Troubled Blood: The Dark Sides to Two Old Mates

January 22, 2021 by 1 Comment

One of the most notable moments of Troubled Blood was when Strike acknowledged Robin as his “best mate.” Up until that moment, Robin had assumed that title belonged to Dave Polworth; other readers might have assumed it was Nick Herbert. By the end of Troubled Blood, however, both men have shown their darker sides. It is easy to see why Robin has been promoted to best bud as well as detective partner.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate Dave’s service in this book. His assistance to Joan, Ted, Strike and Lucy was admirable, He provided physical help– everything from home repairs to taking them food in the flood to, most importantly, leading the team that escorted Lucy and Strike through the floodwaters so they could be at Joan’s deathbed. And, he gave Strike and Ted emotional support, through his pub invitations, serving as a pallbearer and his presence at the scattering of Joan’s ashes. He is a loyal friend, through and through. 

But, like Strike, he’s a bit of a jerk at times. His hyper-nationalism, to to point of wanting to restrict the purchase of property in Cornwall to those who can prove ancestry, is off-putting, even to Strike. He’ll win no awards as either Husband- or Father -of-the-Year. He’s an excessively permissive parent, allowing his girls to run wild, even at a funeral wake. He had no qualms about quitting his job and uprooting his family, without even the decency to consult his wife about the plan first. And, in his opening scene in the book, he laid his misogynistic streak bare for the world to see, acknowledging that he saw marriage, first and foremost, as a cheap and convenient path to regular sex. All in all, despite his service to the Nancarrows, I found myself liking this version of Dave Polworth less than I did the guy who made several icy dives in search of Liz Tassel’s typewriter. 

But, there’s another “old mate” of Strike’s who goes down several notches for me in Troubled Blood: his London schoolmate and man of the always-free-spare-room, Nick Herbert.  I’ll tell you why after the jump. 

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Filed Under: Cormoran Strike, Louise Freeman Tagged With: ,

Guest Post: ‘Twas Charlotte Killed Leda

January 18, 2021 by 5 Comments

In my post reviewing the likeliest suspects for ‘Murderer of Leda Strike,’ I dismissed the idea that Charlotte Campbell did the deed as a looney-tune gambit. A Serious Striker writing as ‘Fiona’ posted a fun response that defended this fan theory. Lest it take over the discussion on that post’s thread (and be forever lost to future Rowling-Galbraith students wanting to identify who first figured out the over-arching mystery of the first seven Strike books), I have bumped the comment up to ‘Guest Post’ status to draw your attention to ‘Fiona’s argument and to invite your response.

I confess to loving the fan-fiction motive — and all such speculation have to come with a heavy helping of fan-fiction, more or less credible — if I’m missing why Charlotte would be moved by the revelation to kill Leda rather than the person who gives her the bad news. I look forward to reading what you think, especially if you believe Charlotte a better bet in the ‘Who Killed Leda?’ sweepstakes than Dave Polworth or Ted Nancarrow! Enjoy ‘Twas Charlotte Killed Leda‘ by first time post-er ‘Fiona’…

Hey, I have also thought about the idea of Charlotte as Leda’s killer! I know it sounds nuts, but it would certainly provide the required twist at the end of the series.

Firstly I’m basing this on other theories that have been posted on this site. I apologise for not remembering the names given to the theories and whether it was John or other contributors who introduced them. By these theories I mean the ones concerning Leda mirroring her mythological namesake concerning Zeus, the double father idea, and twins. Also the idea that the “aristocrat” in the photograph that Strike says is the only known picture of his parents together is the father of both Charlotte and Strike.

Now consider: Strike has gone to Oxford, and therefore already met Charlotte when Leda dies. (We know he meets her almost immediately.) At some point while at Oxford our chaos-loving Charlotte says, ‘Next weekend, come home and meet the family,’ mainly for the sake of shocking her upper class parents with her rough-around-the-edges boyfriend. They arrive chez Charlotte and she triumphantly says something to the effect of “Hi, Mummy, Daddy, meet my new boyfriend! His father is a crazy rocker and his mother is an even crazier drug addict!”

Mummy Charlotte is suitably unimpressed but Daddy Charlotte practically loses it. He takes Charlotte aside and says, “You need to break up with that boy, NOW.” Charlotte laughs and says “I knew you wouldn’t like him.” But her father insists he has good reasons for what he says and if she only knew what he knew she would end it. Charlotte, however, insists she loves loves him and nothing in the world could make her end it (assuming this is all just snobbery on her father’s part.)

So her father realises he will have to tell her the truth. And he does, but first makes her swear not to share a word of what he tells her to anyone. He tells her about his (presumably brief) affair with Leda, and the resulting pregnancy which threatened to ruin his reputation, relationship, and possibly derail a political career. How he (as theorised by others here) convinced Jonny Rokeby to take the responsibility for the baby, in return for arranging that Jonny faces no consequences for actions/crimes of his own. (This presumably all took time to arrange, hence the delay in Jonny accepting paternity, with the paternity test in turn being offered as an excuse for this delay.) [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike, Guest Posts

Hogwarts Legacy RPG Delayed to 2022

January 13, 2021 by Leave a Comment

I’m skeptical that there are many (any?) HogwartsProfessor readers that are ‘really into’ role playing games on their computers, but in that supposition I am probably only revealing how naive and misinformed I am. Lev Grossman and his twin brother Austin, after all, not only play and review these games, but, in Austin’s case, design them. There is a literature nerd/RPG geek overlap out there.

So, for all you neglected RPG playing Serious Readers in the audience, here’s a News Flash from GamesRadar.com: ‘The Harry Potter themed role playing video game scheduled for release this year, Hogwarts Legacy, has been postponed until 2022.’

I was fascinated to see in the ‘sneak preview’ video above that ‘Legacy’ is set in the late 19th Century Hogwarts. The announcer notes that this is a century before Harry, Ron, and Hermione’s time at the magical castle cum wizarding school and decades before Newt Scamander and Company walk the hallowed halls. In case you’re wondering, as I was, if Albus and Aberforth Dumbledore might make cameo walk-ons, they could only do so as children too young to be students (older brother DDore is born in 1881). Set in the past as it may be, 1800s Hogwarts seems to have the same freedom from racial and sexist bias as the one we experienced imaginatively in Rowling’s late 20th Century Septology.

If anyone out there is a ‘gamer,’ please share in the comment boxes what we should know and why we should care about Hogwarts Legacy as well as its delay until 2022!

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes

Requiescat in Pace, Christopher Little

January 12, 2021 by 1 Comment

Christopher Little, the literary agent to whom in 1985 the unknown Jo Rowling submitted three chapters of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in hopes of gaining representation to publishers for the book, died on 7 January “after a long illness,” a euphemism for cancer or AIDS. Little succeeded in finding a home for the oversized novel — Stone being twice as long as the accepted length for stories aimed at the ‘Age 9-12’ bracket for whom Rowling claimed to be writing  — at Bloomsbury’s small children’s book division. It had been turned down by all the major publishers in the United Kingdom, but Little persisted. The rest is history.

The folk tale of Christopher Little as Rowling’s representative did not have a happy ending: Rowling and Neil Blair, a lawyer at the Little Agency, broke legal contracts with him in 2011 to set up The Blair Partnership (a bit of foul play rectified by a large payout to Little the following year). That departure was the birth of Rowling, Inc., in which the global financial interests of the Author Become Juggernaut are aggressively represented by barristers and bean counters so that Rowling, as she once put it, unlike Agatha Christie, does not wind up “fleeing the tax man”  every year until her next book comes out. The fairy tale of the princess discovered and well-served by Sir Cadogan ended with her dismissing him with enough money to buy a new horse and castle. 

Little took the break hard but weathered on gamely with millions of pounds in the bank; the year after his break with Blair and Rowling, he merged his agency with that of Curtis Brown.  He died on 7 January at home with his family.

The Presence has not broken her Twitter silence of more than a month to acknowledge her first representative’s demise five days ago. One hopes she reconciled with the man before his death and has privately expressed her condolences to the Little family and to the Agency that had the courage and good judgment to believe in her when she was a nobody. 

Regardless, rest in peace, Christopher Little — and thank you for all you did to advance J. K. Rowling’s career as a writer and to steward the Harry Potter phenomenon from its birth, growth into a mania, to its adult life as the Shared Text of the 21st Century.

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes

The Rabbits Hiding in Troubled Blood: Spence Finds Oonaugh and the Athorns

January 7, 2021 by 2 Comments

Merry Christmas, Rowling Readers!

I’m not a big fan of Ian Spence, who writes Jungian interpretations of pop culture at medium.com; see, for example his borderline wing-nut character assassination pieces on ‘Rowling the Christian Fundamentalist Transphobe’ here and here. If you have trouble thinking of Rowling as the advocate of “her own patriarchal, superstitious Christian movement,” you can skip over those Spence pieces.

But even when he’s over-the-top with his disgust for all things Christian, he sometimes comes up with a treasure.

Case in point? The hidden rabbits in Troubled Blood. I don’t think his interpretation of these hares and bunnies holds water and he doesn’t talk about them all (he misses the stuffed rabbits dressed as hunters in the bar where Robin interviews SB’s PA); but did you connect the “buck teeth” of Oonaugh Kennedy — who loves “carrot cake,” right? — with the Athorns’ extraordinarily “long ears” and Anna Phipps’ “pajama case shaped like a rabbit” in which she kept photographs of her mother clandestinely? I sure didn’t.

Spence discusses these finds and his interpretation of them in ‘The Rabbit as Psychopomp: Darkness and light in J.K. Rowling’s Troubled Blood.’ Enjoy!

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike