Thoughts for the Serious Reader of Harry Potter
Go ahead and count the Harry Potter references in this brief news story of a Virginia family whose home was invaded by a majestic owl. He or she thought their Christmas tree a perfect perch for an afternoon’s visit.
I confess to being certain that, except for the messenger owls of the Hogwarts Saga, this would not have been the ‘fun story’ everyone thought it was but a nightmare home invasion by a holdover from Hitchcock’s The Birds.
Seriously. Who wants to follow the legend?
21 December is represented in the UK as 21/12 and in the US as 12/21 which because of its a-b-b-a structure, unique on the calendar, makes it a perfect day to celebrate chiastic writing and ring composition, a hallmark (!) of Rowling-Galbraith-Murray and indeed of the greatest works of literature and inspired writing for millenia.
Rowling chose a different day than 12 December for the center chapter of the center book of her remarkably symmetrical ring series, the Harry Potter novels, but a day that resonates with the chiastic aspect of 12/21. The date and time at the dead center of the Hogwarts Saga — Harry’s adventures with Hagrid in the Forbidden Forest and talking with Sirius in the Gryffindor Common Room, ‘The Hungarian Horntail’ — was 22 November between 12 midnight and 1 in the morning. That signaled the story turn or half-way point in as straight forward a fashion as possible, and I think was a hat-tip to the literary reason that 12/21 (or 21/12) is International Chiasmus Day.
Jules Verne made 12/21 the date by which Phineas Fogg had to have completed his circumnavigation of the globe and returned to his club in Around the World in Eighty Days. The ring aspect of that story and the latch falling on 12/21 is brilliant and Rowling the French major, I’m guessing, has read her share of Verne. Her choice of 11/22 between 12-1, akin to the Vernian 12/21 chiasmus there-and-back-again date, was a great marker of the story-turn in her seven book series (“half-way there”).
As I wrote about Verne’s classic in 2018:
Today is the 21st of December or 12/21 in the US and 21/12 in the UK. Besides meaning that there are only four more days until Western Nativity and their Twelve Days of Christmas, it also marks what I hope will hereafter be celebrated as International Chiasmus Day.
I think this day of all days is best for commemoration of self-echoing phrases, verses, passages, books, and series of books both because it is the only calendar date that has digits repeating the other in reverse order (I say “Fie!” to those offering up March 30th as 03/30…) and because it is the date by which Phileas Fogg had to complete his 80 days circumnavigation of the globe in Verne’s chiastic Around the World in Eighty Days.
Yes, I believe Verne chose this date to highlight the ring structure of the work in question; my 2013 post on the subject details how Fogg’s journey is an exact mirror reflection in forward and then reverse order, the return trip beginning with his sailing from Japan, complete with hilarious inverse parallels in the adventures Fogg, Passepartout, and Aouda have in India and America.
Yes, there was a lot of kerfuffle about 12/21 in 2012. Too many people think “Mayan Apocalypse!’ when they see that date in December so I thought a change in focus to its traditional meaning might help.
How to celebrate International Chiasmus Day? Sadly, Worlds of Fun, an American Theme Park dedicated to Vernes’ Around the World in Eighty Days (I kid you not) is closed until the Spring. And though you can fly around the world on commercial flights, believe it or not, in eighty hours, that is still a might long for Chiasmus Day as a single day. And trying to do it in eighty minutes? You’d have to break into Cape Canaveral or Bill Gates’ 401k to do that.
I think the best way to celebrate the day is to pick up a favorite book by an author that is known to have structural concerns and read that book chiastically, a ring-reading. This involves reading the first chapter, then the last, then the second chapter and the next to last, and so on until you reach the middle. Did you discover hidden correspondences? Is the ‘meaning in the middle’?
I’ll testify that this a lot of fun, especially with Rowling’s books and screenplays (and Galbraith’s!). Tomorrow I’ll share my notes on Crimes of Grindelwald when read as a ring composition. I look forward to reading your findings on Crimes or your favorite book. Until then, find a Palindrome Pal and get reading!
For Serious Strikers disappointed that Hallmarked Man may not be published until 25 July, 31 July, or, egad, September 2025, today would be a great day to review Rowling-Galbraith’s Running Grave and its structure to prepare for the nine-parts of Strike 8, which, if Rowling’s pattern holds, will be a nine-part ring as a whole, each of which nine parts will also be chiastic in form. If you want a guide for that effort, check out my notes on Running Graves‘ structure as a good starting point.
Whatever you elect to do this International Chiasmus Day, may your meaning be in your middle and your beginning and end (arche and telos) be conjoined!
Nick Jeffery yesterday posted his best guess of Hallmarked Man’s publication date, 25 July 2025, a hypothesis extrapolated from previous publication dates’ distance from the announcement that Rowling had submitted her final draft.
Inspired by that logic, I wondered if we could guess how many pages Strike 8 will be.
There is simply no way to know, of course, but if one were forced to guess, what clues about Hallmarked Man and information about previous Strike-Ellacott books do we have that could be used a la the date of publication guesstimate to come up with an as-likely-as-not page count?
We have a Rowling tweet about the number of chapters in Hallmarked Man from late September. 
She had tweeted while on her birthday cruise in July around Greenland that she was working on (and nearly finished with?) Strike 8, so it might reasonably be assumed that by September she was putting final touches on the novel.
The epigraph to Part Nine is telling, perhaps:
That passage from A Maid of the Silver Sea has a note of finality to it and Running Grave only had nine chapter sets, Rowling’s ‘Parts,’ so we hoped at the time this meant that she was nearing the finish line.
If we shamelessly and carelessly neglect all logical procedure, though, and assume that chapter 119 is an epilogue piece (in which Cormoran Strike finally meets his estranged biological father?) that Rowling found especially “satisfying” in part because it was the end of her first draft labors, then we can hazard a guess about the final page number for Hallmarked Man.
The calculation will require knowing the average number of pages per chapter in the Strike-Ellacott series and then multiplying that number times 119. Here is your data set for that effort:
Total Pages/Total Chapters = 4,930/546/4,930 = ~9 = Average pages per chapter in Strike-Ellacott series
The average pages per chapter in the series, then, being 9, multiplied by our closest approximation of the number of Hallmarked Man chapters we have been given, 119, yields 1,071 as a ‘Good Guess of How Many Pages Hallmarked Man will be.’
A quick glance at the earlier books in the series, however, shows that those books averaged well over 9 pages per chapter and more recent books significantly less. Running Grave‘s pages per chapter count, for example is almost 7, a 22% difference with the series average.
If we use the average pages per chapter of the most recent book and multiply it by our best number for Hallmarked Man chapters, we get 7 x 119, or 833 pages, perhaps a ‘Better Guess of How Many Pages Hallmarked Man will be.’
As we have thrown all concern for significant figures and calculation sobriety to the winds, how about using an ‘Average of Averages,’ either using the two page number guesses and dividing them by two or just multiplying 119 times 8, the midpoint between 7 and 9? Both those methods give us ‘952 pages‘ as our potentially ‘Best Guess of How Many Pages Hallmarked Man will be.’
I offer this effort to you — and if you have read this far, you are a Serious Striker indeed — as a ‘for instance’ of how not to be reading Rowling-Galbraith. While I helped pioneer back in the years of Potter Mania the speculative madness about all aspects of what the next Hogwarts book would include (e.g., the temperature and weather on Privet Drive in the opening chapter per alchemical formula), it’s past time we give up on such folly and free labor for Mulholland’s marketing team.
Who cares after all how many pages the next book will be, when it will be published, or the cover picture to be used, all subjects and facts that will soon be forgotten after we have the book and can discuss it? We have entered the Fourth Generation of Rowling Studies, in which we are moving towards a consistently broader view of Rowling’s work than a border line obsessive fixation on her most recent codex and the book-in-queue.
But it was fun to come up with a Best Guess of 952 pages for Hallmarked Man, the folly of which calculation we will all appreciate even more on the day of publication (which I confess to hoping will come on Rowling’s sixtieth birthday, 31 July 2025, rather than Nick’s guesstimate of 25 July). Thanks for sharing your best guesses in the comment boxes about page or date, or, better, for submitting the plot point Golden Threads you hope the HogwartsProfessor team will take up after we’re done with Pregnancy Traps. Cheers!
With the announcement that the manuscript for The Hallmarked Man is now (finally!) complete, speculation will inevitably begin as to when the title will finally arrive on the bookshelves. Below I have a table where I’ve been keeping track of the title reveal, manuscript completion, cover reveal and publication day for each Strike title after The Silkworm. I’ve checked the dates against this handy page over at StrikeFans.com.
The later, and longer books take between 221 to 270 days from draft completion to book shelf. The Ink Black Heart is perhaps an outlier with lots of text chat to format, so my guess is the earliest we will see the finished product is 25th July 2025. This is assuming the publishers want to release then. Strike is not an obvious beach read, particularly in its colossal hard-back format. The publishers may want a later publication to appear fresher for the Christmas market.
| Title | Title Reveal | Finished Draft | Cover Reveal | Publication Day | Days from Cover | Days from Draft |
| Career of Evil | 24/04/2015 | 24/04/2015 | 11/06/2015 | 20/10/2015 | 131 | 179 |
| Lethal White | 14/03/2017 | 23/03/2018 | 10/07/2018 | 18/09/2018 | 70 | 179 |
| Troubled Blood | 19/02/2020 | 25/01/2020 | 08/07/2020 | 15/09/2020 | 69 | 234 |
| The Ink Black Heart | 03/12/2021 | 03/12/2021 | 30/06/2022 | 30/08/2022 | 61 | 270 |
| The Running Grave | 12/01/2023 | 17/02/2023 | 19/07/2023 | 26/09/2023 | 69 | 221 |
| The Hallmarked Man | 15/03/2024 | 17/12/2024 | 25/07/2025 ?? |
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