Hogwarts Professor

Yesterday I pledged to write out the wildly speculative theory of the crimes Jonny Rokeby committed that moved him to agree to fake a paternity test and seem to be Cormoran Strike’s father. I explained there that the idea largely depends on the fact that the divorce dates listed in Rokeby’s wikipedia profile don’t match up with Cormoran’s conception and birth days in 1974.

I noted as an aside that this could just be a Wikipedia error. Because Wikipedia pages are not heavily vetted, mistakes creep in. This is less true of global celebrities and public figures, whose pages millions of people visit, reporters use as source material, and the subjects have a consequent interest in monitoring, but it happens.

I’m obliged to note before I offer the Heroin Dark Lord theory details that the Wikipedia entry may be mistaken because the author and editorial team just didn’t catch the detail error. Rowling approved, she says, the changes made in Goblet of Fire that made the Little Hangleton graveyard shades appear in the wrong order out of Voldemort’s wand. And there are at least three other flat out mistakes in Cuckoo’s Calling that make a date slip in the Rokeby Wikipedia page credible.

Here are the three mistakes in Cuckoo’s Calling. Do you think the Wiki divorce dates are a fourth? [Read more…]

I concluded yesterday’s post on the Rokeby-Jagger connection with the promise that I’d take a second look at the Wikipedia entry we’re given in Cuckoo’s Calling about Jonny Rokeby and why the dates don’t seem to “match up” with the story we’ve been given about Rokeby’s supposed paternity. Here goes!

We are told in Cuckoo that one of the Deadbeats is arrested on drug charges in 1975 while on a tour of the US. Their best-selling album (“multi-platinum”) also came out in 1975.

Cormoran was born 23 November 1974, the year before.

Do we know that birthday for sure? Or is it a Wiki-date? All the following discussion hangs on this date being correct.

StrikeWiki gives the year as “C. 1974” while StrikeFans says it definitively was 1974 (Rowling confirmed the day, not the year, in a 2015 tweet [note Ian Rankin’s comment on that thread; he’s a fan]).

Strike’s birthday party in Silkworm at Lucy’s home is celebrated on Saturday 20 November 2010. On p 110 we read, “Lucy appeared with the homemade cake, blazing with thirty six candles and decorated with what looked like hundreds of Smarties.”

Lucy is one for details, especially to do with observances of holidays and birthdays, we’ve been told, because of her nomadic upbringing. The candle number is correct.

Strike turned 36 in 2010, ergo, he was born in 1974.

Which presents a problem. From the Cuckoo Wiki page on Rokeby that Robin reads: [Read more…]

I posted yesterday about why it is more than credible that Rowling/Galbraith’s fourth Cormoran Strike mystery, Lethal White, will involve a white horse of some kind. Today and tomorrow I want to begin my explanation of why I don’t think it will necessarily involve horses of an equine kind, however much I look forward (with Robin) to reading about Cormoran’s first horse-back ride.

To cut to the quick, I think the Lethal White ‘white horse’ that Rowling has been teasing readers with is heroin from Afghanistan rather than albino American paint horses or unicorns.

My first piece of evidence in this speculative argument is Jonny Rokeby and his resemblance to Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones.

Evan Willis has argued here that he doubts Jonny Rokeby, as the Zeus figure in the Leda and the Swan mythological drama underlying the Strike mysteries, will make an appearance in the novels. That is a more than credible position considering the Aeschylus and Virgil parallels Willis cites. Karen Kebarle, though, is almost certainly closer to what’s likely in Strike 4; she said in a just recorded ‘Reading, Writing, Rowling’ episode about Lethal White that the great failing of the Strike series when compared with Harry Potter is the absence of a villain, a Moriarity, as much more powerful and dangerous than Cormoran as Voldemort was to the Boy Who Lived. If Willis is right and Rokeby remains just a haunting presence off-stage, Strike will only be fun detective stories.

Perhaps it is just wishful thinking on my part that this won’t be the case. Rowling has invested so much in the mysterious death of Leda Strike, though, that I think we’re fairly safe in assuming that solving this case is as large a part of the continuing drama as the relationship cum romance of Robin and Cormoran.

Moving forward, then, with the idea that Rokeby is the Voldemort/Moriarity of the Strike series,  what do we know about him and what, if anything, does he have to do with white horses?

The first thing we know about Jonny Rokeby, lead singer of the Deadbeats, is that his life runs as a fairly obvious caricature of Mick Jagger’s.

[Read more…]