Rowling Blasts Glamour Magazine for Its ‘Men in Halloween Costumes’ Issue

Rowling has a thing for Halloween. She noted on Twixter in January that 31 October is very likely the date of her out-of-wedlock conception (Halloween is exactly nine months before her 31 July birthday).

Having noted that, this year she decided to celebrate by having-a-go at ‘the Dolls,’ which is to say ‘men in drag’ and those who celebrate these men as if they were women.

You can read about it at ‘JK Leads Glamour Backlash: JK Rowling leads backlash against Glamour magazine after nine trans activists – including one who called the Suffragettes ‘white supremacists’ – were named ‘Women of the Year’.’

Or you can watch Megyn Kelley cover the same ground:

Happy Halloween, Everyone!

Hallmarked Man: Second Thoughts, Rowling’s Key Definitions and “Religious Faith” Doubts, Blitz Chess and Q&As

Hogwarts Professor has been posting up a storm at its Substack home since the publication of The Hallmarked Man — see ‘Hallmarked Man: First Thoughts‘ for our September posts — though we’ve been relatively quiet here on the weblog.

Here is a quick guide to four more conversations we’ve been having ‘over there’ with links to those discussions at your fingertips! Every post comes with a video capture of John and Nick playing point-counterpoint with extensive footnotes and urls for Rowling Readers wanting to follow up on the ideas discussed. Be sure to read the comment threads beneath each for the insights of Serious Strikers around the world.

Enjoy!

The Hallmarked Man: A ‘Blitz Chess’ Lake and Shed Reading (with a few Golden Threads)

Nick Jeffery and John Granger, Team Lake and Team Shed respectively, do a back and forth review of Strike 8 in which each has to provide an example of a Shed tool or Lake Spring in Rowling’s latest (3 October)

Hallmarked Man and Rowling’s Tweets after the Shooting of Charlie Kirk

The Four Key Word Definitions Rowling posted after a Flood of Death Threats, the Fixed Beliefs She Says She has Given Up, Her Doubts about “Religious Faith” in God, and the Evisceration of Emma Watson (7 October)

Hallmarked Man Q&A with Nick Jeffery and John Granger (1)

Freemasonry and the Universal Humanitarian Church, Michael Ellacott a closeted Freemason, Strike 8 as a Welsh Novel, Hiram Abiff’s Murder as the Book’s Template, the Meaning of ‘Calvin Osgood,’ Carmen Ellacott, Baby Dirk, and Literary Allusion gone Wild, More! (15 October)

Hallmarked Man Q&A with Nick Jeffery and John Granger (2)

Oranda Goldfish, Frozen Peas, and Mise en Abyme; Flints in the Silver Vault Murder Mystery; Why Freemasons love Silver; Rowling’s Mysterious ‘Back-Door Man’ (Did She Hire Harry Bingham as a “Ghost-Writer”?; Gateshead, Pit Ponies, Council Flats; Robin’s “Cuddly Toy” Dream; the Death of Rowntree and the Meaning of ‘Betty;’ “I think, no, I know,” More!

Hallmarked Man: First Thoughts, Misdirection, and the Mythological Template of Psyche and Cupid

Hogwarts Professor has been posting up a storm at its Substack home in the four weeks since the publication of The Hallmarked Man though we’ve been relatively quiet here on the weblog.

Here is a quick guide to the conversations we’ve been having ‘over there’ with links to those discussions at your fingertips! Every post except ‘Flood’ comes with a video capture of John and Nick playing point-counterpoint with extensive footnotes and urls for Rowling Readers wanting to follow up on the ideas discussed. Be sure to read the comment threads beneath each for the insights of Serious Strikers around the world.

Enjoy!

Three Cheers for The Hallmarked Man! Thoughts After the First Reading

Nick Jeffery and John Granger discuss Strike8, fandom disappointment, predictions review, three Rowling targets, the Core Text hidden in the epigraphs, and ‘What’s Next?’ for Serious Strikers (8 September 2025)

Hallmarked Man’s Three ‘Whose My Daddy?’ Set-Ups to Shock Readers in Strikes 9 and 10

Misdirection to cause Defamiliarization in the next Strike-Ellacott Mysteries: Incest, Paternity, Gorilla Murphy, and the Bad Dad-Big Brother who Killed His Little Sister (15 September 2025)

Hallmarked Man’s Flood of Names, Characters, and Plots

Rowling-Galbraith Inundates the Reader with Possible Victims, Murderers, and Sideline Observers; Three Explanations for the Tsunami of Plot Threads and New Faces (22 September 2025)

Psyche and Cupid: The Hallmarked Man’s Mythological Template

‘Cupid and Psyche’s importance for grasping the depths of Strike 8, from the “necessity” of the Silver Vault and the three men in Robin’s life, to spaghetti carbonara and ‘Maid of the Silver Sea’ (25 September 2025)

Strike 9 to Heads to Portsmouth!

J. K. Rowling has changed her Twitter (X) header and updated her profile picture with dramatic turquoise pendant earrings. The image is of Tower Alley situated at the the entrance to Portsmouth Harbour on the south coast of England, the UK’s largest naval base. The tower in the background is Round Tower. Built on the orders of King Henry V in 1418, it originally housed a defensive chain that could be raised to protect the harbour from enemy shipping. I can’t find an exact match for this photograph online, so it is likely that this is her own creation, and she has physically scouted this location for the next Strike book.

Although most fans are still digesting the wonderfully complex plot of The Hallmarked Man, J. K. Rowling has recently reiterated that her headers are usually clues to future books, it is probably a good time to remind ourselves of the headers most likely to refer to Strike 9. With The Hallmarked Man carrying themes of pregnancy, childbirth and babies, the images of a tree-house and scattered dolls, might mean a childhood theme for the next in the series.

All of J. K. Rowling’s headers can be found here, but the Strike 9 headers are reproduced below:

25th January 2025 View from York city walls showing York Minster cathedral.

4th April 2025 A stock image of a tree house from here.

18th April 2025 This appears to be an AI generated image, judging from the distortion visible in the doll’s faces.

17th September 2025 Tower Alley in Portsmouth. Between the buildings can be seen the Round Tower, a 15th century fortification.

A Few Shiny Thoughts on The Hallmarked Man

I’ve at last finished my first read through and started my targeted read-back through of the latest installment in J.K Rowling’s StrikeThe Hallmarked Man: A Cormoran Strike Novel - Audiobook by Robert Galbraith series. We’ll be doing some serious deep dives into this volume, of course,  but I wanted to go ahead and share some of my initial thoughts which may, for some of you, be similar to your own. Just in case you are reading this post before completing your own complete read of the twisting tale of silver, murder, and convoluted relationships galore, I am splitting my Top Ten Initial Thoughts into Spoiler Free and Spoiler-Rife, so if you prefer to solve the mysteries alongside our Denmark Street detectives, you’ll want to stop at number four!

  1. The first of ten thoughts—Ten!

I am always fascinated by number patterns, particularly in Rowling’s work, and not just because I have spent a great deal of time in Panem lately, a world Suzanne Collins meticulously lines with number symbolism. We are used to Rowling and her care with numbers from the Hogwarts adventures, and she has continued that attention to symbolic and literal numbering in the Strike books. In this installment, one of the first things I noticed with interest was the use of the number 10. Before the end of the first chapter, our first non-series character is introduced, Decima Mullins. Her name, with its Latin root of “ten,”  sets up the use of ten throughout. The book is broken in 10 segments of varying length, plus an epilogue. Other tens crop up as well. Since Rowling has made it clear that she plans for a ten-book series, the use of tens certainly reinforces that. Knowing that only two more books remain places added emphasis on the events of this one. It also reminds us of the ten-year age gap between Strike and Robin, which continues to cause him stress, but which we are hoping to see overcome by the time the series, like this book, counts to ten.

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