, Maurice Seton, shares several characteristics with Owen Quine.
Cordelia Gray arrives at the detective agency as a temporary secretary and works her way up to partner in the office and then becomes owner. Hat tip to Beatrice Groves who used that Cordelia-Robin path as her Ace Allusion parallel to convince me to read P. D. James.
Does Rowling quote Plutarch’s “Boys throw stones at frogs in sport. But the frogs do not die in sport; they die in earnest” somewhere in Strike? It seems familiar. James quotes it in Death of an Expert Witness. [2024 note: No, she doesn’t.]
Deborah Miscoe and Adam Dalgleish, their slowly advancing romance, may have been a model for Strike/Ellacott, in terms of slow narrative release emmeshed in stand-alone mysteries. But that was something of a bust for the James characters until Emma Lavenham comes into Adam’s life.
In Taste for Death, James quotes without naming Graham Greene’s bon mot about writers: “If he had a splinter of ice in his heart, then so have I.” Rowling has used this quotation several times through the years.
The idea of the physically attractive being advantaged in life, as per Charlotte, Cuckoo, and other Strike characters, is explored in Original Sin (cf. p 325).
The embedded Christian content suffuses every book but the only attempt at parable or allegory I found was Children of Men which is, relative to James’ light hand with symbolism in her mysteries at least, pretty much “in your face.”
I think there is enough here, alongside the Groves MuggleNet posts about the Gray/Strike echoes, to justify a serious look at the debts Rowling-Murray owes James-White beyond the name she created pre-publication and has kept for herself. They’re more significant than those to any other writer I know of, with the possible exceptions of Lewis, Tolkien, Christie, and Nabokov.
[2024 Note: I still think that is true and hope that Serious Strikers will take this post as a challenge to read P. D. James (or re-read, I suspect, favorite books in many readers’ libraries) to make more profound connections than the very superficial and equally suggestive correspondences between the detective fiction of these two writers. Cheers!]
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