Hogwarts Professor

I am re-reading Cuckoo’s Calling in light of Lethal White and I confess to being whelmed by the number and quality of the echoes to be found of the fourth book in the first book of the series. I’m tabulating them as I go and will have to look up all the corresponding passages in Lethal White, but I think, if a Book 1 to Book 4 correspondence suggests another appearance in Book 7, the finale and end of the story axis, we have a lot of clues to sort through for the series finish. Do you remember the tomoto-red haired women in Cuckoo’s Calling? Me, neither.

One of the connections I have on my curious-but-not-obviously-important list of story echoes is that both contain references to Robin as a personal assistant or PA. Strike tells her in Cuckoo’s Calling after her week as a Temporary Solution that he’d like to hire her as a secretary but she can do much better: “If I could afford a secretary… but I expect you’ll end up pulling down a serious salary as some fat cat’s PA” (Part 2, chapter 5, p 82). Jasper Chiswell, who certainly qualifies as a ‘fat cat,’ offers her that job in Lethal White:

Robin was almost at the door when Chiswell said abruptly:

“You don’t want a PA’s job, I suppose?”

“Sorry?”

“Take over from Izzy? What does that detective pay you? I could probably match it. I need someone with brains and a bit of backbone.”

“I’m happy where I am,” said Robin. (ch 25, p 221)

When Robin reports this to Strike later, he says, “I’m always surprised that doesn’t happen more often” (ch 26, p 234).

This is a faint echoing between the books, I know, but it is audible. Events of the last week, though, are to blame for me being sufficiently sensitive to anything involving PAs and J. K. Rowling to hear it. You may not have heard about it in the media blitz around the Crimes of Grindelwald premiere but Joanne Murray, Galbraith and Rowling’s real name, sued a former PA, Amanda Donaldson, whom she claims “wrongly benefited to a value of £23,696.32 [just over $30,000] by spending on a business credit card and taking Harry Potter merchandise.” Ms Donaldson had been Rowling’s PA from 2014-2017 and was fired for “gross misconduct involving a substantial alleged breach of trust.” Amanda Donaldson is mentioned first in Rowling’s non-alphabetical list of seven assistants in the Career of Evil acknowledgements “without whose hard work I would not have any time to do my own.” She denies Murray’s charges.

Three notes: [Read more…]

I joked in yesterday’s touchstone turtleback post on the ring structure of Lethal White that we should have a page here dedicated to new correspondences that Serious Strikers have found between Strike 4 and Strike 1, Cuckoo’s Calling. Realizing that Strike falls on and cracks his cell phone screen in both books made me look at my charting notes for any other Cuckoo-Lethal links. In addition, that is, to the echo of Cuckoo’s first chapters at the beginning of Lethal White’s Part 2 we’ve talked about at ‘The Missing Page Mystery.’ Here are six for starters, each offered in the hope that you will be inspired to share any you have found and not already discussed in ‘Lethal White: Cuckoo’s Calling Retold?‘ and that post’s comment thread.

(1) The African Student Link: In Cuckoo, Lula Landry had been searching in the last months of her life for her biological father. She had found her biological mother, Marlene Higson, who told her that her father had been a student from Africa. Lula finds him, albeit after his repose, and makes the search for her half-brother, Jonah Agyeman, a soldier stationed in Afghanistan. John Bristow hires Strike after murdering Lula because she had told him that she was leaving all her money to Jonah; Bristow thought Strike might be able to find the runner on the street whom John suspected correctly was Agyeman without figuring out Bristow had done it.

In Lethal White, there is, even after Robin and Cormoran learn from Tegan Butcher that Chiswell had been selling gallows overseas, the mystery of why Chiswell would care if people learned about this. He was a public advocate for the death penalty, after all. The answer is that one of the gallows had been stolen and a British student studying in Africa, Samuel Murape, had been hung on those gallows and there were pictures of his desecrated corpse in the Foreign Office. This is why Chiswell hired Strike: to keep the “unintended consequences” of his gallows business from hurting him politically without revealing to Strike the link between him and Murape’s judicial murder.

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Both J. K. Rowling and Robert Galbraith are ‘ring writers.’ Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, her Casual Vacancy, and the first Fantastic Beasts screenplays as well as the Cormoran Strike novels written under the alternate pseudonym of ‘Robert Galbraith’ are all written in parallelist structure that anthropologist Mary Douglas called ‘ring composition.’ Lethal White is no exception.

Regular readers of this weblog are more than familiar with this traditional story scaffolding but for those new to structural analysis — the turtleback tale and narrative ‘reverse echo effect’ – the shortest of introductions are these four rules. (1) A ring-story begins and ends with the same scene, characters, or dialogue, a question being answered or a mystery resolved, and acts as a ‘latch’ to the circle. (2) The mid-point of the novel is a clearly marked ‘turn,’ at which point the narrative shifts from exposition started at the opening and inciting incident back to the finish (it has pointers to or echoes of both beginning and end). (3) The chapters or story parts on the way out to the big turn are reflected by the chapters coming back, straight-up or in mirror image fashion.

A nine part ring will have story elements and touches that reveal a A-B-C-D-E-D’-C’-B’-A’ with an A-A’ latch, E story turn pointing to the latch parts, and reflections of the parallel chapters or sets,D-D’,  C-C’ and B-B.’ The fourth rule is just that there are often rings inside of the larger rings, so chapters are set up with bracketing elements and a series of books will have a chiastic relationship between the books, i.e., first and last will ‘latch,’ the middle one will be a ‘turn’ reflecting the latch parts, and the others will parallel their corresponding books on either side of the story axis set up by latch and turn.

The first three Cormoran Strike mysteries have all been ring structures and Lethal White, the fourth and central book if it is a seven book series, echoes Cuckoo’s Calling, the first book, the way a story-turn would. The hanging question since publication has been in light of that, “Okay, but is Lethal White itself a ring?” Answering that question involves no little grunt work, which means “charting the novel chapter by chapter to identify the parallel parts,” but I’ve spent the day finishing off that week of diagramming and think I can answer the question.

“Yes, it is a ring: a five part one very much like Cuckoo’s Calling. Surprise!” More after the jump — latch, turn, and parallel parts of the Lethal White ring.

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