Nick Jeffery and freshly Shorn & Clean Shaven John Granger sit down to discuss John’s two posts about the symbolism of the Letter ‘G’ in Strike 8. Part One of the series did the necessary work of demonstrating that, yes, the letter ‘G’ is all over Hallmarked Man, from the online guess that the murderer carved that initial into ‘William Wright’s back to the Witness G echoing with Green-jacked Gorilla-bearing man and a bit of calligraphic terrorism on the Agency door at street-level. The first also covered the accepted Masonic interpretations of why the ‘G’ is featured in the Compass and Square symbolism of their fraternity.

Part Two was a deep dive into more esoteric meanings given to the ‘G’ by Freemasons and by Rene Guenon, notable Perennialist, and into what associations Rowling-Galbraith tried to make between the seventh letter and the key hallmark of the book. It concluded with three answers to “So What?” including some fun speculation about a possible shape for the series, a shape highlighted in Strike 8, and with a discussion of whether Rowling-Galbraith’s subliminal artistry with ‘G’ worked or failed.

Perhaps the biggest take-away of this series of posts was to introduce subliminal coloration as the common denominator of Rowling-Galbraith’s signature seven Shed tools. Nick and John open their conversation about the letter ‘G’ with that subject and everything they discuss in the end folds back into that covert artistry.

As always, the Dynamic Duo covet your comments and feedback as the best follow-up to their conversation. Please jump right in!

The Ten Questions and Relevant Links

1. Okay, John, let’s talk coloration. You mentioned some examples in famous authors’ work in Part One of your deep dive into Letter G Symbolism in Hallmarked Man; do we have coloration in Harry Potter? Another Strike novel?

• ‘Donegality’ in Planet Narnia, Michael Ward, the subliminal artistry of C. S. Lewis’ Narniad;

• From ‘Literary Alchemy: Sacred Science, Sacred Art, and the Alembic of Story’

C. S. Lewis, according to Michael Ward, author of Planet Narnia, also felt appreciating the “manner of the author,” his “various special tricks,” especially those connected to creating atmosphere, were critical to understanding the style of the Greats.

Again and again, in defending works of romance, Lewis argues that it is the quality or tone of the whole story that is its main attraction. The invented world of romance is conceived with this kind of qualitative richness because romancers feel the real world itself to be ‘cryptic, significant, full of voices, and the mystery of life.’ Lovers of romances go ‘back to fruit tree for its taste; to an air for… what? For itself; to a region for its whole atmosphere – to Donegal for its Donegality and London for its Londonness’ (Ward, 16).

Donegal was one of Lewis’favorite vacation spots as a child in Northern Ireland. Ward defined Lewis’ stylistic atmosphere as his ‘Donegality:’

By donegality we mean to denote the spiritual essence or quiddity of a work of art as intended by the artist and inhabited unconsciously by the reader. The donegality of the story is its peculiar and deliberated atmosphere or quality; its pervasive and purposed integral tone or flavor; its tutelary but tacit spirit, a spirit that that the author consciously sought to conjure, but which was designed to remain implicit in the matter of the text… the more influentially to inform the work and so affect the reader (Ward 75).

Ward’s concern is especially with Lewis’ character Aslan, in whom this donegality is “concentrated and consummated” as a “Christologically representative character” (Idem), but the thesis of Planet Narnia is that the “kappa-element,”[xiv] Lewis’ phrase for the informing, hidden “tutelary but tacit” style of a work, is astrological symbolism, each of the Narnia chronicles representing one of the seven traditional planets. Ward argues that Lewis’ subliminal artistry, the “inner weave” or style of his work in Nabokovian language, is the embedded mythological and astral metaphors to be found beneath the surface of each story. Twain is supposed to have said, “”If you would have your fiction live forever, you must neither overtly preach nor overtly teach, but you must covertly preach and covertly teach.” Lewis, believing as he did that “an influence which cannot evade our consciousness will not go very deep” (Lewis no date), wrote in astrological glyphs to reach covertly his reader’s unconscious depths or noetic heights.

• ‘The Eyes of Deathly Hallows’ in The Deathly Hallows Lectures, John Granger, and, briefly, here, and 2010 lecture at New York Public Library; and

• ‘The Cross Symbolism of Troubled Blood,’ John Granger

2. You list those eyes and crosses and I confess it didn’t strike me on my first and repeated readings that there were so many of those. What made you notice all the ‘G’s in Strike 8?

• I confess that I didn’t make anything of the letter ‘G’s repeated appearances in Hallmarked Man until I saw that Rene Guenon, the most famous and profoundly metaphysical of the first 20th Century Perennialists, had written a brief essay in his youth, ‘The Letter G and the Swastika.’ I made that discovery inadvertently when looking for something else in Fundamental Symbols, a posthumous collection of his writing (downloadable as pdf here).

3. Let’s play ‘Name a G passage;’ I’ll start with the G supposedly carved into William Wright’s back and you name another until we’re both out of examples...

Robin’s research into the death of ‘William Wright’ in the Ramsey Silver shop vault begins with an online observer saying out of the blue that a ‘G’ was carved into the victim’s back and that this was tied to the Secret Word of Freemasonry and the legend of Hiram Abiff’s martyrdom. Rowling-Galbraith has Robin mention this to Murphy at their first unofficial briefing on the case and Murphy all but explodes; he denies it was a ‘G’ and says he heard it was a “hallmark” instead.

The letter is associated with Freemasonry as their symbolic center (GAOTU) via a telephone message and in Strike’s meeting with ‘Hiram’ Hardacre.

We learn after Robin’s being attacked in Harrow’s that she was ‘Witness G’ in her rapist’s trial, the letter being to her something like a secret identity.

Strike not long thereafter finds a blood Red Letter ‘G’ painted on the street level door to the Agency which he hopes is a Masonic terrorist marker rather than the pointed suggestion that the Angel of Death is coming for Witness G.

I’d add that the Gorilla mask and doll of the Green jacket man that haunt Robin have some of their subliminal effect on her and the reader because of the initial guttoral sound of ‘Gorilla’ and ‘Green.’

4. The Freemason connection is the most interesting one even though the Masonic G isn’t carved into Powell’s back (it’s a Salem Cross and the only other twice played symbol is the orb and cross pendant Strike buys for the charm bracelet Christmas present). Who knew that the capital ‘G’ was such a big deal in Masonry?

5. At the end of Part One, I thought you’d pretty much covered the symbolism and were going to close in Part Two with what God and Geometry are about in Hallmarked Man, hence the coloration. Instead you wrote that the G being a one-letter acronym wasn’t enough. Why not?

• not Masonic -- no edges!

• not ancient Greek, Hebrew, or Sanskrit,

• not tied to craft symbolism,

• not a symbol!,

• the catechism answer “By letters four and science five, this G aright doth stand in due art and proportion’.”

6. So was Guenon’s essay the key to Rowling’s use of the letter ‘G’?

• Yes and no!

• His Symbolism of the Cross, Lord of the World, and The Great Triad chapters help a lot but from ‘The Letter G and the Swastika’ we learn that

• yod is God is gamma,

• catechism answer means four gammas or four yodhs which both yield swastikas (gammadion cross),

• GAOTUmeans Christ the keystone/cornerstone,

• the sequence of jumps from letter ‘G’ to Murphy’s Salem Cross...

7. Who backed Guenon up on this connection so you weren’t using the Perennialist hammer to drive in a screw or fasten a bolt?

• Cockburn, Crypto Curry, Albert Pike (via Tamara/Tamspells!)

8. If I accept the preponderance of ‘G’s in Hallmarked Man as coloration/Donegality (I do) and the meaning of the symbolism per your readers (I’m withholding skeptical judgement), what effect was this supposed to have on me the reader so I can tell you if it worked or not? If it was supposed to confuse me, boffo job!

• Nabokovian potustoronost,

• numinous quality in the air,

• Robin as ‘Witness G, ‘

• Strike channeling Tyler Powell at finish in Ironbridge

9. Will we see Freemasonry and its symbolism in Strikes 9 and 10?

Maybe! [Rowling-Galbraith] certainly has made us long for a big pay-off with respect to ‘G;’ see Sarah Keeler’s idea that it may be a pointer to Gillespie reappearing in Strike 9. I love that possibility and it certainly is in keeping with the HogwartsProfessor working thesis that Hallmarked Man is what it is to set up the next two books. If we’re going to see characters and themes bleed between the first book of the last three and its successors, why not its symbolism?

If I had to bet money on it, though, I think we probably won’t see more Freemasonry or Big ‘G’ payoffs. It kills me to say that given the investment I’ve made in books about the Masons (they’re on a shelf beneath the dust-collecting little library on Mormon history and scriptures I collected while writing about Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight books). I just cannot see her weaving the Mason characters from Hallmarked Man into story lines that give us resolution with respect to Charlotte’s and Leda’s supposed suicides twenty some years apart, Shanker’s family history, and the mysteries around Strike’s time with the military police, especially the IED that nearly killed him.

10. I thought you promised not to get into the Strike Series Shape Sweepstakes? You’ve already said you think it’s a seven part ring with a triangle-trilogy addendum and in Part Two you give us a Harry Potter shape for the decalogy structure -- or is it Christmas Pig?

In this concluding piece, there are five pieces: an introduction to subliminal coloration as Rowling’s narrative super-power, a review of the letter ‘G’s appearances in Hallmarked Man and what Freemasons claim it symbolizes, a deeper dive into its meaning per Masonic sages and one Perennialist, three answers to the ‘So What?’ question, and a concluding note about whether this symbolism had the desired effect on readers.

Coloration is Rowling-Galbraith’s Literary Signature and Super-Power

As I wrote in Part One of this two-part post, ‘Coloration’ is a term used to describe background information that lights or shades the foreground material in such a way that the reader’s experience of the narrative is moved in a particular direction subliminally. ‘Coloration’ is not exclusively about colors, though that can play a part as in alchemical sequence symbolism; it is at least as much about prevalent symbols and types that create contact, if you will, between the immaterial referents, the greater realities, which the symbols represent and the reader’s imagination. C. S. Lewis’ use of traditional astrological tokens for the seven planets in each of his Narniad novels as detailed in Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia is all about coloration, as is Charles Williams’ use of Tarot imagery in his archetypal thrillers and Rowling’s own use of Christian and alchemical symbolism in her Potter and Strellacott series.

In that author’s latest novel, The Hallmarked Man, there is a peculiar emphasis on, a much repeated reference to the letter ‘G.’ It is done in such a way that the reader who is struggling with the story’s multiple suspects, with a bevy of new characters with names that sound like other characters’ names, and with a bizarre and inexplicably complex (can you say ‘convoluted’?) murder does not have the focus or attention band-width sufficient to pick up consciously. Which means that it penetrates only the unconscious mind, the alocal locus of coloration’s effect.

C. S. Lewis famously observed in an essay on The Literary Impact of the Authorized Version that “An influence which cannot evade our consciousness will not go very deep,” i.e., will not have a lasting or profound effect. Whence Twain’s injunction to writers to instruct their readers not overtly, which instruction they will resist instinctively, but only covertly, implicitly rather in explicit heavy-handedness.

Here’s what separates Serious Readers of Rowling-Galbraith from the million member army of her global audience: they get that all of her Shed artistry, her intentional reworking via specific craft choices of her Lake inspiration into archetypal story and transformative imaginative experience, depends on subliminal coloration. I understand if “all of it” is repugnant to readers as somehow over-board as a critical claim, John-on-a-hyperbole-rant (again), but a brief look at Rowling’s signature Shed tools makes that claim close to indisputable.

Long-time readers here know that we talk about seven specific tools that Rowling deploys in almost everything she writes:

• Literary alchemy,

• Ring composition and parallelism,

• Mythological templates,

• Cratylic Names,

• Psychomachian allegory,

• Kathartic shock, and

• Traditional symbolism

[I’d add “Ghosts” but it would destroy the magic of Seven, right? Let’s not go there.]

Every one of these tools work on a reader (1) by escaping his or her conscious mind’s detection and (2) the operative element’s penetration of his or her unconscious mind via the potency of the working symbolism or archetype and its repetition. No one grasps on a first reading Rowling-Galbraith’s stories’ alchemical sequences and symbols, the chiastic echoing and meanings-in-the-middle-centers, the backdrop mythology, the character markers hidden in the names, the soul transformation allegory, the otherworldly referents experienced in repeated symbolic notes, or the misdirection setting up the Big Twist finish. Few, if we’re being honest, understand it even after it’s pointed out (if you’re a subscriber here, you obviously are part of the exceptional crowd; take a bow).

All of them, in other words, require the reader to not detect her artistry at the surface level; all the Shed tools deliver content that need to enter the reader’s unconscious mind via repeated subliminal imaginative experience. This coloration artistry, of course, isn’t something Mrs Murray invented; again, see, the astrological ‘Donegality’ of C. S. Lewis, Nabokov’s potustoronnost spirituality, Dickensian cryptonyms, and the psychomachia of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Tolkien for her models and predecessors.

Allowing that she isn’t a patent-holding inventor, however, in no way diminishes the centrality or importance of grasping the author’s coloration artistry and achievement. Her sui generis deployment and combination of these tools are the mechanics of the transformative quality of her writing and the engine powering her international success.

Of all Rowling-Galbraith’s Shed tools, the need for escaping conscious awareness is perhaps most critical in the use of traditional symbolism; subtlety is a must, repetition of muted images buried or delivered under cover of distracting story elements is the way to escape detection and enter the unconscious mind.

Perhaps the biggest delight I have when giving public talks is sharing the excitement of discovery in audience’s of Serious Readers when their unconscious experience of Rowling’s repeated symbols are forced to the surface either for the first time or with greater clarity than they’d had even after repeated readings. Three for-instances of The Presence’s subliminal traditional symbolism that fit this mold:

• She inserts traditional symbols of Christ at Harry Potter’s sacrificial love death-and-resurrection scenes which occur at the end of every Hogwarts Saga installment;

• In Deathly Hallows, the Harry Potter series finale, there are seven individual and pairs of eyeballs floating around that deliver her experience of Harry’s transformed vision in the epic climax; and, in the Strike series,

• Troubled Blood has crosses embedded throughout its narrative line to include Talbot’s otherworldly True Book illustrations (the Celtic Cross Tarot Card spread, the Maltese Cross of St John, the St Piran tattoo on Polworth, the astrological charts, the embedded psychomachian allegory of Strike as the Red-Crosse knight, etc.).

In Hallmarked Man, the traditional symbol Rowling deploys is the letter ‘G,’ easily overlooked because it’s an initial not a symbol, right? Let’s review what was discussed in Part One of this two part series about the various forms ‘G’ takes in Strike 8 and what Freemasons say about its meaning.

The Letter ‘G’ in Hallmarked Man

To explore the possibility that Rowling-Galbraith’s subliminal didactic message to her readers in Hallmarked Man involves the letter ‘G,’ I was obliged to provide evidence of the frequency of this image and examples of how the Freemasons interpret this letter as provided within Strike 8 and from properly Masonic texts. You can read all that in The Symbolism of the Letter ‘G’ in ‘Hallmarked Man’ (Part One).

In brief, the letter ‘G’ makes repeated appearances in various guises and in unexpected associations.

Robin’s research into the death of ‘William Wright’ in the Ramsey Silver shop vault begins with an online observer saying out of the blue that a ‘G’ was carved into the victim’s back and that this was tied to the Secret Word of Freemasonry and the legend of Hiram Abiff’s martyrdom. Rowling-Galbraith has Robin mention this to Murphy at their first unofficial briefing on the case and Murphy all but explodes; he denies it was a ‘G’ and says he heard it was a “hallmark” instead.

The letter is associated with Freemasonry as their symbolic center (GAOTU) via a telephone message and in Strike’s meeting with ‘Hiram’ Hardacre.

We learn after Robin’s being attacked in Harrow's that she was ‘Witness G’ in her rapist’s trial, the letter being to her something like a secret identity.

Strike not long thereafter finds a blood Red Letter ‘G’ painted on the street level door to the Agency which he hopes is a Masonic terrorist marker rather than the pointed suggestion that the Angel of Death is coming for Witness G.

I’d add that the Gorilla mask and doll of the Green jacket man that haunt Robin have some of their subliminal effect on her and the reader because of the initial guttoral sound of ‘Gorilla’ and ‘Green.’

The letter ‘G’ haunts Hallmarked Man, then; what is the meaning of this symbolism?

In Part One, I shared what Freemasons say about it, namely, that it is a one letter acronym for both ‘God’ and ‘Geometry,’ a remnant of Medieval stone-working craft guild initiation rites and fraternity oaths mixed up with Templar esoterism. I closed that discussion by noting the problems with this letter as traditional symbolism: ‘G’ is not a symbol but an initial, there is nothing inherently ancient or esoteric about it, it’s not tied to anything to do with craft masonry, it doesn’t look right among other Masonic symbols (not angular or symmetrical), and it doesn’t explain the mysterious Masonic catechism explanation of the letter’s meaning.

Which brings us at last to the business of Part Two: what does the letter ‘G’ mean when read as a symbol, what effect is it meant to deliver subliminally to readers, and does it work?

The Symbolism of the Letter ‘G’

As Hallmarked Man is overshadowed by Freemasonry the way Freemason’s Hall does the Ramsey Silver Shop, let’s begin our exegesis of ‘G’ symbolism again with what Masons say about its meaning. From a 1927 review of the history and meaning of the letter ‘G’ among the Brotherhood, the catechism of an examiner and a candidate for initiation in which the wanna-be Mason is required to recite the accepted meaning:

Respondent. In the midst of Solomon’s Temple there stands a “G,” A letter for all to read and see; but few there be that understand what means the Letter “G.”

Examiner. My Friend, if you pretend to be of this Fraternity, you can forthwith and rightly tell, what means that Letter “G.”

Resp. By sciences are brought to light, bodies of various kinds. Which do appear to perfect sight; but none but males shall know my mind.

Exam. The Right shall.

Resp. If Worshipful.

Exam. Both Right and Worshipful I am, to hail you I have command, that you forthwith let me know, as I you may understand.

Resp. By letters four and science five, this “G” aright doth stand, in due Art and Proportion; you have your answer friend.”

While authorities differ as to just when the letter “G” came into the ritual, all are agreed that the date is not later than 1768; very probably it was earlier.

By letters four and science five, this “G” aright doth stand, in due Art and Proportion; you have your answer friend. The 1927 exegete offers the following explanation of “letters four and science five:”

“Letters four” properly refers to J H V H, the tetragrammaton or four-letter word, the Hebrew designation of deity, which we call Jehovah, for want of a more likely rendition of the vowels (omitted in early Hebrew writing).

“Science Five,” of course, is Geometry. [Geometry is fifth of the traditional seven liberal arts.]

The Pythagoreans reverenced numbers as sacred; geometry was to them the sacred science. It initial letter, Gamma, a square, was especially revered. The Gamma looks like a square used by builders; it was the symbol of the actual, four-sided, or geometrical square, the first whole number square, and therefore, the representative of deity, the four-letter word, the tetragrammaton.

Symbols are easily converted the one into the other and back again. If the Gamma, which appeared like a workman’s square, was a symbol of the geometrical square, which in turn was a symbol of Deity, then, by a simple reconversion looked like Gamma, which in one position looked like the square of the workman, soon came to symbolize the tetragrammaton or four-letter word.

The Greek Gamma was rounded into the Latin “C.” For a while it stood for both the sounds of “g” and “k.” Later (third century B.C.), a slight change was made in the Latin “c” which stood for the soft, or “j” sound - and behold, our modern Roman “G.” Hence, by a path straight to any but mind demanding documentary proof, we place the origin of our “G,” as representing both God and Geometry, as far back as the Pyrhogoreans (sixth century, B.C.).

Another interesting hypothesis - it is hardly more - calls attention to the fact that three geometrical forms appear in the Greek alphabet, as we have seen; Gamma (G) is a square standing on end, the horizontal arm extended to the right. Omicron (O) is a circle, Delta (D) is a triangle.

Writing one letter on top of another to form a monogram is very old. The three Greek letters, Gamma, Omicron and Delta may be combined in a monogram to form a very fair conventionalizing of our letter “G” inside a triangle which looks not unlike our modern square and compasses!

This is little more than sophistry, I fear, especially in the Greek letters for G-O-D giving us the Latin letter ‘G,’ but more importantly in attributing to the Pythagoreans some knowledge of the Hebrew Tetragrammaton, the unspoken Name of God (Adonai ‘the Lord’ or Jehovah serving as spoken place-holders).

Our playful decipherer does note, if dismissively, another Masonic interpretation that says the ‘G’ is the Hebrew letter yodh, the first of the Tetragrammaton:

Mackey, the great Masonic authority, regretted that the Roman “g” ever found its way into our symbolism, and read the “G” as a substitute for the Hebrew Yod, which in turn is a symbol of the tetragrammaton, or four-letter word. Unquestionably the “Lost Word,” the very heart of the Masonic system, is represented by the Yod, but it is a far cry to include also Geometry in that representation. The Greek Gamma, (of which our roman “G” is a substitute) however, did represent both the ineffable Name and the greatest of the sciences.

The problem of ‘G’ meaning “letters four” remains whether one substitutes the Greek gamma, the Hebrew yodh, or the Latin letter. In what sense is the one letter understood as a symbol of “letters four”? The Tetragrammatron is suggested, of course, but it is four different Hebrew letters, none of which are akin to ‘G’ unless one stands on his hands or head when looking at a yodh and squints mightily:

As Serious Striker Tamara (‘Tamspells’) shared last week, Albert Pike in his exhaustive Morals and Dogmas shares a relatively brief explanation of the meaning of ‘G’ that embraces the yodh — and rejects the letter ‘G:’

In the East of the Lodge, over the Master, inclosed in a triangle is the Hebrew letter YOD [picture above]. In English and American Lodges the Letter G is substituted for this, as the initial of the word GOD, with as little reason as if the letter D., initial of DIEU, were used in French Lodges instead of the proper letter. YOD is, in the Kabalah, the symbol of Unity, of the Supreme Deity, the first letter of the Holy Name; and also a symbol of the Great Kabalistic Triads. To understand its mystic meanings, you must open the pages of the Sohar and Siphra de Zeniutha, and other kabalistic books, and ponder deeply on their meaning. It must suffice to say, that it is the Creative Energy of the Deity, is represented as a point, and that point in the centre of the Circle of immensity. It is to us in this Degree, the symbol of the unmanifested Deity, the Absolute, who has no name.

Our French Brethren place this letter YOD in the centre of the Blazing Star. And in the old Lectures, our ancient English brethren said, “The Blazing Star or Glory in the centre refers us to that grand luminary, the Sun, which enlightens the earth, and by its genial influence dispenses blessings to mankind.” They called it in the same lectures, an emblem of PRUDENCE. The word Prudentia means, in its original and fullest signification, Foresight; and accordingly, the Blazing Star has been regarded as an emblem of Omniscience, or the All-Seeing Eye, which to the Egyptian Initiates was the emblem of Osiris, the Creator. With the YOD in the centre, it has the kabalistic meaning of the Divine Energy, manifested as Light, creating the Universe. (italics in original, pp 15-16)

Pike, though using “kabalistic” imagery and Egyptian allusion, seems to be referencing the Creative Principle of Christianity, the Logos, through Whom the transcendent Father brings all things visible and invisible into existence and Who is known as the “Light of the world” as well the light in every man (John 1:9).

But that’s for a yodh in a “Blaze of Glory,” not the letter ‘G.’

John Cockburn, as noted in Part One, a Mason from Adelaide, made a similar complaint in 1897, though he insists that the Greek capital Gamma (Γ) should be used instead of ‘G',’ not the yodh. He introduces the Gammadion Cross or Swastika in this context:

In its original form the letter G was held to be sacred by the Pythagoreans; it was the initial letter of the Earth Goddess Ge or Gaia in whose honour the Eleusiniau mysteries were celebrated; it also stood for geometry, a word derived from Ge and used by Pythagoras as synonymous with Tetractys or the Divinity.

When however our ancient brethren turned their eyes towards the sacred symbol they beheld, not the unmeaning form of the letter G, but the gimel or gamma Γ, the emblem in all ages the most revered by our Craft, the true Masonic square. The second tracing board tells us that the letter G denotes God and depicts certain Hebrew characters, these characters are the four letters which spell the holy name Jehovah, the awful Tetragrammaton.

In the opinion of the ancients the most fitting geometrical representation of the number four was by means of the square; Plutarch says that “The number four is a square” and according to Philo Judaeus “Four is the most ancient of all square numbers, it is found to exist in right angles as the figure of a square in geometry shows,” and “Four is the first number which is a square being equal on all sides, the measure of justice and equality.”

What then could be more appropriate than the representation of the Tetractys or the Tetragrammaton by the square letter gamma? And to what letter other than that bearing the form of the square could the attention of the Craftsman about to receive his wages be with equal propriety directed? The square is one of the working tools of a fellow-craft and is the emblem of that just relation between man and man which entitled the workman relying on the honesty of his work and on the integrity of his employer, to claim without scruple and without diffidence the due reward of his labour.

In short, the gamma or the square falls into its place in the mosaic of masonry as readily as the modern G refuses to be assimilated, and this harmony goes far to establish the antiquity of our ritual; for, if the text is obscure with the letter G but becomes luminous with the gamma, there is proof that the ritual must have been settled before the disappearance of the ancient and the introduction of the modern letter.

The fifth science was geometry which explains the G or Γ in its operative aspect, and the letters four, or tetragrammaton, would elucidate its other, or symbolic, meaning. Is it not just possible that the form in which the letter G formerly appeared in the Lodge may have been that of the Swastica, one of the most frequent and sacred of figures in both Eastern and Western Symbolism, whose absence from modern Craft Masonry is a matter of surprise? The Swastica is composed of four gammas combined and was known among old time craftsmen as the tetragammaton [Note that ‘tetraGAMMAton’ is not ‘TetraGRAMMAton.’]

It is impossible to avoid a feeling of regret that the beautiful symbolism of the square has been marred by the usurpation of the letter G in the place of the gamma, and it appears to be a question worthy of consideration whether it would not be well to show our respect for the ancient landmarks by restoring to the sacred symbol its original form.

Cockburn, writing in 1897, had no qualms about introducing the Swastika as an explanation of the catechism’s “four letters” explanation of the letter ‘G’s meaning because the German fascists had not usurped it for their Aryan symbolism (check out the swastika’s ubiquity before the Nazis made it infamous as the Hakenkreuze). That doesn’t help us much with respect to ‘G’ because of his insistence on the Γ but we’re getting somewhere.

I confess that I didn’t make anything of the letter ‘G’s repeated appearances in Hallmarked Man until I saw that Rene Guenon, the most famous and profoundly metaphysical of the first 20th Century Perennialists, had written a brief essay in his youth, ‘The Letter G and the Swastika.’ I made that discovery inadvertently when looking for something else in Fundamental Symbols, a posthumous collection of his writing (downloadable as pdf here). Guenon was raised as a Roman Catholic in France but had his first introduction to esoteric thought via Freemasonry, in the symbolism and rituals of which he maintained a life-long interest though dismissing it ultimately as a pseudo-religion.

Guenon goes all in on both the yodh and the gamma capital being the backdrop of the Masonic ‘G:’

The letter G could not in itself be considered a true symbol inasmuch as it belongs to modern languages that have nothing sacred or traditional about them; but it ‘stands for God’ according to the English Masonic rituals, and is in fact the initial letter of the word God itself. Moreover its comparison with I is justified by the fact that, in certain cases at least, it has been considered as a substitute for the Hebrew yodh, symbol of the principle or of unity, in virtue of a phonetic assimilation between God and yodh…

… in a very old catechism of the Companion grade,^[4] the question: ‘What does that G denote?’, is answered, ‘Geometry, or the fifth Science’ (that is, the science that ranks fifth in the traditional enumeration of the ‘seven liberal arts’, the esoteric transposition of which in medieval initiations we have pointed out on other occasions). This interpretation in no way contradicts the affirmation that the same letter ‘stands for God’, God being specially designated in that grade as ‘The Great Geometer of the Universe’; and on the other hand, what gives it all its importance is that in the oldest manuscripts of operative Masonry, ‘Geometry’ is constantly identified with masonry itself. There is thus something here which cannot be considered negligible. Besides, as we shall now see, it appears that the letter G, as the first letter of the word Geometry, has assumed the place of gamma (Γ), its Greek equivalent, which the very origin of the word ‘Geometry’ sufficiently justifies (and here, at least, a modern language is no longer involved).

Furthermore, the letter [gamma] has in itself a certain interest from the point of view of masonic symbolism, by reason of its form which is that of the set-square - obviously not the case with the Latin G. Now, before going further, it might be asked if this does not contradict what was said about G being a substitute for the Hebrew yodh… It becomes then a question of the superimposition of two different meanings that by no means exclude one another, something that is in no way exceptional in symbolism.

He discusses the “four letters” mystery of the Masonic catechism:

In the same catechism that was cited above, the following kind of enigma is also to be found; ‘By letters four and science five, this G aright doth stand in due art and proportion’.^[7] ‘Science five’ here obviously designates the ‘fifth science’, that is, Geometry. As to the significance of ‘letters four’, at first sight and by symmetry we might be tempted to suppose that there is a mistake and that ‘letter’ must be read in the singular, so that it would be a question of the ‘fourth letter’, that is, in the Greek alphabet, the letter delta, which in fact is interesting symbolically by its triangular form; but since that explanation would have the great defect of showing no intelligible relationship with the letter G, it is much more likely that it is really a question of ‘four letters’ and that the irregular expression science five, instead of fifth science, has been placed there intentionally to make the statement yet more enigmatic.

Now the point that might seem to be the most obscure is this: why are four letters spoken of, or if it is really still a question of the initial letter of the word Geometry, why must it be quadrupled to stand aright in due art and proportion? The answer, which must be related to the ‘central’ or ‘polar’ position of the letter G, cannot be given except by means of the symbolism of operative masonry; and, moreover, it is here that it becomes necessary to take this letter in its Greek from, as indicated above.

In fact, four gammas joined together at right angles form the swastika, ‘symbol, as is also the letter G, of the Pole Star which is itself the symbol, and for the operative Mason, the actual throne of the hidden central Sun of the Universe, Yah, which obviously calls to mind very closely the Tai-I of the Far Eastern tradition.

[If you are confused about how ‘four gammas’ become a swastika, note that

the word “swastika” derives from the Sanskrit svastika “lucky or auspicious object”. The older term “gammadion cross” derives mainly from its appearance, which is identical to four Greek capital gamma letters (Γ) affixed to each other.]

[See Rex Curry for more on yohd and gammadion swastikas.]

Guenon explores the equation of the swastika and the cross in his The Symbolism of the Cross, chapter X, ‘The Swastika’ (p 55):

[T]he swastika is essentially “the sign of the Pole. If it is compared with the figure of the cross inscribed in the circumference of a circle, it will be seen that these are really equivalent symbols in certain respects; but in the swastika the rotation around the fixed centre, instead of being represented by the circumference, is merely indicated by short lines adjusted to the ends of the arms of the cross and forming right angles with them; these lines are tangents to the circumference which mark the direction of movement at the corresponding points. As the circumference represents the manifested world, the fact that it is, as it were “suggested” (or “understood) indicates quite clearly that the swastika is not a symbol of the world, but rather of the Principle’s action upon the world.

That Principle in Christian cosmology is the Logos, of which Christ is the Incarnation. The ‘G’ of Masonic symbolism, through its “four lettered” meaning is linked to both yodh and gamma, is tied to the swastika and through it, as with Robin’s first conversation with RFM about the William Wright murder, to the cross and to Christ.

After discussing the “four lettered” answer to a catechism question in his ‘Symbolism of the Letter ‘G,’ Guenon then introduces a second question about the Masonic letter ‘G,’ “Who doth the ‘G’ denote?,” and explains cryptically the ‘G’s relationship again with faith in Christ:

Incidentally, we must not forget to mention that in response to the question ‘Who doth the G denote?’ (who and not what, as previously, when it was a question of Geometry), this catechism further contains the following phrase: ‘The Grand Architect and Contriver of the Universe, or he that was taken up to the pinnacle of the Holy Temple’. It will be noted that the ‘Grand Architect of the Universe’ is identified here with Christ (and thus with the Logos), himself placed in relationship with the ‘cornerstone’ understood according to the sense that we have explained. The ‘pinnacle of the Temple’(note the curious resemblance of this word with the Hebrew pinnah which signifies ‘angle’) is naturally the summit or the most elevated point and as such it is the equivalent of that which is the ‘key of the arch’ (Keystone) in Arch masonry….

It may be interesting to note further than in the Kabbala, the yodh is thought of as formed by the union of three points representing the three supreme middoth arranged as a set-square, turned in the direction contrary to that of the Greek letter [gamma], which would correspond to the two opposite directions of rotation of the swastika.

Having established the effective equivalence of the yodh and gamma capital with respect to ‘G’ and how Freemasonry’s insistence that they be understood as “four letters” making them complementary swastikas, he pivots to the ‘G’ denoting “he that was taken up to the pinnacle of the holy temple.” He notes that this answer is a more less direct equation of the GAOTU and Christ because the Christ is “the ‘cornerstone’ understood according to the sense that we have explained.”

For Guenon’s previous explanation, see first his brief essay on why the “cornerstone” of Christian scripture, a frequent epithet for Christ, is better understood as “keystone,” the defining point or principle in a building, ‘The Cornerstone’ in Fundamental Symbols, pp 187-197, and then Coomaraswamy’s ‘Eckstein’ in What is Civilization?, pp 168-177 (Guenon credited AKC with the insight).[For the short course, see ‘Capstone in the Bible’ and Ancient Symbols: Keystone.’]

This seeming departure from the symbolism of the letter ‘G’ is important because Freemasonry is consumed by the significance of the architectural arch of which the keystone is the principle (some orders of Freemasonry are dedicated to the arch, e.g., the Holy Royal Arch). It also is at the heart of why bridges are so important in Freemasonry and play such a role in Hallmarked Man; see William Stoddart’s explanation of the Logos as the metaphysical bridge between the Transcendent and Created Realms in his ‘Aspects of Islamic Esoterism.’

[For those who want to understand the Pythagorean symbolism implicit in the Compass and the Square frame of the letter ‘G’ that Freemasons represent as simple ‘speculative’ lessons in morality, see Guenon’s ‘The Tetraktys and the Square of Four’ in Fundamental Symbols (pp 74-77) and then Maximos Constas’ ‘Revelation as Concealment: The Theology of the Icon Screen.’]

So, following the various essays by Guenon, Cockburn, Coomaraswamy, and Stoddart,

• the letter ‘G’ in Masonic lore is tied to yohd and Γ,

• then in their “four lettered” “proportioned” form to four yohd/Γ swastikas (the Lauburu and Gammadion crosses), which takes us in turn to Cross,

• then to the Salem Cross in Freemason Hall and another legible in the mutilated flesh of Tyler Powell’s back,

• which brings us at last to the letter ‘G’ as a symbol of Christ crucified.

That’s a lot of travel, I admit, over some deep esoteric waters to get from the ‘G’ of Freemasonry to the second Person of the Trinity, God’s Logos, and Its incarnation as Christ. It seems the best explanation for the ‘G’ working in Hallmarked Man as a token standing for GAOTU, Robin’s heroic testimony against the rapist who tried to kill her, a calligraphic terrorist attack straight of Exodus, and the Gorilla toy grasping Green-coated man. It is the pervasive coloration of this confusing and seemingly chaotic novel, one awash in albedo imagery of purification alongside nigredo angst and dissolution, the color of supernatural mystery, transcendent meaning just out of sight but threatening radical change, even death, in Strike and Ellacott as their transformations as soul-meeting-Spirit come to their climax in the series last novels.

Three ‘So What’s?’

I wrote in the comments of Part One in this series about the symbolism of the letter ‘G’ that Part Two was going to be much more challenging than a review of all the ‘G’s in Strike 8 and the explanation that Freemasons offer about what it means (‘God’ and ‘Geometry’). I think I’ve delivered on that pledge — and I really hope that the Serious Readers here will follow some of the links above to the hard-to-find Perennialist essays most often in ridiculously expensive books as free pdfs.

Let me wrap up this long piece with three reasons that Rowling Readers should pay attention to the letter ‘G’ in Hallmarked Man in light of the symbolism discussed above, just in case you’re asking me under your breath, ‘So What, John? Why do I care?’

1. The symbolism of the letter ‘G’ with its heavy spiritual coloration is Rowling’s Nabokovian potustoronnost that creates the atmosphere of another world, which as noted acts as a compelling backdrop for both Robin and Strike’s subliminal transformation within their vocations as selfless avengers as well as their psychomachian soul-to-Spirit relationship with the other;

2. Will we see more Masonic symbolism in Sleep Tight Evangeline and finale? Maybe! She certainly has made us long for a big pay-off with respect to ‘G;’ see Sarah Keeler’s idea that it may be a pointer to Gillespie reappearing in Strike 9. I love that possibility and it certainly is in keeping with the HogwartsProfessor working thesis that Hallmarked Man is what it is to set up the next two books. If we’re going to see characters and themes bleed between the first book of the last three and its successors, why not its symbolism?probably not; and

If I had to bet money on it, though, I think we probably won’t see more Freemasonry or Big ‘G’ payoffs. It kills me to say that given the investment I’ve made in books about the Masons (they’re on a shelf beneath the dust-collecting little library on Mormon history and scriptures I collected while writing about Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight books). I just cannot see her weaving the Mason characters from Hallmarked Man into story lines that give us resolution with respect to Charlotte’s and Leda’s supposed suicides twenty some years apart, Shanker’s family history, and the mysteries around Strike’s time with the military police, especially the IED that nearly killed him.

Of course, if I could see the weave of Rowling-Galbraith stories this far out, I’d be writing stories like she does, right?

3. Having said that, let me go way out there and suggest a crazy possibility about why we should care about the letter ‘G,’ the way it colors Hallmarked Man, and its Masonic and Pythagorean symbolism. How about this? The letter ‘G’ as linked to the three barred Salem Cross could be the embedded shape of the ten book Strike series.

We have three decent contenders for series shape already:

• Louise Freeman’s encyclopedic correspondence-and-pattern defined Double Wedding Band model, far and away the most thoroughly researched and closely argued shape;

• Evan Willis’ Tetraktys Theory, which certainly got a big bump up in the letter ‘G’ discussion above via Guenon (again, see that Perennialist’s ‘The Tetraktys and the Square of Four’ in Fundamental Symbols, pp 74-77) is Salem Cross, more recognizable as Deathly Hallows triangulated and bisected circle; and

• Nick’s and my not-really-a-shape idea that the first seven books constituted a ring a la the Harry Potter septology, in playful parallel with which they were written, and that the last three books will be an organic whole of some kind. (Please discount anything I’ve written in jest about the search for a shape before the series is done.)

Here’s a Parthian parting-thought shot: if I’m right in thinking that the point of the letter ‘G’ symbolism was to subliminally move readers to think about the Salem Cross Murdoch hallmark on Tyler Powell’s mutilated body, could that shape be the picto-gram for the series?

Here’s how that would work:

You start with the first seven books as a ring composition circle, one represented pictorially as a Salem Cross;

To get the three bars of the cross to be turtle-back lines, the latch of Books 1 and 7 have to be separated with Book 0 at the foot of the cross.

As Nick and I have discussed on several podcasts, Hallmarked Man represented a unique challenge in contrast with previous Strike titles. The first seven entries in the series had pretty neat parallels both with their Harry Potter numeric equivalent and one, sometimes two, of the other Strike novels (that Bird’s Eye View post Running Grave). Strike 8? Not so much. Honestly, Serious Strikers found parallels with every one of the first seven Strike-Ellacott mysteries in Hallmarked Man and a lot of the Potter novels. It was like Rowling-Galbraith was having a laugh at those of us who think every parallel is potentially meaningful…

That said, there was not not one but two Strike books that Hallmarked Man seemed to make repeated and undeniable references-in-echoing to: Career of Evil with its multiple suspects and itinerant narrative and Troubled Blood with its cross symbolism and Templars descendant coloration (St John’s Hospitallers and the Freemasons both trace their lineage to the Templars). Those are the obvious ones; Reddit user u/Random-Occurance365 compiled an absolutely mind-blowing list of Strike 3-5-8 parallels that Louise Freeman received permission to repost.

But how to represent those undeniable 3-5-8 echoes? It’s simple with the Salem Cross, right? Just drop it on the 3-5 turtle-back line:

u/Random-Occurance365’s astonishing list of 3-5-8 parallels makes this an easy bar for the Salem Cross model which suggests that the next two books will take their places on the other turtle-back lines of the original seven book ring:

If Sleep Tight, Evangeline is as heavy in its echoing of Strikes 2 and 4 as Hallmarked Man was of 3 and 5, the Salem Cross embedded in the first of the last three books may be the series model (and a great guide for how the finale will play out?).

I think I enjoy this model, though, because it required splitting the latch of the Strike seven book ring to make the bottom bar of the Salem Cross. Cuckoo’s Calling and Running Grave, though, still have a host of parallels with Lethal White. When those connections are represented on the picture, a fun inversion of a beloved symbol turns up:

The Deathly Hallows symbol, you’ll recall, is a triangulated and bisected circle:

The Salem Cross series-shape model is a circumscribed and bisected triangle, an inversion or Fun House Mirror reflection of the Potter books’ most important single symbol.

So perhaps we will be seeing a lot more masonry (and crosses!) in the last two books? If so, we’ll be able to thank the letter ‘G',’ our Sesame Street sponsor and guide in this post, for pointing us to that titular hallmark on Tyler Powell’s back.

Conclusion

Our Paid Subscribers who read Ray Livingston’s The Traditional Theory of Literature know that there are, per A. K. Coomaraswamy, only two valid means of judging the value of a story: there is the Cultural Guardians ‘Gatekeeper’ position a la Socrates’ proscription of poetry in his ideal Republic on moral grounds and there is the gauging of the ratio of auctorial intention realized in the result, his or her written work.

I’ll be writing about the differences in these approaches in the coming months; the Children and Grandchildren of the OG Harry Haters have returned, now with AI tools and Social Media platforms to superpower their message delivery. I am obliged to share my thoughts about what they get right as well as where they go horribly wrong and descend into literary iconoclasm.

For today, though, I want to close with the relatively simple question: if Rowling’s intention in highlighting the letter ‘G’ in Hallmarked Man as she has was as I have argued to color the text with a particularly challenging patina of crucifixion and transformation in Christ, did it work? If the relatively esoteric symbolism of the Masonic ‘G’ and its several variants in Strike 8 was meant to communicate that potusturronost experience, is that what we got as readers?

It certainly doesn’t mean it didn’t work if readers didn’t understand that experience; the effect would have necessarily been subliminal or unconscious.

I think it did work.

Readers hated Hallmarked Man, said begrudgingly that it was a good book after repeated readings, but they that it was the worst of the series, no doubt about it.

I think it was the intention of the writer-artist to create the experience of death to self in love for another and to one’s vocation. That’s a painful crisis of soul, psychological catharsis and spiritual transformation, a confusing chrysalis. We get that via the letter ‘G’ coloration and its links to the Salem Cross carved into Tyler Powell, an experience Strike’s heroics mirrored in Ironbridge.

If you didn’t like it, that’s actually a measure of the book’s success. If you welcomed the purifying pain of empathy with fictional character in anagogical agony, you probably gave it much higher marks — without necessarily wanting to repeat the experience again right away. A close reading of its intricate structures, the rings within rings, however, certainly should have dispelled any idea that the novel was thoughtlessly put together.

Your mileage may vary, I understand. I look forward to reading your thoughts in the comment thread below and I’ll be posting my conversation with Nick about the letter ‘G’ later today. Thank you for subscribing and for your patience with our posting this last month; big things are in the works…

[Left image source, Right image source]

‘Coloration’ is a term used to describe background information that lights or shades the foreground material in such a way that the reader’s experience of the narrative is moved in a particular direction subliminally. ‘Coloration’ is not exclusively about colors, though that can play a part as in alchemical sequence symbolism; it is at least as much about prevalent symbols and types that create contact, if you will, between the immaterial referents, the greater realities, which the symbols represent and the reader’s imagination. C. S. Lewis’ use of traditional astrological tokens for the seven planets in each of his Narniad novels as detailed in Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia is all about coloration, as is Charles Williams’ use of Tarot imagery in his archetypal thrillers and Rowling’s use of Christian and alchemical symbolism in her Potter and Strellacott series.

In that author’s latest novel, The Hallmarked Man, there is a peculiar emphasis on, a much repeated reference to the letter ‘G.’ It is done in such a way that the reader who is struggling with the story’s multiple suspects, with a bevy of new characters with names that sound like other characters’ names, and with a bizarre and inexplicably complex (can you say ‘convoluted’?) murder does not have the focus or attention band-width sufficient to pick up consciously. Which means that it penetrates only the unconscious mind, the alocal locus of coloration’s effect.

C. S. Lewis famously observed in an essay on The Literary Impact of the Authorized Version that “An influence which cannot evade our consciousness will not go very deep,” i.e., will not have a lasting or profound effect. Whence Twain’s injunction to writers to instruct their readers not overtly, which instruction they will resist instinctively, but only covertly, implicitly rather in explicit heavy-handedness.

To explore the possibility that Rowling-Galbraith’s subliminal didactic message to her readers in Hallmarked Man involves the letter ‘G,’ I am first obliged to provide evidence of the frequency of this image and examples of how the Freemasons interpret this letter as provided within Strike 8 and from properly Masonic texts. That is the bulk of this post, which ends with reasons why this isn’t a sufficient explanation for all the ‘G’s. In Part Two of this two part piece I will review other meanings ascribed to the letter by traditional and other sources before I attempt to explain the effect of its use by Rowling-Galbraith as coloration in the book.

Would you believe the Tetractys, Tetragrammaton, Gammadion Cross, and the shape of the Strike-Ellacott decalogy are involved? It’s all there, believe it or don’t, in the letter ‘G’ and the Murdoch silver hallmark…

The Letter ‘G’ in Hallmarked Man

The first references to the seventh letter of the English alphabet in Strike 8 are seemingly meaningless misdirection or misinformation from internet chatter about the murder in the silver vault next to Freemason’s Hall.

The next wave of news stories, which was by far the most excitable, began when the police released more still photographs, this time from CCTV cameras close to the silver shop at night, which appeared to show William Wright and three other men heading towards the shop in the early hours of Saturday the eighteenth of June. These pictures were also fairly indistinct, although one of the men was definitely short and sported a beard. The tabloids now became feverish with excitement, and while the broadsheets reported the wildly spiralling stories of masonic ritual killing only to urge caution in believing them, they nevertheless devoted multiple paragraphs to the theories.

Online sleuths have been quick to point out that the murder of ‘William Wright’ has strange echoes of the legend of ‘Hiram Abiff’, the mythical Grand Master of the stonemasons, who was entrusted with the building of King Solomon’s temple, including a secret vault to house the Ark of the Covenant.

Abiff possessed knowledge of a secret word, a symbol of divine wisdom.

Three lesser masons, Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum, wished to gain knowledge of the word and threatened Abiff, who refused to give it up, and was therefore murdered inside the temple by the three tools sacred to Freemasons: the gauge, the square and the gavel. Ornate versions of these were among the objects stolen from the Ramsay silver vault, where the body of Wright was found.

Robin glanced through excitable reader comments, some of whom had spotted still more masonic features in the killing of William Wright.

The severing of the body’s hands is an allusion to the dismembered Hands of the Mysteries that unlock the temple of wisdom.

The surrounding silver might well have been an illusion to the scripture reading in the Third Degree: ‘Or ever the silver cord be loosed.’

I’ve heard the letter G was carved into Wright’s back – obvious reference to the only surviving letter of Hiram’s secret word.

But then had come phase four, which proved horribly anticlimactic. The police had announced that ‘William Wright’ had in fact been Jason Knowles, twenty-eight, of Haringey. pp 44-45

There’s a lot to unpack here in addition to the letter G and its connection to the lost ‘Secret Word’ of the heroic martyr Hiram Abiff.

• The reader is given a reference to a “short” man as a potential murder subject in the first review of narratives about the silver vault ritual killing;

• We also get our first embedded narrative, the murder of Hiram Abiff, as the story the murderer was telling by his ritualistic draping and dismemberment of his victim (Robin presses Strike on this and he retells the tale in some detail from memory: pp 67-68);

• Rowling invites us to think about murders associated with Masonic ritual, a subject about which “online sleuths” are ready to jump into given the proximity of the murder to Freemason’s Hall but also because it has historic precedent (one of the theories about Jack the Ripper’s Whitechapel murders was that they were done by a mad Mason; two recent films were made based on this theory:

fictional accounts such as the movies From Hell and Murder by Decree depict the murders as resembling masonic ritual and the location of the murders as having masonic significance.)

With all that going on in Robin’s first look at the case, the letter G and its connection to a “Secret Word” is probably lost in the whirl. Rowling-Galbraith, in addition to repeating the Hiram Abiff embedded tale as remembered by Cormoran soon thereafter brings it up again specifically in the Murphy led debrief with Strike in Robin’s apartment:

‘This might be an odd question,’ said Robin, ‘but was anything carved into the victim’s back?’

‘How the fuck d’you know about that?’ said Murphy sharply.

‘I saw it online,’ said Robin, nettled by his tone, especially in front of Strike. ‘Someone commenting on the story said he had the letter “G” carved onto him.’

‘My contact told me it was a hallmark.’ Murphy closed his notebook. ‘And that’s all I’ve got.’ p 77

Of all that Robin recalled from her media search, the letter ‘G’ is what she chooses to bring up with Murphy, who responds vitriolically, a reaction that “nettled” her and highlights it as somehow significant to the reader. In what is offered as a denial, however, Murphy links the letter ‘G’ with the hallmark carved into the victim’s back, what we learn later was a three-barred cross of relatively obvious historic and spiritual meaning. Murphy offers this as his last word on the subject: “that’s all I’ve got.”

In a book titled The Hallmarked Man, it’s fair to note Rowling has given the letter ‘G’ significant weight without obviously foregrounding it.

The letter ‘G’ next appears after Robin’s briefly meeting and scheduling an interview with Albie Simpson-White. Robin is almost immediately after assaulted in Harrod’s, choked from behind, threatened, and, incredibly, gifted with a “rubber model of a gorilla.” Her first thought turns on the letter ‘G:’

Neck still throbbing, Robin turned and stood on tiptoe, and thought she saw a slight disturbance at a distant doorway, as though someone was forcing their way out of the food hall at speed, but it was impossible to see her assailant through the forest of heads.

Now trembling, Robin looked down at the object he’d forced into her hand. It was a small rubber model of a gorilla.

For several long seconds she stared at it, trying to tell herself the man had been mentally ill, that she’d been a random recipient of a nonsensical gift, that he’d mistaken her for someone in the crush, that this didn’t mean what she was terrified it meant.

It’ll ’appen again unless you fuckin’ give this up.

The rapist who had ended her university career and ruined her fallopian tubes had worn a rubber gorilla mask to attack her and six other girls, two of whom had died from strangulation. He’d been sentenced to life and was still in jail, all applications for parole refused. Robin’s identity had been hidden from the press when she gave evidence in court, aged nineteen.

How could a stranger know she’d been Witness G? pp 235 (see also 315)

That may seem a natural response; Robin’s testimony was protected from public view by the assignment of a letter. Presumably she was the seventh witness testifying anonymously, whence the assignment of the letter ‘G.’

That Rowling chose this letter, however, and has Robin recall it as she does rather than more generically — “How could anyone know that I testified against the gorilla-masked rapist? I testified behind protections to my identity!” — is obviously intentional rather than arbitrary. We’ve already encountered the letter ‘G’ in association with the principal Masonic murder narrative, the legend of Hiram Abiff, which is cued up as the initial of the “Secret Word” that Murphy links to the three-barred cross hallmark. Now, via the ‘Witness G’ association, the link is made between the seventh letter and Robin’s defining life-trauma in a life beset with assaults and injuries.

‘G’ hereafter, because of its links made here to (1) her vocation as an avenger through her first success in putting away a criminal, (2) through its ties to the gorilla-masked rapist whose crime caused her to be effectively sterile, and (3) though the association with the green-jacketed thug who gave her the rubber gorilla in Harrods (and who haunts and attacks her repeatedly in Strike 8) is an emotional and psychological trigger for the reader in addition to Robin and Strike. We have the ‘fear of G’ henceforth in addition to the ‘mystery of G.’

The Agency’s antagonist plays on this twined association of the letter by painting it in red on their Denmark Street office’s entry door.

Such ruminations enabled Strike to endure the long, unproductive hours watching Plug with good grace. However, on arrival back in cold, deserted Denmark Street at three a.m., his pleasant musings were rudely interrupted.

A large, still wet letter ‘G’ had been painted in scarlet on the street door of the office. Strike stood contemplating it for a full minute, dismissing within seconds the possibility that he was looking at the tag of some drunken graffiti artist. No other door in Denmark Street had been so decorated, and it seemed far too much of a coincidence that anyone should have randomly slapped up the one letter of the alphabet that had recently acquired an ominous double meaning for the agency on the upper floors.

Was he supposed to take this ‘G’ to symbolise the letter emblazoned in the middle of the square and compasses of Freemasonry’s most identifiable sign? Had it been chosen because an eye of providence or an acacia tree would have required more artistry? Or was this a message for Robin, who’d been Witness G in the trial of her rapist and would-be killer?

Inwardly cursing the necessity, Strike hauled himself upstairs to his attic flat, dug out cleaning materials, and returned to the street to remove the letter, though, having no white spirit, he was able only to render what had been there illegible, leaving a large red smear. The door would definitely need repainting before the landlord next saw it.

It was four before Strike finally removed his prosthesis, wondering whether he should tell Robin what had happened. He didn’t want to drag up her rape again. Was this, perhaps, an obvious case of least said, soonest mended? p 334

Frankly, because of the association of blood being painted on doors to ward off the angel of death by God’s explicit command (Exodus 12:1-12), the red-letter G is an especially meaningful and intentionally terrifying bit of graffiti. Death is in flight! Rowling is now foregrounding the letter ‘G’ just in case we missed its links to God, violence, and death. The author embedded in her story, presumably the murderer, is writing it, blood-red, where the world will see it, deus ex auctore.

Unfortunately but inevitably given Rowling’s giving him immoveable determination to stick to the plan of winning Robin, Strike takes the path of “least said, soonest mended” and neglects to tell Robin about this terrorist calligraphy. Until that is she gets the gift via gorilla-green-jacket man of a masonic dagger and tries to downplay the threat it represents; then Strike unloads his repressed concerns about her safety, spills the beans about the Big Red G on the office door, and, alas, calls her the “weak link:”

‘“Bitch” might have meant Kim or Midge, and I can’t ring you literally every time I’m somewhere alone,’ said Robin, her tone no longer measured. ‘It was a well-lit residential street, and he didn’t actually hurt—’

‘You realise there was a fucking “G” painted on the street door on New Year’s Eve?’

‘What? No, I didn’t! Why didn’t you tell—?’

‘And this bloke said “stop”?’

‘Why didn’t you tell me a “G” was painted on the door?’ [italic emphasis in original]

‘Somebody’s clearly decided you’re the weak link—’ p 489

Robin of course takes offense. Now the letter ‘G’ is tied into the subject of Strike’s pursuit of Robin and the roller coast ride of that relationship in Hallmarked Man. It becomes another touchstone, too, in Robin’s grocery store list of anxieties to review periodically (e.g., p 814).

After this review of the letter G’s appearances in Strike 8, I think it is established that ‘G’ is imprinted in the reader’s subconscious mind as a hallmark, if you will, for everything meaningful in the book. On to what Masons think of it, in Hallmarked Man and elsewhere.

The Letter G in Freemasonry

Rowling spells out one Masonic meaning for ‘G’ in Strike’s tour of Freemason Hall with Hardacre:

‘Wouldn’t happen to know what gow-too is, would you?

‘Gow-too?’ said Haracre. ‘How’re you spelling it? G-A-O-T-U?’

‘Haven’t seen it written down,’ said Strike. ‘What would it mean if it’s that?’

‘Masonic acronym. Great Architect Of The Universe.’

‘God, in other words?’

‘Yeah. Why?’

‘We’ve got an anonymous caller who’s allegedly got GAOTU on their side. I thought Freemasonry wasn’t supposed to be a religion?’ p 525

Which is as close as we get to Hiram Abiff’s “Secret Word.”

In pursuit of what Freemasons believe about Hiram Abif’s martyrdom to contrast it with the death of Tyler Powell in Hallmarked Man, I purchased a small library of books about the Craft (for the meaning of Tyler Powell’s name and its various links to Masonry and Christianity, see my first Cryptonym post; it’s important, trust me). Those books included introductions for the uninitiated, histories of the Templars and of the Masons globally, texts Rowling quotes from in Strike 8 especially in the epigraphs, and encyclopedias and picture books; see my first Serious Reader Q&A session with Nick post Hallmarked Man’s publication in which I provide links to most of those texts and we discuss Freemasonry in its various roles in what was then a new book.

I pulled those books from my shelves this week in search of the meaning of the Letter ‘G’ as Freemasons themselves understand it. I found some fun illustrations that demonstrate the letter’s ritual importance, one decent explanation of its evolution in Masonic history from the craft of stonemasonry to an esoteric cult and fraternity house for the relatively well-to-do, and the consensus understanding of what it ‘stands for.’

If you doubt the ‘G’ is a big deal despite its frequent display at the center of the most visible symbol of the craft, here are some pictures of it outside that common image. Here are two pictures I found in Jeremy Harwood’s heavily illustrated, oversized, coffee table book, The Freemasons:

There’s an even better one of George Washington with an illuminated “G” that points to the initial’s prominence in Masonic rite (source):

What is with the ‘G’ over the chair resting on a raised platform?

Masonic legend has the middle chamber of King Solomon’s Temple used as a meeting place of the craftsmen during the construction of the Temple. It is depicted with a blazing letter “G”suspended over the Worshipful Master, symbolizing geometry and God…

All American lodge rooms have a large “G” over the Master’s station in the east of the lodge. It is illuminated only when the Worshipful Master declares the lodge opened, and is turned off as soon as he declares it closed.

An early American lodge used this tin lantern with a “G” either suspended over the Worshipful Master’s station as the illuminated “G” or hung outside of the lodge hall to indicate a meeting was being held that evening [italic emphasis in original. Image on left below of historic lantern; the image on the right is a contemporary Masonic Lantern also in printed tin as a retro artisan product]. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Freemasonry, pp 228-229

The best explanation of its meaning I found on my bookshelf was in David Hackett’s history of Masonic influence in the United States, That Religion in Which All Agree: Freemasonry in American Culture. Freemasonry was an exclusive craft guild of the Middle Ages that morphed into an English Enlightenment era Hall of Virtue for men:

Although nearly all early modern trades asserted high standing and great antiquity, the fact that masons created the vast stone cathedrals, arguably the most awe-inspiring human works in the Middle Ages, distinguished their claims from those of other medieval craftsmen. Unlike workers whose tools and products tied them to a local market, the masons involved in such large-scale projects were drawn from a relatively wide region. Assembling this regional labor force on a local work site necessitated the drawing up of detailed rules that would help to create shared values and standards of behavior both on and off the job. Among other things, these codes of conduct stipulated how masons should treat one another. For example, their requirements included not taking work from others or underpaying fellow masons, choosing only suitable persons to be apprentices, and respecting confidences and trade secrets.

In the available manuscript constitutions, these charges follow an elaborate legendary history of the guild that traces the origin of masonry to geometry – the source of all knowledge. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, this mythical prehistory was intended to be read out or recited at meetings, especially when entrants were admitted to the craft. The manuscripts open with brief invocations or prayers addressed to God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The narrator then characteristically launches into the subject by presenting the “worthy Craft of Masonry” as rooted in “Geometrye,” which is the foundation of “the seven Liberall Sciences.” The origins of geometry are then traced to the children of Lamech, mentioned in Genesis. The founder of geometry was Jabel, Lamech’s son who, fearing God’s punishment, inscribed his discovery on stone pillars that could survive fire or flood. After the Great Flood, Hemarynes (Hermes), a great-grandson of Noah, discovered the pillars and from them retaught the sciences to humanity. Next, Abraham and his wife Sarah went to Egypt and taught the seven sciences to the Egyptians including Euclid. Euclid then instructed King David during the latter’s sojourn in Egypt. On his return to the Holy Land, David gave these charges to the masons who began building the Jerusalem Temple, whose construction continued under his son Solomon. Solomon sent for workers from other countries, whom he charged to spread the craft to France and England (later rites of initiation took place in an allegorical Solomon’s Temple). Eventually, it was said, the English king Edwin compiled both this prehistory and the guild’s codes of conduct, and his books became the constitutions themselves.

In the seventeenth century, Scottish masons working from these constitutions created catechisms for their rituals of identification and initiation, which collectively became known as the Mason Word. Although it was customary for craft gilds to maintain constitutions detailing their rules and legendary histories, masons not only had extensive codes of conduct and an elaborate legendary history but also, unlike other guilds, evolved an extensive ritual life. Again, this may have been due the prominence of the craft and the need to guard trade secrets among a regional labor force. The early Scottish catechisms dealt with the admission of candidates to the two grades of mason known as Entered Apprentice and Fellow Craft. These rites probably existed prior to that time and may have been created out of earlier practices of the craft. Though fragmentary and diverse in their contents, the surviving catechisms usually include questions and answers to ascertain the identity of another craftsman, culminating in the recognition of a secret or words, and rites of initiation that instructed the two grades of masons in the secrets of the Word.

Both rites of initiation were said to involve a “great many ceremonies,” which the surviving catechisms keep largely hidden from outsiders’ view. Emphasizing secrecy, the Entered Apprentice investiture involved the recitation of the craft’s legendary history, while the Fellow Craft rite explained the significance of the letter G – for both geometry and God – and its place in the Temple of Solomon. The ceremonies took place within the Mason’s lodge, which could be their guild, their workplace, or the setting for their ritual return to ancient Egypt. Though the scattered evidence of the catechisms does not give a clear picture of the early rites, the “work” to which the master put the masons in the lodge presumably symbolized the building of the temple. Among religious people of that time, ‘building the Temple” meant creating the kingdom of God. Post-Reformation influences also appear to be present, in the use of the singular form of word. Scotland’s new Calvinist churches emphasized the truth of the “Word of God” as revealed in scripture. Scripture itself was often referred to as “the Word.” Such phrases as “in the beginning was the Word” invoked powerful sentiments of mystery and ultimate truth. In the Wisdom of Solomon, a favorite among Masons, “God made all things by his Word, and his Word killed all unbelievers.” pp 24-25

Which explains the centrality of ‘G’ to Freemasons at least historically as standing simultaneously for ‘Geometry’ and ‘God.’ For the grander view, there is this explanation of that link:

In Masonic rituals and teachings, the letter “G” holds a place of profound importance. It is prominent in many lodge rooms, particularly in the United States, often placed near the roof or sky during the first and second degrees, symbolizing divine guidance and blessing. In the third degree, the letter “G” is hidden, representing the unwavering light of the divine even in the darkest of times. The Royal Arch degree unveils it once more, in a new form, underscoring its lasting significance.

This journey through the degrees reflects a Mason’s path toward enlightenment, seeking to unify the divine wisdom of the Great Architect with their own moral and spiritual growth. The letter “G” thus becomes a symbol of the eternal quest for understanding and alignment with our creator and that our actions are performed in the presence of The Grand Architect. This allusion to the letter G’s meaning is confirmed during The Tracing Board lecture of the Fellowcraft Degree:

After our ancient brethren had gained the summit of the winding staircase, they passed into the middle chamber of the temple where their attention was directed to certain Hebrew characters which are depicted in a Fellow Craft Lodge by the letter G, denoting God, the Grand Geometrician of the Universe to whom we must all submit and whom we ought to humbly adore….

The letter "G" in Freemasonry encapsulates the essence of Masonic teachings. Representing both Geometry and God, it bridges the gap between the material and the spiritual, the scientific and the divine. By understanding the significance of the letter "G," Masons are reminded of the profound connection between the physical universe and the higher moral and spiritual truths that guide their lives. As such, the letter "G" stands as a testament to the enduring legacy of Freemasonry, uniting its members in a shared pursuit of knowledge, moral excellence, and spiritual enlightenment. (see also here and here)

Problems with Reading the Letter ‘G’ Strictly as an Initial rather than as a Symbol

That’s well and good, I suppose, but there is something head-scratching about it. As one Freemason has noted, the letter ‘G,’ though it may stand for Geometry as that science’s first letter, is not geometrical as are so many of Masonry’s craft symbols (the set square, the compass,, etc.). Not to mention that, if the ‘G’ stands for God or Great Architect, it’s an English or German cipher, a letter and languages that betray a modern rather than the ancient origin that Mason’s claim for their fellowship and esoteric rites and beliefs.

Owing to a departure from tradition the letter G has become a puzzle both as to its shape and meaning. Though supposed to represent Geometry and occupying the place of honour in the Lodge, the outline of this letter stands pronounced as the most ungeometrical and therefore the most unmasonic of our emblems. The reason of this discrepancy is not far to seek when we call to mind the fact that the present form of the letter dates no further back than the middle of the third century B.C., and its intrusion among Masonic emblems can be regarded in no other light than as a comparatively modern innovation.

In the passage from That Religion In Which All Agree above, too, there is mention of a “catechism,'“ a question and answer ritual exchange between guide and the candidate for initiation about the letter ‘G.’ In one back and forth, the initiate wanna be has to say that the G’s meaning is its being “letters four” and “science five,” and answer that being a one letter abbreviation for God and Geometry doesn’t explain.

Which failing highlights that in being an initial ‘G’ is only a pointer to, an abbreviated spelling out of rather than an actual symbol of God and Geometry which has the quality of being somehow slapdash or arbitrary.

In Part Two of this two part post, I’ll share the thoughts of a Freemason, a Perennialist with great familiarity with Masonry, and ‘Crypto Curry’ about more challenging interpretations of the letter ‘G’ before concluding with three ‘So What?’ points: (1) about the success or failure of Rowling-Galbraith’s use of ‘G’ as coloration, (2) the likelihood that we’ll see Freemasonry again in Strikes 9 and 10, and (3) the bizarre possibility that the ‘G’ colored Hallmarked Man has an embedded symbol of the ten-book series.

Stay tuned!

This is the eighth in a series of posts for Hogwarts Professor Paid Subscribers that introduces the Perennialist interpretation of fiction via a book by Ray Livingston titled The Traditional Theory of Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 1962). I have sent out seven chapters thus far in single posts — Prologue, Man, Society, and Art, The Creative Process, The Work of Art, Part One, The Work of Art, Part Two, The Function of Works of Art, and Judgement and Criticism — and with this post, the Conclusion and Appendix to Traditional Theory, the series comes to a finish.

The Appendix is a brief life of Ananada Kentish Coomaraswamy and speaks for itself.

The Conclusion, the greater part of this post, has three parts. The first is Livingston’s five-point explanation of how reading — or writing — literature today through Coomaraswamy’s traditionalist perspective is much better than prevalent modes of interpretation and composition. In brief, it is better because it aligns both with the created order of things and with man’s spiritual constitution (logos) and end (telos).

This leads to his ‘for instance’ of how Coomaraswamy’s approach to narrative art resolves mysteries of literature that contemporary theories can do little more than acknowledge as mysterious. His choice as an example is the power of tragic katharsis.

I have re-read several times Livingston’s explanation of why story, on stage or page, affects us as audience member or reader as it does and each time I have marveled at the way it congeals for me both my experiences as a reader of Rowling’s work and what I have tried to communicate in my efforts to explain her traditional artistry to modern and postmodern readers. I will be referring to it, quoting from it, I suspect in all future talks and posts. I can only hope that you enjoy it even half as much as I have.

Livingston concludes the chapter and his book with a not very hopeful but exceedingly sober picture of literary criticism today. Given that his brilliant presentation in one volume of Coomaraswamy’s more than 400 books and articles insofar as that writing touched on literature as sacred art has been not just overlooked but forgotten, his almost dour view seems as prophetic as it is depressing.

The good news? It really hasn’t been forgotten; here we are reading and being challenged by his work.

I think Livingston and Coomaraswamy would both have laughed hardily at the unlikelihood of a 21st Century writer such as Joanne Murray and her against-the-rip-tide revival of the traditional Shed tools of creating transformational literary sacred art — Christian symbolism, mythological story-templates, literary alchemy, psychomachia or soul allegory, chiastic structure, and cathartic shock —being the cause of this revival. But, again, here we are.

Rowling’s deliberate choice of these traditional tools, her consistent use of them over almost thirty years of writing, and their effect together and individually being precisely that of sacred art makes reading and interpreting her work without the traditional or spiritually-minded perspective of the Perennialists something akin to critical malpractice. Reading via the perspectives of Critique and other critical methodologies would be like using a screwdriver to pound in a nail.

My next post will make frequent reference to Livingston’s Chapter Six, the post on literary criticism just previous to this one, and his conclusion in my attempt to frame the two right-readings of Rowling’s Harry Potter series as we re-enter Potter Mania this Christmas. Those two readings — as sacred art and as spiritual danger — seem to be in necessary conflict; I will explore how an Orthodox priest’s recent reading of Tale of Two Cities illustrates almost perfectly why those two critical perspectives simply talk past one another. Coomaraswamy via Plato explains why both are necessary if one is much preferable to the other.

Nick and I will be talking about this, about work being done in Strike fandom by Tamara, Katya, and Fiona (I hope with interviews with each!), and about the upcoming Snape and Strike Summer School series we are editing now. Thank you to all our subscribers, especially to those who contribute to the cause. It promises to be a very exciting time here the next few months as we prepare for the animated Christmas Pig and the HBO+Bronte Studios television adaptation of the Hogwarts Saga.

I have highlighted the dense passages below and included links to the definitions of those words Substack’s editors do not recognize as words. My apologies if either or both are distracting or annoying to you. Enjoy this profound read!

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This is the seventh in a series of posts for Hogwarts Professor Paid Subscribers that introduces the Perennialist interpretation of fiction via a book by Ray Livingston titled The Traditional Theory of Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 1962). I have sent out six chapters thus far in single posts — Prologue, Man, Society, and Art, The Creative Process, The Work of Art, Part One, The Work of Art, Part Two, and The Function of Works of Art— and we have only the Conclusion to send out after the chapter below, Judgement and Criticism.

It is also arguably the most relevant and challenging of Livingston’s chapters because it discusses how a literary work of any quality is properly read and interpreted.

It is challenging, because traditional literary criticism is as demanding and can be as creative as the original artist’s efforts. Interpretation, if done properly, is potentially as important for the reader of a work understanding its depth and power as the symbols and anagogical artistry the writer of the story wove into a narrative-tapestry. That kind of exegesis, however, requires the critic to grasp the intention of the work or of the author to gauge the success of the result in realizing it, which understanding necessitates familiarity at least with its archetypal roots.

This chapter is relevant to Rowling Readers because we are entering a Renaissance of Potter Mania subsequent to the HBO+Bronte Studios adaptation of the Hogwarts Saga for television. What are the right and wrong ways to interpret Harry Potter’s seven volume Bildungsroman?

In the Potter Panic years, 1999 to 2007, there was a surfeit of illustrations of what Coomaraswamy would consider the wrong ways, most notably, literary criticism that did not judge Rowling’s work either by measuring whether the text as published succeeded in doing what Rowling intended it to do or by interpreting the symbols, allegories, and other transcendent content of her books.

A traditional understanding of Harry Potter and the ability to write about it requires

• a knowledge of the tools with which Rowling was working,

• a determination to explain the author’s artistry for the reader’s greater conscious appreciation of what he or she had experienced imaginatively, and

• the personal watchfulness and sufficient self-awareness to prevent making the text into a sock-puppet or project screen for the critic’s identity issues, psychological, political, or religious.

In the near absence of critics having any familiarity with the writing tools in Rowling’s Shed, what serious readers found instead on book stores’ shelves and online in the way of Harry Potter criticism was:

• superficial praise and blame of Rowling’s vocabulary and story-telling chops,

• academic celebration and dismissal of Rowling as a brilliant writer or one “unworthy of adult attention,” and

• attacks from religious Culture Warriors determined to make refusing to read the series a touchstone of righteousness and falling under its spell a token of godlessness, even demonic possession.

These last bits were especially embarrassing to thoughtful Christians and readers if understandable in light of proper concerns about the occult and the corruption of children’s morals. As Mark Shea explained in his Harry Potter and the Christian Critics (First Things, 13 September 2008), the Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox professional Culture Warriors’ objections to the books revealed only that they had not read the books or were unable to comprehend what they had read.

Shea is spot-on in his arguments and conclusion, but he responds to the tribe of Harry Potter’s Christian Critics on almost exactly the same level of thinking as the sophists he rebukes. For a truly profound explanation of where the devotional religious Pecksniffs go off the rails, the chapter of Livingston’s book below, ‘Judgement and Criticism,’ is essential reading. Coomaraswamy’s explanation of proper, which is to say, traditional literary criticism is one I think all Rowling Readers need to have firmly in mind as we begin the renaissance not only of Potter Mania but also of misuse of the books by Heresy Hunters and Harry Haters to advance their claims of Greater Grace.

The Chapter is not easy reading and I apologize if my highlighting and coloration of sentences I thought especially meaningful does not make that reading any easier. As always, the effort put into appreciation of Livingston’s writing rewards itself many times over. If you are like me, as you read it, you will find yourself reflecting on how much AKC and Livingston’s ideas do and do not apply to the writing of insightful criticism about the work of J. K. Rowling. I look forward to reading what you think in the comment thread below!

Thank you as always to our Paid Subscribers for helping us keep the lights on! We set up the lighting, backdrops, and sound systems in the Rowling Studies film studio this week; stay tuned for Nick’s and my ‘Lake, Shed, and Golden Threads’ Summer School coming up soon.

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Late last month, John shared two theories about the Cormoran Strike series of novels, both from Katya Slonenko, a member of the Reddit r/CormoranStrike online fandom: Dementia, Jewelry, and a Nine Inch Cock: The Mystery of Shanker’s ‘Old Man,’ His Given Name, and Why He’s Never Killed Jeff Whittaker and Katya Slonenko: Leda Strike's 'Mistress of the Salmon Salts' Pudenda Tattoo. John corresponded with Katya while preparing those posts and invited her to join him and Nick for a discussion of her ideas, of life as a Redditor, and her thoughts about Rowling’s artistry and meaning. She accepted the invitation but said she wouldn’t be free until July to talk.

Hence the wait! As expected, though, speaking with her about her own journey to expertise in Rowling Studies, her ideas about the clues Rowling has embedded so carefully within the first eight books and especially in Hallmarked Man, and the Reddit posts of which she thinks Hogwarts Professor readers need to be aware was well worth the wait.

You’ll want to read those posts from June before listening to get the most out of this conversation, but, regardless of your preparation, John and Nick believe that every Serious Striker and Rowling Reader will be charmed and challenged by Katya’s remarkable insights, generous spirit, and winsome personality. The conversation includes three other Reddit community posts — about Leda’s ‘Carnival’ dress (Arachulia), about the real name of her first husband, and about the Harry Potter tattoo Rowling-Galbraith hid on a Strike novel character’s shoulder — which took the discussion above and beyond the two Katya theories in the June posts.

Nick and John close the conversation by inviting her back and they hope readers here will share the questions they want us to be sure to ask her on her return visit in the comment thread below. Or just ask her yourself! As she demonstrated on the threads beneath the June posts, she is generous with her time in responding to other Strike fans.

Can’t wait for more Katya Slonenko? Follow her at r/CormoranStrike, on Instagram (Tattoos!), on FaceBook, and check our her older, longer posts on Medium…

The Ten Plus Questions with Links

1. Welcome, Katya, and thank you for joining us! The serious readers at Hogwarts Professor have been buzzing about your Shanker and Leda r/Cormoran Strike Reddit posts and we’re thrilled to be able to talk with you about those ideas. First, though, tell us about your first Rowling reading experiences and how you started posting on Reddit about the Strike series.

2. I’m guessing that Reddit Strike fandom may be as unfamiliar to Hogwarts Professor readers as it was to me. What is it about the Pelican_Girl and TopRequirement670 moderated posts and that international community that you love the most?

3. Shanker! I confess -- I hadn’t given him a thought really beyond a doppelganger twin for Strike before Fiona from Adelaide introduced me to the ideas that he had to be involved in the death of Leda Strike and that the Riccis were also somehow party to it. Ed Shardlow shared your Reddit post on the subject and my mind was blown; you made a compelling case soon after the publication of Hallmarked Man last year that Shanker is a Ricci, the illegitimate son of Nico ‘Muccy’ Ricci, but to avenge Leda Strike’s death he has become a Met or MI5 informer.

Let’s start with the four pointers that Shanker gave Strike in one conversation that he is a Ricci-by-blood and what made you think of that connection:

• Shanker’s statement that his father had dementia or was senile;

• Shanker’s report that his dad taught that jewelry was the way to a woman’s heart;

• Shanker’s claim that his ‘old man’ was said to have a “nine inch cock;” and

• Shanker’s saying that his begetter “‘ad kids wiv abou’ ten diff’rent women.”

4. I see the trigger now that you’ve detailed it but you dug and made four more connections that were buried in the texts of the series’ other books:

• Shanker’s knowledge of the Ricci clan, especially Mucky,

• his Strike-witnessed working with Mucky in drug deals,

• “he deals cocaine and is good with a knife;” and, best of all,

• the reaction Robin had to both Shanker and Luca at their first meeting, the fun-house mirror upside-down reflection of the attraction half-siblings feel for another intuitively. Robin is viscerally repulsed and afraid of the half-sibling Ricci boys.

We cannot not see these connections after you point them out, but they’re nigh on invisible until they’re pointed out! Why do you think you saw them when we missed them -- and why do you think Rowling has taken such care to make them invisible in plain sight?

5. And Shanker is an MI5 informant? Where does that come from?

5.5 Let’s not forget that you also make an intelligent guess, the first one I’ve heard, about what Shanker’s given name really is, one based on the names of Nico Ricci’s two children out of ten for whom we have names.

• Katya shared not only her reasoning about why Shanker’s name is John or an Italian variant of the Evangelist’s name but also her theory about the parentage and name of the other remaining character in the series who also remains nameless: the mysterious ‘Strike’ with whom Leda ran away from Cornwall! (Be sure to read the comment thread for Redditor conversation about other possible Ricci children…)

6. Your thoughts about Shanker all feed into theories about Leda Strike and her mysterious death in the end, which brings us to another aspect of her life and death about which you’ve brought an important and unique perspective. I’m talking about the Mistress of the Salmon Salt tattoo. Did you know anything about tattoos, Katya, before writing this piece?

7. As a tattoo artist yourself, what do you make of Leda’s tattoo placement?

8. Tattoos are meaningful, powerful reflections or revelations of the person’s interior life or self-understanding (see the post about Katya’s ‘Salmon Salt Tattoo’ theory for much more on this). What do you think this tattoo communicates about Leda? Is it another example of Rowling’s text-within-the-text or a variant of her using cryptonyms to signal important information about a character’s inner life?

What Tattoos Mean in Cormoran Strike and a Catalog of Examples

• From Katya’s 2023 ‘Mistress of the Salmon Salt Revisited:’

I hear you asking - why can’t Leda’s be just a tattoo, without any deeper meaning to it? That’s because all the other tattoos in the Strike books have meaning and provide a clue to their wearers’ characters.

Here are some examples:

• Kelsey Pratt’s One Direction tattoo is an obvious link to her being a One Direction fan. (How Leda’s tattoo is different? She chose the name of the particular song, not the more generic name of the band, to be tattooed on her)

• Laing’s rose pierced with a dagger bluntly means violence to women. Rose is a woman in the language of symbols, while the dagger is… well, a dagger.

• Polworth’s St Piran’s cross means he’s a Cornish patriot. I’ll be surprised if it also doesn’t mark him as The Hanged Man (a symbolic bearer of a cross)

• Portia Bayliss’s trident refers to her Caribbean roots

• Edie had a small black heart on the knuckles because she was the creator of ‘The Ink Black Heart’ cartoon.

• Zoe’s tattoos are of ‘The Ink Black Heart’ characters she identifies with.

• Pez Pierce has The Beatles quote around his neck - Strawberry Fields was (is?) a place in Liverpool.

• Union Jack, a skull, and a Nordic “Chaos” rune give a good impression of what the Turisaz character will be about (all tattooed on visible spots like head or neck - he wears them proudly!);

• Same with Algiz and Uruz, sans the Union Jack and the skull.

• Noli Seymour’s tattoo stands for “Golden Prophet”. It denotes her connection to the Universal Humanitarian Church and her status there as the current Golden Prophet.

• An ace of spades was inked onto his left cheek, and a tattooed tiger covered his throat. - Jordan Reaney’s tattoos are pretty telling, too.

• Not a character, but still - JK herself has a tattoo, “Solve et Coagula”, which means - “I’m a writer of an alchemical detective series!” :D

So you see, all these tattoos are chosen to reflect their owners’ personal histories. That’s generally a feature of Rowling’s writing: if she describes a character, every little detail works for the portrait she wants to paint. There are no details put there “just because” - everything is important. How the characters dress and speak, what they eat and drink, what music they listen to, and what tattoos they have tell us something about the character.

What does Leda’s tattoo contribute to her portrait?

Nothing!

In Career of Evil, when we learn of its existence, the tattoo adds literally nothing to Leda’s portrait. Why is it mentioned in the story to which it makes zero contribution, except for serving as a plot device enabling the killer’s obsession?

Because it will be important later.

• Katya shared in her answer her theory from experience that Rowling-Galbraith had secretly marked a character as a Harry Potter fan by giving her a shoulder tattoo that Potter-heads would recognize!

9. Rowling’s Solve et Coagula tattoo: what do you think she is telling the world about herself? Is there a correspondence or tie between the author’s tattoo and its placement and Leda’s?

10. Whittaker quotes a line from the Salmon Salt song by the Blue Oyster Cult — “She was the Quicklime Girl” — while testifying at his trial on murder charges; what do you think that tells us about her death? Does it suggest it was suicide or murder? Do you think Whittaker did it?

11. And another one to make eleven! You thought at one point because of the meaning of ‘Mistress of the Salmon Salt’ that we had to take seriously the possibility that Leda herself was a serial killer. But you’ve changed your mind. Why is that?

• In addition to her own thinking on this subject, Katya shared yet another Redditor theory, this one from Arachulia about The New Dress that Aunt Joan said was the real reason that Leda had left her Nancarrow home in Cornwall with the mysterious ‘Strike.’ Enjoy!

(Credit: Telegraph article, June 2017, J.K. Rowling at the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation party in 2007, wearing a floral diamond necklace and matching earrings, cf., Christmas Pig)

Solomon Schmidt, author of A Pen to Change the World: The Life of J. K. Rowling (Skyhorse, June 2026), sat down with us again to discuss what challenges he faced in collating and synthesizing almost thirty years of interviews for his biography. He also shares the three questions he’d ask The Presence if she’d consent to an interview, questions that he thinks she might answer; Solomon turned the tables on his interviewers who had to improv questions they’d ask without being told their interview with Rowling was over.

The necessary links to the book’s Amazon page and to the two Hogwarts Professor reviews are here:

• A Pen to Change the World: The Life of J.K. Rowling (Amazon.com)

• A Pen to Change the World: The Life of J.K. Rowling (Amazon.co.uk) Uk Edition

• A Pen to Change the World – the Biography of J. K. Rowling by Solomon Schmidt (Nick Jeffery)

• Book Review: A Pen to Change the World - The Life of J. K. Rowling (John Granger)

Five Questions for Solomon Schmidt, Author of A Pen to Change the World:

5. I said you didn’t get to interview Rowling, which is true, but you did have access to all her interviews that she has done 1997 to the present as well as the interviews and articles with her family, friends, fans, and business associates. How did you find, assemble, and sift through those interviews?

6. If you had been allowed inside the gates of Fortress Rowling and you were only allowed three questions, what would you ask her? (This is a game John and I regularly play, and usually John’s questions would get him thrown out of an interview!)

7. What discoveries that you made in your research were the most exciting to you?

8. Rowling has said repeatedly through the years that the critical negative events of her life that reshaped her thinking and her work were the death of her mother and the abusive relationship she had with her first husband. Agree or disagree? What do you think were the most important positive turns in her life?

9. Very few people I meet don’t have a fixed opinion about Rowling; the world seems to love and hate her in equal measure with little grey area between the two: adoring fans and political allies on the one hand and those that despise her work, her political efforts, or both. Where do you fall in that divide and how hard was it to represent the other point of view in your biography?

10. I assume you’ve started researching your next biography though you’ll be neck deep in this book’s launch for a few months. What will you be working on next?

‘If that’s what happened,’ said Wardle, ‘it’s the most convoluted fucking murder I’ve ever heard of and I can’t believe he brought it off.’

‘He didn’t,’ Strike pointed out, ‘or we wouldn’t be coming for him, would we? The thing was too complicated by half. Too many moving parts. Well, that and the fact he couldn’t resist adding a sex crime into the caper. Never mix business with pleasure.’

‘I think you’re going to be lucky pinning the whole thing on that footprint,’ said Wardle. ch 120

The problem that jurors will have believing what he is convinced happened in the vault haunts Strike during his illicit interrogation of Griffiths and his mates after subduing them:

He wasn’t in such agony that he failed to noticed Griffiths’ pigeon-toed walk as they dragged him alone, a peculiarity Strike had attributed to Griffiths’ trip over his guitar the first time they’d come face to face. This small, extra confirmation of his theory was enough to make Strike determined to see the thing through himself, because he was worried that Ian Griffiths might yet get away with the murder of Tyler Powell. ‘Not proven’ was the verdict he feared. Even if the killings of Sofia Medina, Jim Todd and Todd’s mother could be pinned on Griffiths, even if the man was rightly sentenced to multiple life sentences, that wouldn’t be enough for Strike.

He wanted justice, even vengeance, for Tyler Powell: a young man who’d suffered an inordinate amount of bad luck while living, and who most certainly hadn’t deserved the fate he’d met at Griffiths’ hands. The ingenious, complicated and outlandish nature of his murder might yet prevent a jury believing it could have happened as Strike was certain it had, but Powell had become real to him lately: a little lost, as Robin had said, but brave, resourceful and determined, not the fool people might have thought him; a young man who, Strike believed, had been ‘proper good’, and whose biggest mistake had been to believe that a man who held out a helping hand was doing so out of kindness. ch 123

Ed Shardlow and Nick Jeffery have pointed out that ‘Not Proven’ was not possible as a verdict in England, only in Scotland, but Rowling seems here to be highlighting that she was well aware the story as told would be difficult not just for jurors to grasp and embrace but also for her readers. The most frequently voiced complaint about Hallmarked Man was disappointment that the two principal characters were not lovers by story’s end; close behind it was bewilderment with respect to (1) the complexity of the plot with its multiple threads and suspects overlaid the Strellacott romance, (2) the overwhelming number of characters, many with names assonant and thus easily confused with the names of other characters, and (3) the simply bizarre aspect of the murder mystery at the story’s core.

The conversations Nick Jeffery and I have had here about Hallmarked Man since its publication last September have largely been discussions of these points. Our contention has been, contrary to critics of the book who hold that the novel is by far the worst of the series, that the confusion, discomfort, even angst that readers experience in it was intentional on the author’s part which makes the discomfort in her audience a measure of her success.

We have argued, too, that Hallmarked Man is necessarily crowded and complex because it is the introduction to the last three books of the series, the capstone trilogy on top of the seven book ring that closed with Running Grave. Rowling-Galbraith is obliged in this book simultaneously to introduce all the characters and story-lines that will play out in the final two books, including the clues to the Big Twists in the coming books, while obscuring those pointers in a flood of information so the solution is anything but obvious. She has trained her readers to think of individual novels as largely stand-alone pieces with respect to the murder mystery whose characters will not appear except in the briefest of cameos later on; Hallmarked Man, however, seems to break with that convention and act as the opening act of a three act drama.

And that “convoluted fucking murder” Wardle couldn’t get his head around and readers struggled to understand as well? My argument has been that Tyler Powell’s thoroughly mutilated body with its three-barred cross hallmark cut into the back of this “proper good” man had to be read allegorically to be grasped; all signs of Tyler’s individual existence — his hands, eyes, ears, teeth, genitals, feet — had been cut from him leaving only his crucifixion, his selfless sacrificial death, as his identity. The underground silver vault in which he is laid is his tomb and grave, one he shares metaphorically with the pregnant and longsuffering woman he was working to save buried in a like-vault of cement beneath the Griffiths house in Ironbridge. I suspect that the Tyler-Jolanda deaths are best read as Shakespearean marriages a la Romeo & Juliet and Antony & Cleopatra in which Soul and Spirit are entwined and the world transcended in a shared demise. As Strike & Ellacott are a like pair in psychomachian allegory, this death may be a strong pointer to the finish of the series.

That interpretation of the murder scene and its complexity combines three tools from Rowling’s Shed, namely, Christian symbolism, Psychomachia, and Literary alchemy. An alternative and complementary reading of the bizarre murder in the Ramsay vault with its masonic touches leans on a different Shed tool, Rowling-Galbraith’s love of embedded texts, her stories inside of stories signature, not to mention her love of literary illusion.

I found this reading on the Reddit Cormoran Strike page, r/Cormoran Strike, moderated by Pelican_Girl, written by Top-Requirements670. I reached out to the author through Katya Slonenko to discuss this idea but Top-Requirement was not interested in that.

Without her participation, then, I will re-present her reddit post here with links to the original, summarize it briefly, review her argument with relevant illustrations, and add three points of evidence that make it more compelling and credible.

In a nutshell? Top-Requirement670 argues that Ian Griffiths, uber Steely Dan fan, killed Tyler Powell as he did to recreate the cover of that American band’s best selling album, ‘Aja.’ First the reddit post, all links and highlighting as in the original:

Steely Dan’s Aja & Body in the Vault

r/cormoran_strike•8mo ago

Top-Requirement670

Griffith is obsessed with Steely Dan.

‘Chloe’s’ whatsapp to Robin (which is Griffith in disguise). ‘Dad thinks anyone who likes Steely Dan and wants to learn the guitar must be a good guy, but Tyler isn’t’

Also when Griffith first appears in ch. 66, ‘He was wearing a Steely Dan T-shirt and holding an acoustic guitar by the neck’ like a weapon and hurrying towards Robin & Strike.

Griffith also used the alias ‘Skunk Baxter. A guitarist for Steely Dan.

And what nails Griffith as guilty: ‘The number was stored under ‘LUGS NEW’. Strike pressed it. Somewhere in another room, they heard the ringtone: Steely Dan’s ‘Do It Again’. In the mornin’ you go gunnin’...

There’s also references to the Dan’s song ‘Dirty Work’ and ‘Kid Charlemagne’.

But none of these Steely Dan references refer to, Aja (take a look at cover) their most critically acclaimed album that’s ranked 145 on Rolling Stone Magazine’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

The cover of Aja is dark and mysterious yet iconic. There appears to be a long red and white striped ribbon covering a body. It’s not exactly clear what it is. The head of the body is surrounded by black, looks like it has blood dripping from the eyes. The body on the cover is surrounded in darkness.

In Ch. 47 when Kim shows Strike the pictures of the body in the vault, the body originally left in darkness, is In ‘The masonic sash--black and red, with gold embroidery that shone in the flash of the camera--lay across a chest that was muscled and hairless...’ And the eyes of the body had been removed.

Perhaps this wasn’t a convoluted mess of a murder, but rather a ritual killing inspired by Steely Dan’s most famous album and album cover, Aja. Griffith could have used Masonic misdirection not only to throw off investigators, but also as a way to complete a ritual to his musical obsession.

• ‘Double helix in the sky tonight
  Throw out the hardware
  Let’s do it right
  Aja’

Were these lyrics from the title-song Aja, the inspiration behind the crime? They include references to DNA and throwing out hardware. Griffith removed hands and eyes to make DNA testing difficult. He threw out the ‘hardware’ the Masonic silver, behind a wall under the sink.

The murder in the vault being a recreation of the cover of Steely Dan’s Aja, also would be callback to Career of Evil and the ritualistic murder involving lyrics of Blue Oyster Cult. In The Hallmarked Man, the serial killer, Steely Ian, decorates the corpse in a way that points towards the Masons, while obfuscating what became ‘part of his ritual’ to quote Laing in Career of Evil.

One of the few comments in this post’s thread notes that cutting off pieces of a body does not effect in any way the ease or difficulty of DNA testing. Having noted that, let’s review the Steely Dan allusions in Strike 8 that Top-Requirement670 refers to.

Steely Dan as Ian Griffiths’ Obsession in The Hallmarked Man:

First meeting with Ian Griffiths:

‘Oi!’

The detectives turned. A short and extremely belligerent-looking man with longish dark hair had emerged from the back door of the house opposite. He was wearing a Steely Dan T-shirt and holding an acoustic guitar by the neck and as he hurried towards them, he did precisely what Strike had been trying to avoid for the last fifteen minutes: slipped on his back lawn and tripped. However, he recovered his balance with the aid of his guitar and, hobbling and slightly pigeon-toed, he advanced on them, shouting:

‘What d’you want? Bloody press, is it?’ ch 66

Ian Griffiths texting Robin as Chloe Griffiths:

Hello this is Chloe Griffiths, Ian Griffiths’ daughter. Dad’s asked me to get in touch with you as like a character witness for Tyler Powell. I wasn’t going to but my boyfriend thinks I should tell you the truth, even if Dad doesn’t want to hear it.

I know Dad’s told you Tyler definitely didn’t have anything to do with that car crash and I’m not saying he did, but I know for a fact Tyler isn’t the nice sweet guy Dad thinks he is. Dad thinks anyone who likes Steely Dan and wants to learn the guitar must be a good guy, but Tyler isn’t.

He gets really pushy with girls when he’s drunk, he’s done it to lots of friends of mine. Dad feels sorry for him, he thinks Tyler’s desperate for love or something, because his parents aren’t very nice to him, so he thinks it’s all harmless but it isn’t. Anne-Marie only went out with Tyler a couple of times, and he started talking about them getting married. Dad thought that just showed Tyler wants a proper family of his own, but Anne-Marie was really freaked out by him being so intense and possessive when they’d only dated twice and Tyler was really angry she dumped him and was talking all kinds of shit about her. ch 71

The music Ian Griffiths plays on entering his house the night Strike is in his basement:

Strike gestured furiously at the girl to be quiet as he crept back towards the opening in the ceiling, rapidly calculating odds. He didn’t doubt Wardle or Barclay had tried to warn him that Griffiths and friends were on their way home, and it wasn’t their fault he was currently in a concrete chamber underground without phone reception, but that didn’t alter the undoubtedly perilous position he and the girl were now in. His glib response to Barclay’s ‘an’ if Ah hear ye yellin’ “help”?’ was no longer so funny; possibly his colleagues were waiting for a sign or a shout that he required assistance, but as making any noise right now would expose his presence to what sounded like four or five men, one of whom he knew to be a serial killer, Strike chose instead to move into the shadows behind the ladder.

Loud music began to play from the sitting room: Steely Dan.

While the music played… ch 122, p 851

Strike explains to Griffiths how the detectives figured out he was the murderer, his choice of online aliases:

‘I don’t—’

‘Skunk Baxter. Guitarist for Steely Dan.’

‘These are just fucking—’ ch 123

Strike confirms the Steely Dan-Ian Griffiths connection/obsession by dialing the phone number that was supposed to be Tyler Powell’s:

The number was stored under ‘LUGS NEW’. Strike pressed it.

Somewhere in another room, they heard the ringtone: Steely Dan’s ‘Do It Again’.

In the mornin’ you go gunnin’… ch 123

Top-Requirement670 asserts that there are references in Hallmarked Man to two other Steely Dan songs, ‘Dirty Work’ and ‘Kid Charlemagne.’ I found one to ‘Dirty Work:’

‘My whole business is asking questions that wouldn’t usually be any of my business.’

‘“Dirty work, but someone’s got to do it”?’

‘Wouldn’t claim I’ve got to,’ said Strike. ‘Just the line of work that best suits my abilities.’ ch 36

There are three previous “dirty work” references in Cormoran Strike and four in Harry Potter, so I’m skeptical that this is a Steely Dan song reference. Kid Charlemagne? There are no ‘Charlemagne’ references in Hallmarked Man, though there are 63 to ‘kid’ in a book crowded with child and baby discussions. Check out its Song Lyrics to see if that was what Top-Requirement670 was referring to; I didn’t see anything obvious. [Ed Shardlow notes in the comments that the lyric given on p 851 is from ‘Kid Charlemagne.’]

My preliminary conclusion after just checking up on the Steely Dan references in Hallmarked Man? Rowling-Galbraith repeatedly marked Ian Griffiths as a man as obsessed with Steely Dan as Leda Strike was with Blue Oyster Cult. The argument that the murder was staged even if only in part to resemble the cover of this band’s best selling album was credible. Was there anything else about Steely Dan that would make them credible as the favorites of a serial killer?

Steely Dan: Links to Hallmarked Man and Ian Griffiths

I knew nothing about Steely Dan before doing some simple internet searches after reading the relevant Wikipedia pages. The best source of information was an archived fan site’s Steely Dan FAQ page from 2011, from which the excerpts below are taken.

How about the two Steely Dan principals, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, being tagged in their early days as murderous crazies?

Fagen graduates Bard in 1969 with an English degree. Becker also leaves Annandale. The two of them move to Brooklyn, New York and decide to peddle their songs at the famous Brill Building in Manhattan. They don’t meet with much success, but they make an important early connection with Kenny Vance of Jay and the Americans. Vance helps them record some demos of their early material and gets them some odd jobs including doing the soundtrack for the low-budget Richard Pryor film “You Gotta Walk It Like You Talk It.” Vance also gets Becker and Fagen gigs as back-up musicians on Jay and the Americans’ 1970-71 tour. Jay Black disaffectionately labels Donald and Walter as “Starkweather and Manson.”

Charles Starkweather was a serial killer and Charles Manson was the leader of a murderous cult. Was Rowling-Galbraith hinting at Ian Griffith’s desire to emulate the musicians whose music he idolized? Jeff Whittaker was a fan of Manson’s music as we learned in Career of Evil, ch 10:

Thrown out of his most recent band, Whittaker continued to dream of stardom. He knew three guitar chords and covered every bit of paper not hidden from him with lyrics that drew heavily on the Satanic Bible, which Strike remembered lying, its black cover emblazoned with a pentagram and goat-head combined, on the mattress where Leda and Whittaker slept. Whittaker had an extensive knowledge of the life and career of the American cult leader Charles Manson. The scratchy sound of an old vinyl copy of Manson’s album LIE: The Love and Terror Cult formed the soundtrack to Strike’s GCSE year.

Back to the FAQ page and the history of Steely Dan. Enter Skunk Baxter:

With Fagen on keyboards and vocals and Becker on bass, they decide to sign up guitarist Jeff "Skunk" Baxter and drummer Jim Hodder. With the core band recruited, Donald and Walter need a name for their group. Since both of them were avid readers of 1950's "Beat" literature, they decided to name the band "Steely Dan" after a dildo in William Burroughs' "Naked Lunch."

The band’s name was taken from a Beatnik novel’s sex toy. Is Rowling-Galbraith playing with her own texts being loaded with inter- and intra-textual references, the books-within-her-books? The name ‘Steely Dan’ itself was just such a reference to an obscure work but one which is important for understanding Fagen and Baxter’s beatnik lyrics and perspective on sexual relations.

Top-Requirement670 reports that ‘Aja’ was Steely Dan’s best selling album. It was more than that:

ABC Records, consistent in their pressure for hit singles and a tour, drive Becker and Fagen back into the studio. The end result, "Aja", is released in September 1977 and features their longest and jazziest compositions to date. Fagen and Becker drafted even more giants of the jazz world including Joe Sample, Wayne Shorter and Tom Scott to execute their increasingly complex songs. "Aja" becomes their first platinum album and reaches #3 on the album chart, trailing only mega-sellers Fleetwood Mac's "Rumors" and Billy Joel's "The Stranger." "Peg" hits #11, "Deacon Blues" hits #19 and "Josie" hits #26 on the singles charts.

‘Rumours’ is #8 on the list of All Time Best Selling Albums and ‘The Stranger’ won the Grammy for Album of the Year over Rumours. There was no shame in being #3 in that company. ‘Aja’ is a memorable album, far and away the most famous and successful of Steely Dan’s recordings. The idea that Rowling-Galbraith would have a murderer obsessed with the duo’s music concoct a crime scene reminiscent of the ‘Aja’ cover is prima facie credible.

If you’re like me, you know little about the album or its cover. Here are the summary facts about ‘Aja’ The Album via Wikipedia:

Aja (pronounced /ˈeɪʒə/, like Asia) is the sixth studio album by the American rock band Steely Dan, released on September 23, 1977, by ABC Records. For the album, band leaders Walter Becker and Donald Fagen pushed Steely Dan further into experimenting with different combinations of session players, enlisting the services of nearly 40 musicians, while pursuing longer, more sophisticated compositions and arrangements. Like all the band’s previous albums, it was produced by Gary Katz.

The album peaked at number three on the Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart, and number five on the UK Albums Chart, ultimately becoming Steely Dan’s most commercially successful release. It spawned the hit singles “Peg“, “Deacon Blues“, and “Josie“. At the 20th Annual Grammy Awards in 1978, Aja won Best Engineered Recording – Non-Classical, and was nominated for Album of the Year and Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals. It has appeared on many retrospective “greatest albums” lists, with critics and audiophiles applauding the album’s high production quality. ….

In 2000, Aja was voted number 118 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's book All Time Top 1000 Albums, in which Larkin noted its "brand of jazz-influenced white soul". In 2003, Aja was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and ranked 145th on Rolling Stone's list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time"; it maintained the same spot on the 2012 update of the list, and rose to 63rd on the 2020 version. In 2006, Aja was included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. In 2010, it was recognized by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry

And the cover? The ‘Aja’ Album Cover Essentials (r/SteelyDan)

The Aja album cover features a photograph of Japanese model Sayoko Yamaguchi, taken by Hideki Fujii, with layout design by Patricia Mitsui and Geoff Westen.

I confess that I was delighted that Sayoko Yamaguchi’s Wikipedia page had a picture of her, because the album cover is not very helpful in getting a mental picture of her:

Yamaguchi broke into the international modeling industry in the 1970s. She was one of the first Asian models to be featured in the world’s top fashion shows and magazines. She made her debut in Paris in 1972, and went on to work in New York City and other international cities.

In 1977, Newsweek named her one of the world’s top six fashion models. Also that year, she was featured on the cover of Steely Dan‘s Aja album, photographed by Hideki Fujii.

Which brings us at last to the Aja album cover:

I cannot make anything of that cover, frankly. I was glad to find out that this is pretty much the consensus of all but die-hard Steely Dan fans. Here is a typical query to be found online, from an Audiogon Forum 2024 Thread: The ‘Aja’ Album Cover:

What is that ribbon supposed to be? It looks like a piece of the US flag. Is that what it's supposed to be or something else? I never understood it. I see the profile of the face of the Japanese model, though….

I see the lady’s partial face profile, and what looks like a ribbon or something. I can’t make it out. I wish I could see the partially open robe, but I don’t. I just don’t get what those "lines" are. Cloth? flag? Ribbon? I don't see blue anywhere, just a whole lotta black.

The helpful Dan-iacs on the thread provided links to a FaceBook page with Out Takes from the Aja Cover Photo Shoot: (see also this explanation at r/SteelyDan)

See the FaceBook page with the ‘Aja’ Cover Shoot Out Takes

The red and white are part of the kimono/happi coat/robe the model is wearing. It extends along the front were it opens. It also looks like it trims the end of the sleeve.

Her face BTW is almost full front but veiled.

Steely Dave at r/Steely Dan about another ‘Aja’ Cover Shot

There’s also a Japanese promo poster for Aja that uses another shot from this same shoot:

https://dygtyjqp7pi0m.cloudfront.net/i/5409/8463847_1.jpg?v=8CB5C31B34F7AD0

I have one of these and they’re really stunning, printed on really heavy stock with a nice glossy coating, unlike the thin paper the US posters (which just use the album art, with thumbnails for the back catalog at the bottom).

Top-Requirement670 seems to be arguing less from the Aja album cover that was published than from the ghoulish outtakes above, especially the one with ink or blood flowing from the model’s eyes. Combined with the evidence of the ‘Aja’ song lyrics about “DNA” and “Hardware” and the connections that can be made with Career of Evil, there might be something to this idea. Add in the Starkweather/Ransom notes and the Steely Dan name origin in Naked Lunch and maybe it’s a great find.

It certainly works in terms of Rowling-Galbraith’s text within the text Shed tool. If Ian Griffiths, the writer of the false narrative that the Strike-Ellacott team must decipher in Hallmarked Man, then he is in a way the real author’s embedded image in the story; in terms of syuzhet-fabula, he is the writer of the fiction that Rowling’s detectives have to unravel the way that she is the writer of the mystery her readers are struggling to understand. How appropriate, then, for her to make him ‘write’ as she does, with a murder performed to mimic his favorite band’s best-selling album’s cover…

I love that idea, but I acknowledge it’s still a big stretch. I decided to share it with you, nonetheless, both to note the most neglected of Rowling-Galbraith’s signature Shed tools and because of one more wild association between the Aja album cover and Hallmarked Man.

Jake Malooley on his ‘Expanding Dan’ Substack page shared this about Patti Matsui: The woman who shaped the look of Aja:

Without Patti Mitsui, the Aja we know and love would not exist.

Oz Studios, the company she ran with Geoff Westen (former guitarist for California garage-psych outfit the Other Half), was tapped to art direct the cover of Steely Dan’s 1977 jazz-rock tour de force. Next to photographer Hideki Fujii’s enigmatic shot of Japanese supermodel Sayoko Yamaguchi in a kimono, Mitsui added a literal masterstroke: the striking red calligraphic letters of the album’s title.

That’s right. The team that put together the Aja cover was Oz Studios. Ian Griffiths’ alias for his serial killer dealings was music producer Calvin Osgood and, unlike the real Osgood, he went by ‘Oz.’

It’s still a stretch, of course, but the fun quotient went way up for me. I hope you feel the same way. Regardless, hat’s off once again to the Redditors at r/CormoranStrike, especially to Pelican_Girl for her moderation there and to Top-Requirement670 for following the Steely Dan trail of evidence to the Aja cover and the body in the vault.

(A. K. Coomaraswamy, Credit: Dorothy Norman)

Livingston in this chapter explains the Perennialist ideas of Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy (AKC) about the ends or purpose of art in general and literature specifically. If you’re a serious reader of J. K. Rowling and Robert Galbraith, all effort invested in understanding AKC’s traditional wisdom will be richly rewarded.

I’m confident in saying that about AKC and this chapter of Traditional Theory of Literature because in it Livingston lays out the anagogical or spiritual dimension of story, the roots of literature in initiatory rites, the requirement that narrative simultaneously turn the soul right side up (“a rectification of the personality”) and shock it out of its mundane and materialist mind-set, even separating soul from body cathartically, how the proper subject of fiction is myth, which is to say, the life of a God or hero, and, wait for it, why a “thunderbolt” is such a great choice for an orphan’s facial scar.

AKC per Livingston explains that the “end of art is gnosis… the immediate, intuitive, direct knowledge of reality or God;” all of Rowling’s Shed tools as well as her plot points and themes in the end are about her readers’ cathartic transformation and ego-transcendence within the imaginative, hermetic crucible of her novels.

I’ve been reading this week that ‘The End of Reading is Here,’ that the great majority of our fellow citizens do not read long-form fiction, and those who do are incapable of understanding what they’ve read beyond the surface story and the in-your-face moral message of Good Guys and Bad Guys. Sadly, there’s more than sufficient evidence for this contention than there is compelling reason to think it’s over-wrought.

The good news or Silver Lining? Everyone reading this is a Serious Reader who is not only capable of reading 800 page novels in a seven or ten book series but who also is excited about understanding the mythic backdrop, traditional symbolism, alchemical colouration, Big Twist misdirection-shock, chiastic structure, and kathartic soul allegories (psychomachia) that make such stories a life and mind-changing experience.

If you’re a member of this Serious Reader Remnant tribe in a Postliterate Age (and being a Hogwarts Professor subscriber is a marker that you are), reading the Perennialist explanation of why homo sapiens sapiens is less the “rational animal” than the “story-telling animal” will reveal in depth why your oddball hobby is an exteriorization of your species-being, as Marx night put it, of you’re being real-ly human.

Here are five of my favorite paragraphs from ‘The Function of Works of Art’ for non-paying subscribers to enjoy. Paid Subscribers will find after the paywall, in addition to the argument-in-full, all the links to AKC’s and Livingston’s references to hard-to-find publications. Enjoy!

The end of art is gnosis. And if the work of art is to serve effectively in revealing knowledge, “the mental and effective barriers behind which the natural manifestation of the spirit is concealed” must be broken down, temporarily at least. There must be, as we have seen, a rectification of the personality. This transformation of one’s nature comes from a purification or purgation of those elements that would interfere with the intellectual identification with the idea of the work….

If one genuinely and profoundly responds to the thesis of a great work of art – which deals perennially with the subject of God, “whose only idiosyncrasy is being” – he identifies himself with the subject of the work and ceases to be aware of himself as an individual. Each such experience reinforces a man in his realization of who he is, it tends to separate soul from the body – that is to say, one’s consciousness is raised from concern with the body to a higher level….

According to the perennial Tradition, the perfection of man is in knowledge – immediate, intuitive, direct knowledge of reality or God. Works of art are among the best means developed by man for imparting principial knowledge. As we have seen, works of art are reminders, they are supports of contemplation. Their beauty, their power of shock and purification, their capacity for ordering the disparate elements of our natures – all these are qualities that make them very effective with persons with the innate ability or with the training to employ them as they are intended by the Traditional artist….

The imitation of anything and everything is despicable; it is the actions of God and heroes, not the artist’s feelings or the natures of men who are all too human like himself, that are the legitimate theme of art.” Even if one is unable to achieve that gnosis which is the highest end of the aesthetic experience, he will be powerfully prompted to emulate the actions of the gods and heroes he has identified himself with as he has read, seen a play, or taken part in a rite….

Although few even among those consciously aspiring to their perfection as men may achieve the supreme realization, much less experience it as a direct result of reading a poem or viewing a play, many men can advance in the perennial pilgrimage with the aid of objects of beauty designed to satisfy mediate ends and gradually to perfect them. To study deeply the Divine Comedy, to view Hamlet in the theater, to read Blake’s “Tyger,” to see a bronze statue of a dancing Shiva – these and the like may not of themselves be the occasion for that “lightning-flash” of gnosis, but they can and do give men profound insights into the true nature of things, the more so if the rest of a man’s life is generally in accord with the informing spirit of these and similar works. As reminders and supports of contemplation they not only afford marvelous intuitions but also prepare men for those other contemplative experiences with which we are graced, especially if we still retain the sacred view of the cosmos. While works of art in themselves will not save the world or even many souls in any age, much less in our own, they will nonetheless form one important component in the economy of the Traditional existence, which is in all ways ordered to the perfection of persons.

Read more

(Credit: Neil Wilder, Edinburgh 1999, now in National Portrait Galley)

Solomon Schmidt, author of A Pen to Change the World: The Life of J. K. Rowling (Skyhorse, June 2026), sat down with us this week to discuss what moved him to write a Rowling biography at the height of her radioactivity as a supposed “transphobe” and the obstacles that Rowling, Inc., puts in the way of unauthorized biographers. He also shares the kindness and circumspection of the people who did agree to speak with him, to include Neil Blair and Jorge Arantes.

The necessary links to the book’s Amazon page and to the two Hogwarts Professor reviews are here:

• A Pen to Change the World: The Life of J.K. Rowling (Amazon.com)

• A Pen to Change the World: The Life of J.K. Rowling (Amazon.co.uk) Uk Edition

• A Pen to Change the World – the Biography of J. K. Rowling by Solomon Schmidt (Nick Jeffery)

• Book Review: A Pen to Change the World - The Life of J. K. Rowling (John Granger)

The second part of our conversation with Mr Schmidt will be posted next week. The first five questions he answered were:

1. What moved you to start this project? You've already written a biography of Alan Dershowitz and many more in the History Bites series; what made J. K. Rowling an inviting subject to you? What made it different from the other biographies you've written?

2. You wrote in the acknowledgements at book's end that you didn't write the biography as a work of "literary criticism," but you do discuss everything she has written or collaborated on, Philosopher's Stone to Ink Black Heart. What would you have included in those discussions if you had been writing "literary criticism"?

3. This is an "Unauthorized" biography which means you were researching and writing outside the gates of Team Rowling, simultaneously shut off from Rowling and her circle of friends and, one would hope, outside her ability to shape the narrative you put together of her life. You did, though, get some push-back from Rowling, Inc.'s legal arm at one point; what was that about?

4. You weren't able to interview Rowling, her sister, her husband, her father, her daughter Jessica, Sean Harris, the Sisters of Swing, Michael the boyfriend, Lucy Shepherd, Pearl Biddle, or 'Starsky and Cox.' You did find and scored interviews with Jorge Arantes, Barry Cunningham (the publisher who signed J. K. Rowling to Bloomsbury), Steve Eddy (one of Rowling’s English teachers), Neil Blair (sort of!), and her American cousins, Ben and Bryony Rowling. How did you find these sources and what was it like sitting down to speak with them?

5. I said you didn't get to interview Rowling, which is true, but you did have access to all her interviews that she has done 1997 to the present as well as the interviews and articles with her family, friends, fans, and business associates. How did you find, assemble, and sift through those interviews?

Please share your thoughts below as well as follow-up questions you wish we had asked! Part Two will be up in a week…

(Credit: BBC)

Katya Slonenko is a Serious Striker who posts at the r/CormoranStrike reddit page. I wrote about her ‘Shanker John Ricci’ theory here last week in a post called Dementia, Jewelry, and a Nine Inch Cock: The Mystery of Shanker’s ‘Old Man,’ His Given Name, and Why He’s Never Killed Jeff Whittaker. If you think that Rowling-Galbraith has been writing the Strike novels in playful parallel with her Harry Potter novels, you’ll find in the evidence Katya presents there — that Shanker is Nico ‘Mucky’ Ricci’s illegitimate son — a simultaneous proof that Strike’s Dark Side mate is a Severus Snape stand-in.

Katya has written up other great ideas about the series on the Cormoran Strike reddit page. Some of my favorites after a few days catching up with her writing since 2021 are Leda Had Another Child Before Strike, Longcasters and Legards, Leda’s Eggs and Robin’s Eggs, Cultural Allusions in Rokeby’s Flat, and Frozen Peas are a Frozen Eggs Metaphor. These relatively brief posts are all bold, text-based, explosive devices that either turn your thinking in a different direction than the author has been pushing us or reveals new depths to the series’ artistry and meaning. It’s good writing and thinking — and it’s fun, all reddit style.

The one Katya theory I felt I had to share with you, though, before Nick Jeffery and I talk next month with Ms Slonenko about her work is what she has written about tattoos in the Strike series. She’s written about them twice, first in late 2020 and again in 2023, both times to explore the meaning of Leda ‘Peggy Nancarrow’ Strike’s ‘Mistress of the Salmon Salt’ inking. Her theory about how Rowling uses tattoos that her Strellacott characters have been assigned doesn’t include any of the tatts in Hallmarked Man but the hypothesis holds up, as we’ll see.

I confess to being embarrassed, for reasons that will become obvious, that I didn’t take a closer look at the character tattoos in the Strike series, especially after reading Katya’s first post and writing about it in 2021. Katya, who asks to be referred to in these posts by her given name, has the advantage on all of us in one regard with respect to the meaning and importance of ink art; in addition to being a Serious Striker Order of Merit, First Class, multiple winner, Katya makes her living as a tattoo artist in Amsterdam.

Before going into some detail about what she noted concerning tattoos in the Strike series, I’m obliged to note that the older posts do not necessarily represent her current thinking on the subject. As she wrote to me last week:

About the “Mistress,” I last updated the theory in 2023, and since then, I have to confess, I drifted away from it. I chose to believe that Leda was on the Greater Good side of events. So there’s that. I am still certain that the tattoo will come up again, and will be excited to hear your opinion and the opinions of your readers; I’m just not prepared to defend this theory beyond what I’ve already written - I changed my mind! :D

We’ll be exploring her current tattoo ideas on our podcast conversation with her. of course.

This post comes in three parts:

• The textual appearances of the ‘Mistress of the Salmon Salt’ tattoo in Career of Evil with my notes;

• Katya’s review of the tattoos in the Cormoran Strike series and what each tells us about the character who has it; and

• Katya’s ideas about Leda Strike’s ‘Mistress of the Salmon Salt’ tattoo specifically and about its placement.

All three will come with my commentary with special emphasis on how tattoo interpretation fits into Rowling’s exteriorization principle and her texts-inside-texts Shed Golden Thread, but, really, all the heavy lifting was done in Katya’s reddit posts at r/Cormoran Strike.

(Credit: BBC)

Leda Strike’s “Obsession Really” with Blue Oyster Cult and Other Career of Evil ‘Mistress of the Salmon Salt’ Notes

The reader first learns about Strike’s familiarity with the Blue Oyster Cult song in the meeting with Metropolitan police officers Wardle and Ekwensi after Robin received a leg at the Agency’s front door in Career of Evil:

Wardle took the polythene-covered note and scanned it, frowning.

“It’s gibberish,” he said, then read aloud: “‘A harvest of limbs, of arms and of legs, of necks—’”

“‘—that turn like swans,’” interrupted Strike, who was leaning against the cooker and too far away to read the note, “‘as if inclined to gasp or pray.’”

The other three stared at him.

“They’re lyrics,” said Strike. Robin did not like the expression on his face. She could tell that the words meant something to him, something bad. With what looked like an effort, he elucidated: “From the last verse of ‘Mistress of the Salmon Salt.’ By Blue Öyster Cult.”

Detective Sergeant Ekwensi raised finely penciled eyebrows. (Career of Evil, ch 3)

Strike shares with Robin in their pub debrief later how he came to a memorized knowledge of the song and to his familiarity with the band, namely, through his mother Leda’s “obsession” with Blue Öyster Cult:

“Aren’t you even going to tell me,” Robin asked, after several more minutes’ silence, “what your connection with that song is?”

He chewed for a while, drank more beer, ordered another pint of Doom Bar then said, “My mother had the title tattooed on her.”

He did not fancy telling Robin exactly where the tattoo had been. He preferred not to think about that. However, he was mellowing with food and drink: Robin had never showed prurient interest in his past and he supposed she was justified in a request for information today.

“It was her favorite song. Blue Öyster Cult were her favorite band. Well, ‘favorite’ is an understatement. Obsession, really.”

“Her favorite wasn’t the Deadbeats?” asked Robin, without thinking. Strike’s father was the lead singer of the Deadbeats. They had never discussed him, either.

“No,” said Strike, managing a half-smile. “Old Jonny came a poor second with Leda. She wanted Eric Bloom, lead singer of Blue Öyster Cult, but she never got him. One of the very few who got away.”

Robin was not sure what to say. She had wondered before what it felt like to have your mother’s epic sexual history online for anybody to see. Strike’s fresh pint arrived and he took a swig before continuing.

“I was nearly christened Eric Bloom Strike,” he said and Robin choked on her water. He laughed as she coughed into a napkin. “Let’s face it, Cormoran’s not much bloody better. Cormoran Blue—”

“Blue?”

“Blue Öyster Cult, aren’t you listening?”

“God,” said Robin. “You keep that quiet.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“What does it mean, ‘Mistress of the Salmon Salt’?”

“Search me. Their lyrics are insane. Science fiction. Crazy stuff.”

A voice in his head: She wanted to die. She was the quicklime girl.

He drank more beer.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard any Blue Öyster Cult,” said Robin.

“Yeah, you have,” Strike contradicted her. “‘Don’t Fear the Reaper.’”

“Don’t—what?”

“It was a monster hit for them. ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper.’”

“Oh, I—I see.” (Career of Evil, ch 4)

Strike doesn’t share “exactly where the tattoo had been” on Leda’s body. He balks at looking it up online himself later, but Robin’s curiosity gets the better of her:

After sitting in thought for several more minutes, and with a sense that she was somehow betraying her boss, Robin typed Leda Strike into the search box and then, feeling guiltier than ever, naked.

The picture was black and white. The young Leda posed with her arms over her head, a long cloud of dark hair falling down over her breasts. Even in the thumbnail version, Robin could make out an arch of curly script set above the dark triangle of pubic hair. Squinting slightly, as though rendering the image a little fuzzy somehow mitigated her actions, Robin brought up the full-sized picture. She did not want to have to zoom in and nor did she need to. The words Mistress of were clearly legible.

The bathroom fan whirred into life next door. With a guilty start, Robin shut down the page she had been viewing. Matthew had lately developed a habit of borrowing her laptop and a few weeks previously she had caught him reading her emails to Strike. With this in mind, she reopened the web page, cleared her browsing history, brought up her settings and, after a moment’s consideration, changed her password to DontFearTheReaper. That would scupper him. (Career of Evil, ch 6)

The producers of the BBC teevee adaptation of the novels elected to go PG on their picture of this tattoo (above). Strike several chapters later reflects on the “voice in his head” he had heard talking about a “Quicklime Girl” in his pub talk with Robin. It turns out to have been the voice of his step-father, Jeff Whittaker, whom Strike remembers testifying in court about his mother’s death:

[Whittaker’s] voice had cracked melodramatically and he broke into dry sobs. Counsel for the defense hastened to ask whether he needed to take a moment.

It was then that Whittaker had shaken his head bravely and offered his gnomic pronouncement on Leda’s death:

“She wanted to die. She was the quicklime girl.”

Nobody else had understood the reference at the time, perhaps only Strike who had heard the song so many times through his childhood and adolescence. Whittaker was quoting from “Mistress of the Salmon Salt.”

He had walked free. The medical evidence supported the view that Leda had not been a habitual heroin user, but her reputation was against her. She had done plenty of other drugs. She was an infamous party girl. To the men in curled wigs whose job it was to classify violent deaths, it seemed wholly in character that she would die on a dirty mattress in pursuit of pleasure her mundane life could not give her. (Career of Evil, ch 10)

We get one more mention of Leda’s telling tattoo in Strike’s brief search of Donny Laing’s apartment before their climactic confrontation in Career:

The bulb was out in the only bedroom. Strike turned on the small torch he had brought with him and advanced slowly towards the only piece of furniture, a cheap pine wardrobe. The door creaked as he opened it.

The interior was plastered with articles from the newspapers about the Shacklewell Ripper. Taped above all of them was a picture that had been printed on a piece of A4 paper, possibly from the internet. Strike’s young mother, naked, arms over her head, her long cloud of dark hair not quite covering her breasts proudly displayed, an arch of curly script clearly visible over the dark triangle of pubic hair: Mistress of the Salmon Salt.

He looked down at the floor of the wardrobe where a pile of hard-core pornography sat beside a black bin bag. Putting the torch under his arm, Strike opened the latter with his latex-gloved hands. Inside was a small selection of women’s underclothing, some of it stiff with old brown blood. At the very bottom of the bag his fingers closed on a fine chain and a hoop earring. A heart-shaped harp charm glinted in the light of his torch. There was a trace of dry blood on the hoop. (Career of Evil, ch 61)

Rowling-Galbraith in Career of Evil repeatedly makes the lyric tattooed just above Leda Strike’s pudenda the object of her characters’ and her readers’ reflection. This intentional and pointed repetition reflects intentional artistry which in turn makes it a point for interpretation; what does it mean? To get this specific tattoo’s meaning, though, we need to grasp what tattoos in general mean in Cormoran Strike. Enter Katya Slonenko.

What Tattoos Mean in Cormoran Strike

From Katya’s 2023 ‘Mistress of the Salmon Salt Revisited:’

I hear you asking - why can’t Leda’s be just a tattoo, without any deeper meaning to it? That’s because all the other tattoos in the Strike books have meaning and provide a clue to their wearers’ characters.

Here are some examples:

• Kelsey Pratt’s One Direction tattoo is an obvious link to her being a One Direction fan. (How Leda’s tattoo is different? She chose the name of the particular song, not the more generic name of the band, to be tattooed on her)

• Laing’s rose pierced with a dagger bluntly means violence to women. Rose is a woman in the language of symbols, while the dagger is… well, a dagger.

• Polworth’s St Piran’s cross means he’s a Cornish patriot. I’ll be surprised if it also doesn’t mark him as The Hanged Man (a symbolic bearer of a cross)

• Portia Bayliss’s trident refers to her Caribbean roots

• Edie had a small black heart on the knuckles because she was the creator of ‘The Ink Black Heart’ cartoon.

• Zoe’s tattoos are of ‘The Ink Black Heart’ characters she identifies with.

• Pez Pierce has The Beatles quote around his neck - Strawberry Fields was (is?) a place in Liverpool.

• Union Jack, a skull, and a Nordic “Chaos” rune give a good impression of what the Turisaz character will be about (all tattooed on visible spots like head or neck - he wears them proudly!);

• Same with Algiz and Uruz, sans the Union Jack and the skull.

• Noli Seymour’s tattoo stands for “Golden Prophet”. It denotes her connection to the Universal Humanitarian Church and her status there as the current Golden Prophet.

• An ace of spades was inked onto his left cheek, and a tattooed tiger covered his throat. - Jordan Reaney’s tattoos are pretty telling, too.

• Not a character, but still - JK herself has a tattoo, “Solve et Coagula”, which means - “I’m a writer of an alchemical detective series!” :D

So you see, all these tattoos are chosen to reflect their owners’ personal histories. That’s generally a feature of Rowling’s writing: if she describes a character, every little detail works for the portrait she wants to paint. There are no details put there “just because” - everything is important. How the characters dress and speak, what they eat and drink, what music they listen to, and what tattoos they have tell us something about the character.

What does Leda’s tattoo contribute to her portrait?

Nothing!

In Career of Evil, when we learn of its existence, the tattoo adds literally nothing to Leda’s portrait. Why is it mentioned in the story to which it makes zero contribution, except for serving as a plot device enabling the killer’s obsession?

Because it will be important later.

I mentioned above that I was embarrassed that I hadn’t seen the importance of tattoos in the Strike series before reading Katya’s posts on Leda’s ‘Mistress of the Salmon Salt’ posts. I went all palm-to-forehead because tattoos are a combination of two of Rowling’s essential principles as an intentional artist.

(Credit: BBC)

The first of the two principles wrapped up in Rowling’s Strellacott Series ink-work is exteriorization.

I first encountered the word ‘exteriorizing’ or ‘externalization’ used with respect to Rowling’s work in Beatrice Groves’ seminal Literary Allusion in Harry Potter (112), who cites Klaus’ 2012 ‘A Fairy-tale Crew? J.K. Rowling’s Characters Under Scrutiny’ in Hallet’s J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter (New Casebooks) (26-27) for the idea, who in turn credits Kullman’s 2008 Englische Kinder-und Jugendliteratur: Eine Einfuhring (164) as her source. [See Groves’ 2019 essay on Fantastic Beasts for more on this.]

This is not, in short, John’s little hobby horse but a ‘given’ of Potter Punditry and Rowling Studies.

As I wrote up in my examination of Rowling’s The Christmas Pig as an extra-liturgical sacred art per the traditionalist reading, Perennialists understand sacred art as the work of an artisan who uses traditional forms in his work to imitate nature’s “methods of operations” rather than created nature itself. This artifact is the exteriorizing of the artisan’s inner essence or logos in conformity to the inspired or revealed forms of the Logos, the Creative Principle within that creates everything existent, visible and invisible.

‘Exteriorization’ of interior psychological conditions in this manner is what Rowling does best, frankly. It is the principle of allegory, frankly, alieni-loquium, ‘one thing standing for another,’ that informs Rowling’s literary alchemy, psychomachia, and mythological templates, i.e., making visible in story the invisible qualities and transformation of the soul. The reader of her workers is engaged in that transformative experience via imaginative identification with the character in chrysalis and consequent catharsis.

Take Harry Potter. Rowling populates her Hogwarts stories with magical items and creatures that “exteriorize” psychological phenomenon.

The exteriorizing of interior psychic states is most obvious in the various magical objects and creatures designed for just this purpose in Rowling’s ‘Wizarding World.’

• The Mirror of Erised reflects the person’s “heart’s desire” rather than their image.

• The boggart when confronted turns into the worse fears of anyone it meets.

• Howlers are letters which explode with the anger of the person writing.

• The Sorting Hat identifies the primary quality of every new student’s soul and proclaims it to the student body as the name of a Hogwarts House.

• Dumbledore’s Pensieve creates three dimensional experience of a memory and the MACUSA Death Pool similarly projects the doomed convict’s happy memories into the lethal black waters.

• The Room of Requirement changes into whatever space the person in need must have, be it a bathroom, an ever expanding secret headquarters for a resistance movement, or a dump for unwanted objects.

Each “externalisation of psychological phenomenon” creates “comprehensible, physical forms” of “complex emotions” and soul capacities (Groves 2017, 112, citing Klaus 26-7, citing Kullman 164).

Rowling is highlighting psychological interior elements, in other words, her characters’ fears, desires, repressed emotions, for her readers to look for in character behavior and language in addition to what can be seen in her exteriorizing devices. In Harry Potter, the Fantastic Beasts films, in Christmas Pig, and in the Strike-Ellacott mysteries, Rowling is writing allegorical drama of the soul’s journey to perfection or damnation, a match with the Martin Ling’s model for interpreting Shakespeare as sacred literary art (see the ‘Traditional Theory of Literature’ posts for Paid Subscribers for much more on this).

Tattoo interpretation as Katya Slonenko explains it is another example of Rowling-Galbraith exteriorization artistry. Being tattooed, because of its visibility and permanence, is by definition ‘message sending’ of the person tattooed understanding of themselves to others, even if the message is only “I am the kind of person who thinks body art is really neat.” In Rowling-World, however, the message in those characters with only one tattoo is their exteriorization or projection of what that person is about, a visible key to their psychological self-understanding.

As Katya points out, Rowling’s tattoo, ‘Solve et Coagula’ on the wrist of her writing hand, conforms to this exteriorizing principle. What is the key to understanding Rowling according to Rowling per her only visible tattoo? I read it to say:

“I write stories and live my life in order to advance the alchemical transformation in myself and readers as much as possible from the unconscious, historical, and psychological individuals we all are largely due to accident-of-birth and lived experience into ego-transcendent, intentionally spiritual, and loving persons transcending circumstances. Solve et Coagula means ‘I dissolve my unconscious existence and self understanding to recongeal myself as a more deliberate and consciously integrated image of the God Who is Love’.”

More mundanely, it might just mean, “I was crushed by life events and recovered via counseling, reflection, and deliberate choices.” It could even be a subtle reference to choices that changed her life from which she is recovering still.

What, though, does she think her tattoo means?

No idea! I’m confident that will be revealed only in the authorized biography rumor says is in the works or in the autobiography to be published after her death. [See my post about why Rowling went public with this tattoo just before she blew up Potter fandom’s idolization of her by supporting Maya Forstater for more on her hermetic self-understanding and exteriorization in ink.]

The second of the two principles that tattoos represent in the Strike series is Rowling’s penchant of providing texts-within-texts for readers to interpret alongside the story characters reading the interior narrative.

As I’ve written elsewhere, Rowling is a writer who writes about the experience of reading.

Every book and screenplay we have had from her to date has had, first, embedded texts which characters struggle to come to terms with and, more important, both good guys and bad guys create narratives they want others to believe in order to manipulate or trap them.

In Harry Potter, the two types of texts vary book to book, Chocolate Frog Card to Beedle the Bard, with the Prophecy linking Voldemort and the Boy Who Lived the ur-text behind the overall story. Dumbledore and the Dark Lord are the master manipulators through story-telling; think of how Tom Riddle, Jr., uses the Diary in Chamber to convince Harry that Hagrid is the Heir of Slytherin and dreams in Phoenix to get him to the Department of Mysteries — and Dumbledore’s use of select memories in the Pensieve in Prince to frame Harry’s understanding as the Headmaster wants it for Hallows. See Guest Post: David Martin reveals the Role of Books in the Hogwarts Saga for a full review.

In Strike, it is implicitly the false narrative created by the murderer to prevent detection of his or her crime. Explicitly, though, the books are crammed with other books and writing, fiction and real world non-fiction, e.g., Strike 2’s Bombyx Mori, Talbot’s True Book’s puzzle-pictures and Astrology 14 in Troubled Blood, ‘The Ink Black Heart’ cartoon in Ink Black Heart, and the Legend of Hiram Abiff and various Masonic texts in The Hallmarked Man.

Rowling’s dramas are protagonists and antagonists simultaneously dealing and dueling with stories just as we are struggling alongside them to figure out what the external creator of these internal authors and readers is doing.

I think it hard to overstate how important this is to grasping Rowling’s artistry and meaning; the goal of her story-telling is to foster greater reader ‘penetration,’ not only, not even especially while reading but in how we see and think after what we’ve experienced as serious readers. We are meant to learn from our decoding and deciphering the dueling narratives and to realize again and again that like the characters we were deceived and need to be more attentive and less gullible in future. She achieves this transformed vision in her readers through a variety of fascinating traditional tools, from literary alchemy to ring composition, but always by providing us with a mirror within the story we are reading both of characters trying to understand a text and white and black hats writing a story to deceive them.

And tattoos?

Rowling puts tattoos on her imaginary characters’ flesh as written texts, words or pictogram images, for her characters and her readers to interpret, to penetrate, in order to understand the person beneath the ink.

So, what does ‘Mistress of the Salmon Salt’ mean, in itself and in its placement just above Leda Strike’s pudenda?

The ‘Mistress of the Salmon Salt’ Tattoo

In late 2020, Katya thought that Leda Strike was saying, “If you can read this, you’re in danger of being murdered.” For her full exegesis, see ‘Why did Leda have a “Mistress of the salmon salt” tattoo? Because she was the quicklime girl. And what’s that?’

In Career of Evil, we learn that Leda Strike had “Mistress of the Salmon Salt” tattooed on her lower belly. Of course, Blue Oyster Cult was her favourite band, but why choose this particular song? What did it mean to her? What sort of a unique connection does it have with her life and death?

She provides a definition for ‘quicklime’ and its historical use:

What is quicklime, in case you wonder? (I did). Quicklime is another name for calcium oxide, a compound made by the thermal decomposition of limestone. And limestone is that thing white cliffs of Cornwall is made of. Could that connect Leda to her Cornish roots? Not likely, if you ask me. Leda hated her roots. She ran away from home young, changing her Cornish name and never going back to stay.

Could the tattoo be a metaphor for her transformation then? From limestone to quicklime through some sort of thermal decomposition? That sounds more plausible. I catch a whiff of Rowling-esque alchemy here. :D Was “Mistress of the Salmon Salt” Leda’s “Solve et Coagula”? Maybe.

That, of course, if we presume that Leda got the tattoo because “she was the quicklime girl”. Whittaker probably thought so, but did Leda herself? After all, she didn’t get “Quicklime girl” written (which would be shorter and less painful! :D). Was that simply because “mistress” sounds better and more empowering than “girl”?

Or, could it mean something deeper and more sinister? That is what we learn from Wikipedia about the use of the quicklime:

• Disposal of corpses: Historically, it was believed that quicklime was efficacious in accelerating the decomposition of corpses. This was quite mistaken, and the application of quicklime can even promote preservation; although it can help eradicate the stench of decomposition, which may have led people to suppose it was the actual flesh which had been consumed.

Katya then shares links to the lyrics of the ‘Salmon Salt’ song and how Blue Oyster Cult fans understand the song:

And even more disturbing [than the ‘disposal of corpses’ use of quicklime,] there is a general opinion among the Blue Oyster Cult fans what the “Mistress of the Salmon Salt” lyrics is all about:

Its lyrics describe a woman, implied to be a prostitute, who murders soldiers on shore leave.

WHHHAT?!

Yep. Lots of comments in different corners of the Internet share this view:

• This song is not the peaceful pastoral idyll about gardening and the cycles of life that the lyrics and upbeat folky tune suggest at first listening. It concerns a female serial killer who disposes of men in quicklime after having sex with them. The Quicklime Girl is something of a monster to be feared. (here)

Blue Oyster Cult was Leda Strike’s favorite band, and Mistress of the Salmon Salt was her favorite song. She liked the song so much she listened to it time and again and even got the title tattooed on her. What was in the song that resonated with Leda?... There is a general agreement around the internet (1, 2, 3) that Mistress of the Salmon Salt is a song about a serial killer.

You can read the lyrics here or listen to the song here. It’s very metaphorical, but all in all, the lyrics go about a woman who lures her victims with sex and kills them “on the shore”. Leda, the true fan of Blue Oyster Cult, must’ve known that - and J K Rowling, a cunning author who puts a lot of research into her source material, certainly does! Then why, god, WHY, did they (the author and the character) choose the title of that particular song as Leda’s tattoo?..

… What does it say about Leda? What made her relate to the Mistress of the Salmon Salt? This song must have felt truly about her (even if not actually dedicated to her).

Could it be that the life of Leda Strike presents even more mysteries than her death? Is it possible that Strike’s future cathartic revelation would not only include the answer to the question “who killed Leda?” but more to the - “who she really was?”

As I wrote in 2021 after learning about Katya’s post, the message of ‘Mistress of the Salmon Salts’ seems to be ‘Beware!’

The accepted interpretation of the Blue Oyster Cult lyrics according to the sources Katya shares is that the Quick Lime Girl was a prostitute-murderer who preyed on Coast Guard sailors on shore leave, i.e., those who paid for sex with her became corpses buried under quicklime in the Salmon Salts of Long Island.

It’s hard to read that as anything other than a warning, no? As Janice Beattie shares at the end of Troubled Blood, “Actions have consequences.”

More to the point, the ‘Beware!’ message is placed where it is for a specific audience.

The distinguishing characteristic of the tattoo is its placement. Pretty unusual, no, to put a tattoo where she did? It has a pretty limited audience, namely, those who see her in the nude, and, forgive me, those who might have their eyes at that level, not just looking at but with their eyes in her pudenda.

The obvious interpretation of the tattoo is that Leda was sending a coded message (’Don’t say I didn’t warn you!’) to her lovers that sex with her, if only for pleasure or exploitation, came at a high price for, even the life of the offender.

“Screw this woman and you’ll be screwed royally, fucker” seems a likely interpretation. “Don’t Fuck With Me” would be the bumper sticker abbreviation.

So What?

The tattoo and the repetition by Whittaker of the lyric repeatedly at his trial, not to mention Donny Laing’s sharing it with Robin and Cormoran in the message he sent with the severed leg (he knows it was her tattoo only via images online) mean that Rowling-Galbraith wants us to think and think again about this lyric.

We have it’s obvious meaning and for whom it was meant. What are we supposed to make of that?

My first guess was that Whittaker only figured out the tattoo’s meaning after Leda’s suicide put him in the Dock for murder at the Old Bailey. He believed that she committed suicide in the way she did because she knew the police and her family and friends would think he did it and lock him up for years, maybe decades. “She was the Quicklime Girl” to Whittaker meant, “Damn! Screwing with her and her kids has meant my death...”

This is significant evidence that Whittaker did not kill Leda himself but that he believed she did top herself to pre-empt and punish him for threatening to kill her or their son.

It is not evidence that Leda actually did kill herself. The murder could have been staged by anyone wanting Leda dead or wanting to frame Whittaker or both. We have good reason via Katya’s close reading of Shanker’s past to think that he and the Riccis are somehow involved. But Whittaker’s quoting of the pudenda lyric line in the Dock suggests strongly that in her death he believed Leda had turned the tables on him the way the Quicklime Girl did those Coast Guard sailors.

In Mistress of the Salmon Salt revisited (2023), Katya reviewed why we’re almost sure to get an answer to the mystery of this inked text before the series closes:

If you’re about to argue that Leda’s story is done and will never be returned to, consider this:

• In a mystery series about a detective striving for justice, a huge unsolved mystery is announced right in the first book. The injustice of that mystery haunts the main hero in every book. Personally, I’d find it very disappointing if it was left untied.

• Nearly all other books feature a storyline from the past that nobody expected to be solved, but that was solved. (Charlie Bristow’s murder, pushing Elspeth Kerr to kill herself, the horse mystery in LW, Margo Bamborough, Daiyu). Deep in the past is not a problem.

• Nearly all the other cases proved to have a personal connection to Strike’s life: Charlie was his classmate; he took Leonora’s case because he was sorry for the girl with a missing father; the killer in CoE was obsessed with Strike himself; Margo disappeared in 1974 - the year Strike was born; he investigated his ex’s ex-husband; then the cult that grew on top of the community he spent his worst time in… There must be a case even more personal to Strike’s than these - and what it can be if not Leda’s murder, which’s already been hanging there since book 1?..

• No suicide in this series is a simple suicide. Nobody has attempted to kill themselves without coercion or bullying (Elspeth Kerr, Rhiannon Winn, Edie, Gigi Cazanove, Alex Graves, Cherie), or, more often than not, suicides turn out to be murders. (Charlie Bristow, Lula Laundry, Rochelle Onifade, Dowthwait’s girlfriend, Jasper Chiswell). It makes me highly doubt that Leda killed herself - and Charlotte, too….

• Unlike now, it was much less common for a woman in the 80s or 90s to get a tattoo with her favorite band’s lyrics. Consider societal pressure (no self-respecting woman had visible tattoos, even among rock stars, back then) and a much narrower choice of hygienic tattoo shops to walk into. So, Leda must’ve put a significant effort into getting this (one and only as far as we know) tattoo - and Rowling certainly did in choosing a suitable lyric for her!

Katya then reviewed the “main points” of the extended reddit conversation about the meaning of Leda’s ‘Mistress of the Salmon Salt’ tattoo consequent to her first post:

The post I made three years ago sparked a fascinating discussion, and we covered a lot of possibilities there. I suggest you read it yourself, but here are the main points:

• Who did Leda kill? We don’t know. :D (Dave Polworth’s father was on the table once, but their timelines didn’t match).

• How did she kill them? The song suggests she was offering them sex before killing.

• What did she do with corpses? We actually have a good idea about that! “She was the quicklime girl“. Quicklime is used to decompose corpses chemically and is available in abundance in Cornwall.

• Why would Leda be killing anyone? Means before motive, but we slid right into discussing motives of course! :D Revenge to abusers, general “badness”, and possible mental illness were mentioned.

• Greek myth exploration: the name “Leda“ suggests that Leda Strike was a survivor of sexual abuse; otherwise, why naming her Leda, do you know any real person with that name? Me neither.

• Zeus raped mythological Leda in the guise of a swan. A theme of disguise and its importance for the Strike series. Rapists disguising himself as something else (a gorilla mask comes to mind).

• Mythological Leda is the mother of four people responsible for the start of the Trojan War: Castor and Pollux, Helena and Clytemnestra. Leda Strike was a mother of Strike, Lucy, Switch, and Shanker - which one of those is Helena, you decide, but I personally vote for Strike. 😀

• Finally, who killed Leda and why? We have no idea, but it must be someone already introduced. Uncle Ted, Lucy, Shanker, Rokeby, Gillespie? The possibilities and reasoning are covered in the comments there.

Do you want to discuss any of these subjects? Do you have any theories or ideas, or maybe just want to express your disbelief and anger? :D Anyways, it would bring me joy if we could continue discussing Leda as a killer again!

As noted above, Katya no longer thinks Leda was a serial killer.

Of all these points, there are three I want to explore here briefly before opening the floor to your comments.

1. Leda was confessing to her lovers in the tattoo as much as warning them that she as ‘Quicklime Girl’ was a murderer, even a serial killer, i.e., that her lovers were somehow cursed, doomed to die for entering these gates;

Everything that Rowling has written about Leda Strike, nee Peggy Nancarrow, has been positive. Well, Aunt Joan didn’t like her much and daughter Lucy certainly wasn’t a fan, but everyone else seems to have thought of her as troubled, yes, but funny, intelligent, beautiful, and loving. Not a great mother perhaps by conventional measures, but a woman who cared for her children as well as her mental condition and inherent instability allowed.

Which is why the tattoo of a lyric about a Jacqueline the Ripper, a prostitute who murders her Johns, over her pubic hair is so jarring. Her seemingly benign nature and the ‘Mistress’ message conjoined raises the possibility that she felt guilty or responsible for the misfortune that happened to men who had sex with her.

Which suggests further -

2. that ‘Leda’ chose that name because she was the victim of sexual abuse by a person of godlike authority in her life, rape that resulted in pregnancy, maybe more than once, which abuse and pregnancy, the tattoo reports, ended in murder that no one knows about;

The Golden Thread of incest that runs through Rowling’s work and which was highlighted in The Hallmarked Man’s Decima-Rupert-Lion plotline has raised the possibility that either Leda was the fruit of incest between her mother and her much older brother Ted or that she was sexually abused by her father Trevik (or both). If Trevik’s abuse included rape that resulted in pregnancy, the murders implicit to the tattoo’s message and consequent to that crime could be Ted’s killing Trevik, Leda’s terminating the pregnancy, or, again, both.

Which House of Horrors would explain a lot.

• Leda’s choice of names,

• her identification with the ‘Mistress of the Salmon Salt’ lyrics,

• her mental instability and internal conflicts about sex and marriage,

• her love of her living children (and refusal to murder them in utero),

• her succubine lifestyle qua ‘groupie,’ and

• her decision to flee Cornwall as soon as she was of age.

I suspect readers find this speculation sobering, disgusting, or a reflection more of my issues than real story possibilities. Fair enough! There’s a big ick factor in incest, combining as it most often does rape with child abuse, I get it.

But Rowling goes there as often as not — and Sophocles and Freud think she’s talking about fundamental issues beneath human tragedies when she weaves incest into her dramas. It’s not just me.

3. Finally, the idea of ‘rape in disguise’ linking Leda with her swan to Robin with her gorilla-masked rapist.

Ed Shardlow wrote on the Hogwarts Professor Moderator Backchannels last week that there had to be something in the coincidence of ‘Mistress of the Salmon Salts’ and ‘Maid of the Silver Sea’ beyond their initials (though MOTSS has a fascinating history which may be a Rowling inside joke for her LGB friends and fans). Is Rowling trying to link the characters connected with those titles?

Leda Strike is the obvious candidate for ‘Mistress of the Salmon Salt.’ She labeled herself with that tag literally and indelibly.

Which Strike character best qualifies for Maid of the Silver Sea’s Nance Harmon? If you haven’t read the story, Beatrice Groves gave this thumb-nail sketch of the character before the publication of Hallmarked Man:

Sark’s silver proves elusive [in the Oxenham story], but in the novel it is replaced by a woman – Nance – who is worth her weight in gold: ‘he would give all the silver in the mines of Sark to win her appreciation and regard’ (Chap 7); ‘Gard, as he watched her, felt like a discoverer of hidden treasure, overwhelmed and intoxicated with the wonder of unexpected riches. He had come to this wild little land of Sark after silver, and he said to himself that he had found a pearl beyond price’ (Chap 11). Nance is the true treasure of Sark – the prize of Gard’s life: ‘and, if he had incurred unreasonable dislike, he had also lighted on the virgin lode of Nance’s love and trust, and that, he said to himself with a glow of gratitude, outweighed all else’ (Chap 20). The phrase ‘virgin lode’ connects Nance (the ‘maid’ of the title) with silver mining via a metaphor of metal as ‘virgin.’ This is a word used for metal ‘of great purity, esp. occurring naturally in an uncombined state’ (The Oxford English Dictionary). But ‘virgin lode’ is not a general mining term – rather it is a specific reference to Gard’s Cornish roots. It recalls the Cornish mines of West Wheal Virgin and Wheal Virgin, and the seam (or ‘virgin lode’) which was the most important and lucrative find of those mines: ‘the most important lode was Virgin Lode which was stopped or over 1.3 miles (2.1 km).’ Gard unconsciously connects Nance with his Cornish roots, just as Strike’s first thoughts on falling for Robin connect her with Trevaylor Woods and his Cornish childhood.

(Credit: BBC/Sam Taylor)

Robin Ellacott is our best bet for the Strike series’ ‘Maid of the Silver Sea.’

Is Rowling suggesting in having these MOTSS tags on both Leda and Robin that ‘all men marry their mothers’ per folk wisdom and Freudian psychology, that Strike senses a common element in the life of his mum and his business partner?

If so, then the odds on Leda Strike having been raped by a man in disguise (perhaps a man who was not what he seemed to be to others, her father Trevik?) as Robin was by the gorilla-man, go way up. The two women would have in common their more or less successful struggle to recover from that violation and regain a life not defined in large part by that assault.

Hat doffed once again to Katya Slonenko and the Serious Strikers at r/Cormoran Strike for spying the importance of Leda Strike’s ‘Mistress of the Salmon Salts’ tattoo and their exegetical efforts to explain it! I look forward to reading what the Hogwarts Professor All Pros make of Katya’s idea and my glosses on her work — have at it in the comment boxes below.

Last week Nick Jeffery and I spoke with Fiona F, a Serious Striker from Adelaide, Australia, who argued via ‘Means Before Motive’ that Shanker and the Ricci Gang in Clerkenwell had to be considered persons of interest, even suspects, in the death of Leda Strike. Fiona thought they were at least as likely as Jeff Whittaker to have done the job or known who did it, if only because Strike is so sure his step-father did it. See The Mysterious Suicides of Leda Strike and Charlotte Campbell Revisited Post Hallmarked Man for Fiona’s detective work.

As soon as we posted that, Ed Shardlow shared a url to an October 2025 post at Reddit’s r/CormoranStrike boards, Is Shanker Mucky Ricci’s son?. The author of that post, Katya Slonenko, argued Shanker was not only related to the Ricci’s through the drug deal Strike remembered in Troubled Blood (ch 27; 308-310), he was in fact one of Nico Ricci’s illegitimate children.

No doubt that seems a crazy stretch to you, an ‘out there’ theory from the Wild West fandom that posts on the reddit boards. I know Katya Slonenko, though. She’s brilliant, frankly, and I’ve posted my notes to another theory she had, that one way back in 2021, Leda Strike: Mistress of the Salmon Salt (about which pudenda tattoo, more in another post). After reading her Shanker theory, I reached out to her to ask permission to summarize and quote from her reddit notes here and to invite her to talk with me and Nick next month. She’s agreeable on both counts (and asks that I refer to her simply as ‘Katya’ in my notes below).

Allan Blackburn wrote last week about Fiona’s deductions, “I'm always staggered at the 'firepower' brought to bear on the Strike novels by really well informed individuals proposing outcomes from clues in the novels.” To which I can only say, “Same.” What follows is not my work except for my filling out the relatively telegraphic writing style of reddit posting; the research and insights in my summary and text citations are all from Katya and the redditors at r/CormoranStrike, to whom with Fiona I tip my hat for bringing Shanker and the Riccis out of the shadows.

Here is the heart of Katya’s argument:

Hear me out.

• ‘Jewellery. (...) Got that tip off me old man, before’e went senile,’ said Shanker. (...) ‘You can fuckin’ smirk, but ‘e ‘ad kids wiv abou’ ten diff’rent women. (...) Well, ‘e ‘ad a nine-inch cock as well.’

I thought, wait a moment, haven’t we already seen an old demented father of many children, who’d given his son tips on how to win a woman back, and who had a nine-inch cock somewhere in the books?..

Yes, we have. That man was Mucky Ricci.

The son was Luca, and the woman was Gloria. (A piece of jewellery - a ring - was also featured in that story.) Granted, it wasn’t explicitly stated that the nine-inch cock belonged to Ricci - Betty Fuller just says “a geezer”, - so I’ll omit it from the arguments below. :D

Here are the things about Shanker:

• He’s coming from a big clan of professional criminals in Clerkenwell, London - what are the chances that there are two such clans in the Ricci’s area?

• He deals cocaine and is good with a knife - The Riccis deal cocaine and are famous for knifing police informers (Kara Wolfson).

• His father had (has?) dementia, which we learn about in TRG, two books after demented Mucky Ricci appears. Literally every time Shanker speaks of his father, he mentions dementia (in TRG and THM), so it must be important.

• Mucky owned strip clubs; Shanker’s civil wife is a stripper.

• Shanker and Mucky Ricci have met in person.

• Shanker looks pretty informed about the details of Mucky’s life: he shares with Strike that he started a part of the Sabini gang as a kid, that he received his ring from Danny the Lion (the mobster, not the porn actor from THM), and that he’s now “in an ‘ome”, “gaga”. You can say it’s general knowledge, but there is no other criminal in London about whom Shanker shares personal details, just this one.

• According to Shanker, that’s because he had business with Mucky’s eldest, Luca. About Luca. There are similarities in Robin’s first reaction to Shanker in CoE and her reaction to Luca Ricci in TB: Compare how these descriptions are worded: “Clanging footsteps on the stairs outside made her brace herself. The door opened. Robin looked up. The man who stood there was not Strike. Primal, instinctive fear ripped through her. There was no time to analyse why the stranger had such an effect on her; she only knew that he was dangerous”.

• Vs. “The footsteps grew louder, and then the door opened to reveal a very tall man whose face was pitted with acne scars and whose knobbly bald head looked, as Barclay had said, as though something heavy had been dropped on it: Luca Ricci. She could feel the sweat on her breastbone now, where it would be visible to Luca. (...) She could feel the potential for violence coming off him like radiation.”

• Both start as distant footsteps and cause an involuntary physical reaction from Robin. Could they be described so similarly, because they are brothers?

(Also, Shanker didn’t tell everything to Strike, and from THM we know that he also has business with Mucky’s middlest, Marco. Or at least, they are both associated with Barnaby’s.)

If the Riccis were a rival gang, why wouldn’t Shanker take a chance of them being taken down by Strike and the Met? The answer is - because they are not a rival gang.

I hear you saying, the Riccis are Italians, and Shanker is pure London! But let me tell you this in Strike’s own words, albeit about Whittaker, not Shanker: He was born in Yorkshire, but now he’s pure cockney. There’s something about the capital that does it to you.

There’s more to Katya’s Shanker-Ricci theory that we’ll get to but let’s fill in the textual blanks to be sure of the evidence she cites above on the fly. First, the Hallmarked Man conversation between Shanker and Strike in which we learn that the Criminal with a Heart of Gold, Strike’s childhood friend, had a well-endowed dad who had a way of keeping his women on board and who had since “gone senile:”

He stood ready to oppose any mooted plan of revenge or intimidation against a single mother whose eldest child had been seriously ill, but Shanker responded,

‘Jewelry.’

‘Jewelry,’ repeated Strike.

‘Got that tip off me old man, before ’e went senile,’ said Shanker. ‘Women never say no to jewelry. Only useful fing ’e ever fuckin’ told me. They don’ chuck it, an’ then they fink about you every time they fuckin’ look at it.’

‘Wise counsel,’ said Strike.

‘You can fuckin’ smirk, but ’e ’ad kids wiv abou’ ten diff’rent women.’

‘By giving them all jewelry?’

‘Well, ’e ’ad a nine-inch cock as well,’ said Shanker, and Strike laughed. (Hallmarked Man, ch 21)

Shanker has used different words for his dad’s mental decline in previous works but he always brings it up:

‘Yeah,’ said Strike, slipping his phone back in his pocket. ‘Well, my uncle might have dementia, I don’t know. My mum’s brother,’ he added.

‘Yeah?’ said Shanker. ‘Sorry to ’ear that. Fuckin’ bitch, dementia. My old man ’ad it.’

‘Didn’t know that,’ said Strike. (Running Grave, ch 33)

When Strike asked him in Troubled Blood about the man wearing the ring from his memory of delivering drugs back in the day, Shanker tells him the man was Nico ‘Mucky’ Ricci and that he is “gaga” and “in an ‘ome” — but still very dangerous:

“Well, Clerkenwell, that was the old Sabini stamping ground, warn’t it? And I s’pose even gangsters need doctors sometimes.”

“It was a party,” said Strike. “Not a surgery. Why would Mucky Ricci be at a doctors’ party?”

“Dunno,” said Shanker. “Anyone need killing?”

“Funny you should ask that,” said Strike. “I’m investigating the disappearance of a woman who was there that night.”

Shanker looked sideways at him.

“Mucky Ricci’s gaga,” he said quietly. “Old man now, innit.”

“Still alive, though?”

“Yer. ’E’s in an ’ome.”

“How d’you know that?”

“Done a bit o’ business wiv ’is eldest, Luca.”

“Boys in the same line of work as their old man?”

“Well, there ain’t no Little Italy gang any more, is there? But they’re villains, yeah,” said Shanker. Then he leaned across the table and said quietly, “Listen to me, Bunsen. You do not wanna screw wiv Mucky Ricci’s boys.”

It was the first time Shanker had ever given Strike such a warning.

“You go fuckin’ wiv their old man, you try pinnin’ anyfing on ’im, the Ricci boys’ll skin ya. Understand? They don’t fuckin’ care. They’ll torch your fuckin’ office. They’ll cut up your girl.”

“Tell me about Mucky. Anything you know.”

“Did you ’ear what I just said, Bunsen?”…

“That occurred to me,” said Strike. “Hence—”

“Fuck your fucking ‘hence,’” said Shanker fiercely. “If the bint was taken out by Mucky Ricci or any of his boys, she’s past fuckin’ savin,’ in’t she? I know you like bein’ the boy scout, mate, but the last guy who pissed off Luca Ricci, his wife opened the door few days later and got acid thrown in her face. Blind in one eye, now.

“You wanna drop this, Bunsen. If Mucky Ricci’s the answer, you need to stop askin’ the question.” (Troubled Blood, ch 27; 310-311)

So, connecting the Shanker-Ricci dots, we know from Strike 5 that Shanker knows the Riccis, knows colorful stories about the clan’s Godfather, and knows his current condition and location. Note that he calls Mucky “old man,” a phrase he also uses for his father. Shanker told Strike in Running Grave that his father had dementia, something he confirms in Hallmarked Man. He also reports there that his dad had a large penis, large enough that he knew its exact legendary nine-inch length.

Katya remembers that Betty Fuller had a run-in with a “geezer” with one of those power-tools but discounts the connection with Ricci. I think she’s hasty! At the beginning of her Troubled Blood interview with both Robin and Cormoran in the room she reports why she needed a house-call from the local clinic:

Betty Fuller suddenly grinned at him, showing chipped yellow teeth.

“You ever taken it… up the shitter… with a nine-inch cock?”

Only by exercising the utmost restraint did Robin prevent herself letting out a shocked laugh. She had to hand it to Strike: he didn’t so much as grin as he said,

“Can’t say I have.”

“Well,” wheezed Betty Fuller, “you can… take it from me… fuckin’… agony… geezer went at me… like a fucking power drill… split my arsehole open.” (Troubled Blood, ch 56; 690)

Maybe “nine-inch cock” is a Clerkenwell or Cockney euphemism for “really big” rather than a precise measurement so there’s nothing to be made of both Betty and Shanker describing a Clerkenwell man with that in his pants. Must be a bunch of men like that in every London neighborhood, right?

Here’s the thing (sic); Betty opens their rest home conversation with that report — a man who hurts her so much by drilling her anally that she needs medical attention, the mark of a sadist who knew exactly what he was doing, and closes her conversation with Strike by talking about Mucky Ricci and the snuff film he made of Kara Wolfson’s death:

“I met ’er… coupla years later… visitin’ ’er mum… and she tole me a story.

“Girl at their club… gorgeous girl, Jen said… got raped… knifepoint. Cut…” said Betty Fuller, indicating her own sagging torso, “right down the ribs… by a mate… of Ricci’s…

“Some people,” said the old woman, “fink a hooker… being raped… it just means she never… got paid…’spect your Miss Stick-Up-’Er-Arse,” said Betty, glancing at the window, “finks that… but it ain’t that…

“This girl… angry… wants revenge… get back… at Ricci… so the silly bitch… turns police informer…

“And Mucky found out,” wheezed Betty Fuller, “and ’e filmed it… as they killed ’er. My mate Jen was told… by someone… what ’ad seen… the film… Ricci kept it… in the safe… show people… if they needed… scaring…

“Jen’s dead now,” said Betty Fuller. “Overdosed… firty-odd years ago… fort she’d be better… up West… and ’ere’s me… workin’ the streets… still alive.” (Troubled Blood, ch 56; 696-7)

I think Rowling-Galbraith having Betty refer to Robin as “Miss Stick-Up-’Er-Arse” while relating a story about psycho-killer Mucky Ricci, one with which she shuts down her conversation with Cormoran, is for us to make the connection with the psychopathic misogynist who she said at the start put his tree limb up her bum.

And the jewelry advice? As Katya wrote, Mucky went to the Christmas party at the Clerkenwell clinic to scare Gloria into reconciling with Luca — who soon after pops the question with the necessary hardware. As Gloria told Robin and Strike forty years later:

“After he’d calmed down, he let me go home to my grandparents” house, but he wanted to see me again later. It was always like that after he’d been really violent. He wanted extra contact.

“He hadn’t beaten me in the face. He never did, he never lost control like that, so I went back to my grandparents” and acted as though everything was fine. Went out to meet Luca that night, and he took me out for dinner, and that was the night he proposed, with a ring and everything.

“And I said yes,” said Gloria, with a strange smile and a shrug. “I put that ring on, and I looked down at it, and I didn’t even have to act happy, because I genuinely was. I thought That’ll buy some of my plane ticket. Mind you, I’d never flown before in my life. The idea of it scared me. But all the time, I could see Margot in my head. You’ve got to be brave, Gloria. (Troubled Blood, ch 66; 831)

So dementia, a jewelry trick, and a nine-inch cock are things Shanker’s dad and Mucky Ricci have in common. That’s pretty compelling linkage, even if everyone but Strike makes their marriage proposal with a ring.

Now add in all the extra connections in Katya’s reddit post:

• Shanker’s knowledge of the Ricci clan, especially Mucky,

• his Strike-witnessed working with Mucky in drug deals, and, the best catch of the theory in my opinion,

• the reaction Robin had to both Shanker and Luca at their first meeting, the fun-house mirror upside-down reflection of the attraction half-siblings feel for another intuitively. Robin is viscerally repulsed and afraid of the half-sibling Ricci boys.

This ‘Shanker is a Ricci’ idea leaves us pretty much in the same place that Fiona’s ‘Means before Motive’ exploration of Leda’s death brought us, namely, that Shanker has to go way up the ‘person of interest’ list in any investigation of Strike’s mother’s mysterious death and the Riccis must be considered suspects. Katya argues that Shanker fears Luca, not only because his half-brother is a lunatic, but because everyone with a half-sibling should be on their guard in the Strike novels:

All in all, I think, Shanker is not afraid of Mucky Ricci; he’s afraid of Luca Ricci, who’s an “absolute psycho” and another example of a jealous murderous (half-)sibling that are so populous across the series: John Bristow, Donald Laing, Freddie Chiswell, Gus Upcott, Abigail Glover.

Jealous, because he didn’t have his father’s attention like Shanker did. (Luca tells Robin in Troubled Blood that their father never had time for them before Marco was hit by a car, which happened in 1974. Which, if I’m not mistaken, is also the year of Shanker’s birth.)

Because it looks to me that Shanker had as good a relationship with his father as was possible in the context. It feels like Mucky was present in Shanker’s life because the stories like how he became a part of the Sabini gang (like a famous rock band of a criminal world, I presume), or how he got his ring, sound exactly like something a father would tell his (probably estranged) son.

Also, for what he is, Shanker tries to be as good a father as possible in his context. Somewhat repeating his family pattern.

Shanker doesn’t sound either fearful or angry when he talks about Mucky - only about Luca. At present, he is the danger.

On top of these brilliant connections, Katya then takes a stab, if you will, at solving two other Shanker mysteries.

• What is Shanker’s name?

• Why hasn’t he killed Jeff Whittaker after all these years if he’s so convinced that Leda’s second husband killed her?

The name thing is a hoot and I really wish I had spotted it. Katya explains:

I think we can agree that Shanker’s real name is somehow important. It’s not that important that Strike would remember it, but it’s important enough to be kept secret for eight books.

If I’m right and he’s Mucky Ricci’s son, we can deduce two things:

• He didn’t grow up in the same family as Luca and Marco, and most likely uses his mother’s last name. Strike would definitely make an effort and remember if Shanker’s last name were “Ricci.”

• Given that two of Mucky’s sons are named Luca and Marco, I suggest that there’s a high probability that he also has sons named the variations of “John” and “Matthew”. And if I had to choose between the two above, my money would be on John, because MFC [Matthew F’in Cunliffe] would most probably remind Strike of Shanker’s real name.

Hence, I predict Shanker’s name to be John or a derivative: Shaun, Sean, Evan, Giovanni (haha), Jack, Jan, Jon, Ian, or such….

And another one. Isn’t it sad that the “John” fish died (Travolta), and now we’re afraid that the new “John” fish (Elton) is going to gulp it sooner or later, too? Yeah. Is it a possible Shanker [death] foreshadowing?

She notes, too, that ‘Shanker’ is cockney slang for ‘wanker,’ but I suspect it is much more likely to be a reflection of the shorter word shank’s slang meaning of ‘the stabbing of a person with an improvised knife in a prison.’ A ‘shanker’ in this context would simply mean someone good with a knife or who stabs others as a reflex.

Why hasn’t Shanker shanked Whittaker after all these years? It’s the first thing he thinks Strike has in mind in Career of Evil when the detective asks his adopted brother to help him find his step-father. Katya’s theory is that it is because Shanker’s name at birth may have been ‘Giovanni Ricci’ but his secret identity is ‘Severus Snape.’

In a nutshell, Katya argues that Shanker is a police informer and not just any police force. He’s working with MI5.

Of course, Shanker can be an offspring of another, yet unknown, super-violent and very dangerous cocaine-dealing and knife-wielding clan.

But what would be the narrative value of revealing that vs the narrative value of having Shanker, Strike’s “brother”, to be a Ricci all along! A “good” Ricci, saved by the imperfect woman Strike’s mother was—a Trojan Shanker, “the agent of the Adversary” in our camp.

It also puts Shanker prominently on the list of persons of interest connected to Leda’s death, even though he was not present when she was dying. He was away on a cocaine-dealing duty, which is a convincing alibi, as we know from TCC :D

It puts the Riccis there, too. If Leda (accidentally) learned something about them from Shanker, she could be on their hit list. Albeit, their MO is very different from quietly overdosing the victims.

Shanker cried at Whittaker’s trial and yelled, “That fucker’s done it!” - Did he want to get Whittaker committed because he believed he’d done it, or because he didn’t want the investigation to go in whatever possible “Ricci” direction? Just like he didn’t want Strike to dig anywhere near the Riccis in Troubled Blood and The Hallmarked Man. “If Mucky Ricci is your answer, you need to stop asking questions.”

Actually, every time Strike starts digging close to the Riccis, Shanker becomes especially grim in his warnings. And he also sounds afraid.

From The Hallmarked Man:

• “Ooo’s grassed?’ said Shanker furiously. (...) ‘Fuck, you ain’t wiv a pig right now, are ya?’.

His range went from “cagey” to “furious”, which we haven’t seen him yet. Why is that?

(Sigh.)

My theory is that he’s a double agent working undercover to undermine the Riccis and has been doing it since (and because of) Leda’s death.

Here, I said it! And by “double agent”, I mean that he’s also a police informer.

Shanker is a police informer.

Shanker gives info to Strike, so is it really that impossible to suggest that Strike is not his only confidant?

• “’Ow do I know? Know enough o’the fuckin’ cocksuckers, dontcha?”

• “They speak hightly of you, too,” said Strike.

That little dialogue made me think: what if Strike accidentally hit the spot, and Shanker is already working with the police? Unbelievable as it might seem, I went and reread every Shanker conversation there is across the books, and I discovered a pattern.

Every time there is a suspicion that someone has “grassed” or “blabbed” (or worse - when Strike thinks in Career of Evil that Shanker has grassed on him), Shanker starts sounding dangerous, angry, or furious.

Why is he so emotional? He’s matter-of-fact about his upcoming prison sentence in The Hallmarked Man, so the police are obviously not what worries him.

No, he’s afraid of the gang uncovering him, and we know exactly what they do to police informers.

The fact that has kept worrying me since the end of Troubled Blood is that the Riccis were never brought to justice for what happened to Kara Wolfson; all the other lines in that book were tied and closed satisfyingly, but not that one. That leads me to conclude we will return to the Riccis in a later book, where they’ll be even more dangerous, but ultimately get what they deserve.

And Shanker is a Ricci by birth and part of the Ricci gang, but was “saved” by Leda’s love many years ago; therefore he’ll play a prominent part in bringing them down.

I don’t know what long project in the crime world could involve undercover work for twenty-odd years, but I’m convinced that Rowling-Galbraith is into that sort of long play, because it brings Severus Snape to my mind. Upgraded to the next level. “After all these years?” - “Always”….

Before the end of the series, [I predict] we will question [Shanker’s] alliances. If it suddenly seems that he went to the dark side completely, I’ll take it with a grain of salt, keeping Severus in mind.

And MI5?

Because I know that you take an outlandish theory kindly, I’m gonna say it: Shanker is not with the Met, he’s with MI5. I got this idea when I read a Wikipedia article about the conviction of the real-life Clerkenwell crime syndicate, which involved a long-term undercover MI5 operation.

I think he probably wouldn’t’ve been charged with obstruction of justice if he were an undercover agent of his own department. And he’s really supportive of Strike “showing it” to the Met when the occasion arises, so he’s probably from a competitive organisation. :D

I found the Wiki piece about a Clerkenwall Crime Syndicate taken down with MI5 undercover work, a “21 month bugging operation,” responsible in large part for the arrests and convictions. From 2007, ‘Britain’s Godfather Behind Bars’ and Gang boss trapped by MI5 ‘bugging:’

A leading member of a notorious crime clan was facing a long jail term last night after admitting money laundering.

Terry Adams, part of a north London gang known as the A-Team and The Firm, admitted he had spent years laundering criminal proceeds with a crooked jeweller who has since been murdered.

The conviction came after months of hearings. A jury was about to be sworn for a four-month trial and were to receive protection.

The case is a major success for police and MI5, which helped bug Adams’s home in an operation which began in the late 1990s.

The Adams gang from Islington, north London, had troubled police since the 1980s and is suspected of running an international criminal empire, ranging from protection and extortion rackets to drugs.

Calling Ralph Lawrence! We need an MI5 contact in Sleep Tight, Evangeline or Strike 10 for the Big Reveal that Shanker was the Severus Snape deep-plant whose cover could not be risked if he was to succeed in his life-long mission to get Luca Ricci for killing Leda. (Strike has mistakenly tried to find and kill him when he learns enough about Shanker’s relationship with the Riccis [through Whittaker?] to think he killed his mother, right?)

Shanker hasn’t killed Jeff Whittaker because John Ricci knows that the Satanist didn’t kill the mother of his son Switch. Giovanni’s after much bigger game, the most dangerous kind, and is on the side of the angels to avenge Leda’s death.

Three Reasons Why I Love the Shanker John Ricci Theory:

(1) It Confirms the ‘Blackburn Truth of Rowling Fandom’ Noted Above: “I’m always staggered at the ‘firepower’ brought to bear on the Strike novels by really well informed individuals proposing outcomes from clues in the novels.”

Katya Slonenko and Fiona Down Under, a tattoo artist in Amsterdam and an environmental scientist in Adelaide, independently and from opposite poles of the earth (antipodes?) and different text starting points arrive at the seeming surety that Shanker and the Riccis are somehow tied to Leda Strike’s death. We’re still a (very) long way from knowing what happened, but the fandom is so much closer to the hidden truths about which secrets Rowling-Galbraith has been setting down clues for over eight books.

Harry Potter fans figured out how ‘Stoppered Death’ Severus was responsible for Dumbledore’s survival post exposure to the cursed Horcrux ring; they did this soon after the publication of Half-Blood Prince, which is to say “years before” Rowling revealed it in Deathly Hallows. That theory, of course, resolved the mystery of Snape’s allegiance; he had to be a Dumbledore man.

I think these Serious Strikers in pointing out the Shanker-Ricci connection have done the same thing for the series-in-parallel’s very own Severus Shanker Snape and Dark Lord Luca-Lucifer. Hats off especially to Katya Slonenko who got there very soon after the publication of Hallmarked Man and whose text-based arguments make the seeming impossibly Dickensian conjunction of Shanker and the Riccis come to life.

(2) It Confirms the Hogwarts Professor Hypothesis that Hallmarked Man is What It Is to Set Up the Big Reveals of the Last Two Books in the Series.

When the Hogwarts Professor faculty and adjuncts ranked the six Strike novels best to worst after the publication of Ink Black Heart, the big winner was Troubled Blood and the very near consensus choice for worst book was Career of Evil (my score-card and the Final Tally). I noted all the failings of Career (and, sadly, I laughed at readers who thought it was brilliant; not a great look, I admit). In my defense, I allowed that if Strike 3 paralleled Strike 7 the way Prisoner of Azkaban did Deathly Hallows, its ranking in the series was sure to climb significantly.

There were a lot of Career of Evil echoes in Running Grave (read about them all here) but it didn’t raise my opinion of Strike 3 significantly. There were perhaps even more Career of Evil echoes in Hallmarked Man, and, though Strike 8 had an avalanche of echoes from each of the previous seven books, the experience of reading Hallmarked closely — as in ‘charting each ‘Part’ or chapter set — made me reconsider my dismissal of Strike 3.

Why?

I realized I had fallen into a trap when reading Career of Evil that I was watching Serious Strikers and beach readers make with Hallmarked Man. I had assumed that if I didn’t like the experience of the book, Career of Evil, then the book had failed rather than asking myself if the experience I had reading it was exactly the one the author intended that I have, making it a success. I think that is certainly the mistake being made with the greater part of Hallmarked Man criticism today. More on that in future posts with respect to the Shakespearean psychomachia and literary alchemy of Strike 8.

Here, in a piece about the reddit post by Katya Slonenko about Shanker John Ricci, I need only point out that the complicated plot line, the number of plot lines and characters, and the seeming chaos of what is actually an acutely chiastic structure successfully obscured the Shanker clues about his relationship with the Riccis from all but the most attentive readers. I sure missed them all; I’ve read that Louise Freeman Davis noticed something about Shanker in her re-read at Farting Sofa which with Katya and Fiona makes three people who figured it out — out of how many?

Which was the ‘hiding in plain sight albeit in a crowd of thousands’ genius of Hallmarked Man’s complexity. The ‘wow’ quality of the reveals that will be made in the next two books would be very much diminished if either the author had not given us sufficient clues to figure out what was in the works or if Rowling-Galbraith had made those clues too easy to spot so there was little shock at what we had missed. ‘Shanker John Ricci’ is hard to see, but once spotted it’s impossible to not see.

3. The Shanker John Ricci Theory Doesn’t Answer Any of the Big Questions

Does believing, even knowing that Shanker is somehow related to the Ricci crime family answer any of the key questions that have to be tied up before the last pages of Strike 10?

Most obviously, does it explain how and why Leda Strike died? If she killed herself or if someone else killed her?

Katya wrote at first that, though Shanker may be a Ricci and the Riccis were butchers, she still thought Jeff Whittaker killed Leda Strike:

Oh yeah, I agree with you that Whittaker killed Leda. I still think that Shanker is either connected or knows something, or is a red herring, but a one that would allow Strike to investigate the Riccis and bring them to justice for what they’ve done. (They’ve done enough horrifying things even without killing Leda - it would be underwhelming to bring them in for her death, in my opinion.)

From a meta-fictional perspective, Whittaker killing Leda makes sense in an upside-down kind of way. Harry Potter’s being convinced that Snape is a bad guy meant he had to be a good guy, so the man Strike believes killed his mother is the one person that Rowling Readers are all but certain cannot be the person that killed her. Therefore Rowling would make him the murderer as her Austenian ‘Big Twist.’ A little too ‘meta’ for me but de gustibus.

Katya’s thinking has changed about Whittaker, too, by the way:

I don’t agree that Whittaker killed Leda any longer. It would be equally underwhelming, in my opinion, to find out that Whittaker, a serial killer, is her murderer. It makes for a better plot if the murderer has personal reasons rather than just a compulsion to kill, if that makes sense. Personally, I would be disappointed if the answer to Leda’s murder is - “a maniac killed her”.

The point is that Katya’s Shanker John Find, her Set of Brilliant Deductions really, forces us all to rethink the question of Leda’s death and what could have been going on in that flat after Cormoran left for Oxford.

The way that Fiona’s ideas about Charlotte and Amelia being at Sasha Legard’s birthday party and learning the Longcaster Incest secret reshape the conversation about Milady Bizerko’s death and the motives her friends, family, and enemies might have to kill her or compel her to suicide.

The way that the possibility Ted at age 14 went full Oedipus with his mother (on Freud’s desk?) from which incestuous union his sister-daughter Peggy-Margaret-Leda was conceived blows up everything we thought we knew about why Strike’s mother left her home in Cornwall and had the bizarre relationship with Ted and Joan that she did.

If you’re going to play the game of Anticipating the Chess Master’s Knight’s Move, her signature narrative misdirection and ‘Big Twist,’ these are the theories and the kind of seemingly off-the-wall speculation you’re obliged to take seriously. And the better the theory, the more it lines up with evidence and overturns mistaken assumptions about characters and events the author has carefully fostered in her readers over thousands of pages, the more likely you are to be on track.

But it pays to remember that it’s a game we’re not going to win. The theories may make the Big Reveal at the Story Finish less surprising the way ‘Stoppered Death’ cued Potter fans that Severus was a Dumbledore Man rather than a Slytherin Stooge. They won’t make us anticipate the last book any less or dilute the experience of learning how it all plays out; just the opposite!

Let me know what you think of Katya Slonenko’s ‘Shanker John’ theory and the three reasons I love it in the comment boxes below. A big shout out and bow from the waist to Pelican_Girl, the moderator who hosts the Pinball Machine energy and brilliance of the r/Cormoran Strike boards at Reddit; thank you for all you do!

In this second half of Livingston’s chapter on what constitutes a traditional literary work of art, he explains via Coomaraswamy that (1) the artisan should deploy the tricks of the trade, his “literary devices” or “ornaments,” that create anagogical narrative and self-transcending experience; (2) that the work should be beautiful as it must be if it accurately reflects his intention to write archetypal story, and (3) that the artist and his work will have an individual style necessarily but only so that his audience might have access to imaginative experience not restricted to the age in which he and his audience live.

As he puts it in the chapter conclusion:

• [A Traditional work of literature] should be ornamented or furnished with those literary devices that enhance its efficacy as a means to knowledge.

• It should be beautiful, as it will be if it has been well and truly made. Beauty as the attractive power of perfection relates to the cognitive power. A work approaches perfection to the degree that it expresses or imitates adequately the conception of it in the artist’s intellect.

• Last, a Traditional work of literature will have a style. This style, which is a personal thing only accidentally, is conceived as a means to accommodating knowledge to the condition of those for whom the work was made, but without distortion or radical misrepresentation of that knowledge.

As always, this chapter from The Traditional Theory of Literature is reading that both requires significant effort and generously rewards all the time given to understanding it.

I found this chapter especially meaningful because of the questions that Serious Strikers who are familiar with Rowling’s traditional tools — her use of chiastic structures and parallelism, literary alchemy, soul allegories (psychomachia), Christian symbolism, and mythic templates — should be asking themselves. Namely, how do we best understand her use of these “literary devices”? Are they just her quirky signatures or personal style, things only of interest to pointy headed academics? Or are they keys that work together to create a transformative work, one both beautiful and, in that, useful to bring us into transpersonal contact with what is Real?

Are they, in fact, the substantial reason readers everywhere respond to her work the way they do?

Livingston in this chapter does Rowling Readers a great favor. His explanations of the place of ornament, beauty, and style in traditional literature all but force us to take a larger view of Rowling’s traditional artistry and the meaning implicit to such artistry. She really is after the Real — and charting her novels, even Parts of her novels, laying out the alchemical colors, sequences, and symbols, and noting the parallelism and Christian content have to also touch on the effect these “literary devices” have, their peculiar beauty. Without that explanation, the charting and exegesis is to real literary criticism what taxonomy is to biology, which is to say, a useful foundation for the important work.

[Stella Bloch and Ananda Coomaraswamy]

A big thanks to our Paid Subscribers for keeping the lights on here at Hogwarts Professor, to include the lights in our new ad hoc film studio! We’re filming a course in the coming weeks to test the system and our techno-gadgets, all of which will be free to paid subscribers (the longer courses will be deeply discounted).

Enjoy the chapter — and let me know what you think in the comment boxes below!

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The Hogwarts Professor Talking Heads duo invited her to a discussion of her potential solutions to two of the unresolved questions that have to be answered before the epilogue of Strike 10, namely, ‘What really happened in the ruled-a-suicide deaths of Leda Strike and Charlotte Campbell?’ Fiona seems to have broken both cases using information dropped as asides in Hallmarked Man.

The Ten Questions that guided their conversation are below with the promised links and Fiona’s time-lines and comments on the Moderator Backchannel they discuss.

In brief, about Leda’s death Fiona notes that we learn in Strike 8 that Shanker is familiar with ‘Barnaby’s, the preferred body-disposal business used by the London under-world, to include the Ricci Crime Syndicate. She connects that dot with (1) Strike’s memory of making a drug delivery for Shanker to the Ricci Godfather way back in the day when the two shared a flat and (2) Shanker’s near panicked warnings to Strike not to investigate the Riccis in Troubled Blood. Fiona’s theory? Means, motive, and opportunity point to the possibility that Leda’s heroin overdose was a Ricci ‘message’ to Shanker that he had better not cross them in a drug deal. Readers have missed this possibility because Shanker loved Leda like a mother, which love unfortunately made her a perfect target for the gangsters to ‘get at’ Strike’s adopted brother.

And Charlotte’s death? Fiona, unlike much of Strike fandom, accepts the Jeffery hypothesis (see here, here, and here) that Ms Campbell-Ross did not kill herself but was murdered in a staged-suicide (a la Leda Strike, Lula Landry, Jasper Chiswell, and Kevin Pirbright). After a close reading of Hallmarked Man, Fiona realized that Dino Longcaster, whom Tara Campbell married after she had divorced Charlotte’s supposed biological father, may have been, based on his fathering Rupert Fleetwood in an adulterous relationship, Milady Bezerko’s real sperm-donor daddy (and at home molester).

Which possible parentage would have made Charlotte and Valentine Longcaster half-siblings. Fiona theorizes from there that the baby Charlotte says was Strike’s was Valentine’s (a la Rupert and Decima’s Lion), that Jago Ross’ children might have been Valentine’s, or both. Valentine, Jago, and Tara shoot to the top of the ‘Charlotte Murder’ suspect list, with Sasha, Rupert, and Amelia as Tara’s agents all possibilities.

Fiona, Nick, and John discuss the various Rowling Golden Threads in play with each of these theories — incest, pregnancy traps, staged suicides — and how both Fiona’s Ricci-Shanker and Secret Charlotte theories are textbook illustrations of Rowling misdirection while planting clues in plain sight.

John and Nick are grateful to Fiona for getting up as early as she did to chat with them and for sharing her theories here with the Serious Strikers at Hogwarts Professor. Hats doffed with a bow from the waist in admiration and gratitude!

The Ten Questions With Links and Notes

1. Fiona, you, Nick, and I have been chatting on the moderator back channels since May and we’ve shared your Daddy Dino theory in which Charlotte was another Longcaster child conceived in adultery and Valentine was her incestuous lover and abuser. Nick and I discussed that idea on our ‘Incest Golden Thread’ program. But none of us know who you are really and I just learned you’re living in Central Australia. Tell us about Fiona, a Welsh name?, and what brought you to Serious Striker land?

12 April Fiona Comments on Moderator Backchannel:

In response to a post by Cheryl Rose Orrocks on 17 Feb 2026, my current theory is that Dino Longcaster is Charlotte’s father and that his son, Valentine Longcaster, will be revealed as her abuser and the possible biological father of Charlotte’s children. Hence the 2nd incest storyline will also involve the Langcaster family. This could be why Charlotte’s mother, Tara, despised Charlotte so much.

If Jago Ross is somehow linked to the matter of the DNA test involving Bijou and Strike, it may be because he had Charlotte’s birth children DNA tested to confirm parentage. Maybe Jago discovers he is not the biological father and assumes Strike is, hence the reason he wants to obtain Strike’s DNA results.

2. Nick was telling me the other day that he has been re-reading the series and it’s changed his thinking about how he would rank the books, especially in light of Hallmarked Man. I hope he’ll clarify what he means by that – and that you’ll share, Fiona, where Strike 8 is on your list of best to worst Strike novels and if or how it changed your thoughts about the first seven.

3. By the time this conversation is posted, I hope to have put up a short summary of your Birthday Party Theory, Fiona, or else it will be the text beneath this conversation. In brief, you lay out the calendar dates after Sacha Legard’s birthday party with respect to Charlotte’s death. Can you tell us why you thought that party had something to do with her death and how you went about setting up the time-line?

May 6 Fiona note on Moderator Backchannels:

In this video, your comments regarding Rupert Fleetwood and Charlotte’s murder (1:00:17) got me thinking. If Charlotte was murdered, her murderer was likely present at Sacha Legard’s birthday party.

After checking out several sources (books (physical copies) 7 TRG and 8 THM, Strike Fans, the Farting Faculty Lounge and Hogwarts Professor) I put together a rough timeline to assemble my thoughts.

• Saturday 21 May 2016: Sacha Legard’s birthday. Valentine and Cosima Longcaster are at the party. Rupert Fleetwood gatecrashes and he and Valentine have some kind of confrontation (refer THM Chapter. 36, pages 291 and 292). I presume Charlotte and Amelia would have been at the party as they are Sacha’s half siblings, however I have no evidence to support this.

• Friday, 27 May 2016: Strike listens to Charlotte’s voicemail messages. (TRG, Chapter 55, pages 421 and 423).

• Tuesday, 14 June 2016: Charlotte is arrested for assault on Landon Dormer (TRG, Chapter 59).

• Thursday, 23 June 2016: Strike deletes three voicemails from Charlotte before heading up to his attic flat (Chapter 61). Charlotte Campbell dies (commits suicide?).

• Friday, 23 December 2016: When Strike goes to the National Theatre to interview Sacha Legard (THM, Chapter 36, pg. 289). Sacha says he ‘was shooting a film in Mexico (Conquest?) when all this business with him [Rupert] and Dessie happened.’

I’m unsure when Sacha was in Mexico (before and/or after his birthday party on 21 May 2016). If he was filming in Mexico after his birthday then he may not have been in London when Charlotte died. If filming in Mexico finished before his birthday, he would have to be on the short-list of murder suspects.

As Charlotte loved tension, conflict, and rows, she may have overheard the confrontation between Rupert and Valentine. Presuming the confrontation was about DNA testing and Dino Longcaster being Rupert’s biological father, maybe the DNA results also contained information about other unknown (and related) people with a similar DNA profile to Rupert and the Longcaster’s (Dino, Valentine, Decima and Cosima) and Rupert threatened Valentine with this information. Valentine is scared of his father, Dino, and wouldn’t want the DNA paternity information to reach Dino.

If Valentine Longcaster (as possible Charlotte abuser), finds out he is the biological father of Charlotte’s children and realises that Charlotte has found this out, that could be a strong motive for murder, particularly as he was appalled by the incest between Decima and Rupert.

It will be interesting to see if Rupert makes an appearance in Book 9.

• See Louise Freeman Davis’ Strike and Ellacott Timelines at The Farting Sofa Faculty Lounge.

4. Your conclusion is a mind-blower as I’ve written in my notes you to invite you to wake up early down under to talk about it. To skip to the Big Reveal, you think, if Charlotte was at the birthday party or learned from Cosima or Valentine about the Dino-Decima-Rupert genetic conjunction, that Valentine Longcaster has to jump to the top of the Campbell-Ross ‘assisted suicide’ list. How so?

5. This is fascinating theorizing, Fiona, and it highlights what Nick has said that the complexity and crowdedness of Hallmarked is a marker of Rowling crafting a “target rich” environment for Books 9 and 10 possibilities. You wrote on 4 June that what if, instead of being molested at home by Trevik, her supposed biological father, she had been abused by a schoolteacher. Why did you think that was possible and how would it color your thinking about her life and death?

4 June Fiona Comment

Have you considered the possibility that Leda Strike (Peggy Nancarrow) was molested by a school teacher, rather than a victim of incest. Both scenarios are obviously awful. I have been pondering this because Leda/Peggy packed up and moved so often and Cormoran and Lucy never stayed in the same school for very long.

6. On 10 June you sent your magnum opus, the Leda Strike life timeline and a ‘Means Before Motive’ examination of her death. Again, why bother and how did you track down the dates?

7. What did the data reveal about Leda that you hadn’t seen before?

10 June Fiona Timeline for Leda Strike

I have been systematically going back through the Strike books using the JKR finder in an attempt to work out who killed Leda Strike.

I am relying on Rowling playing fair and that the answer to the question of Leda’s death and the evidence to support this has already been given to us in the books.

My attempt at Leda’s timeline and my murder theory are attached. There are gaps in Leda’s timeline and changing dates in the books. I mostly focused on Leda’s childhood, then the last few years of her life in London. I’d be interested in your thoughts.

Constructing Leda’s timeline was also about reaching a conclusion on whether Cormoran Strike was the product of incest. At this stage, I don’t think he was. The timeline doesn’t support the incest theory and I suspect Leda was away from St Mawes from when she married at 18 and left Strike Snr two weeks later until she returned to give birth to Cormoran at Truro hospital at age 20. Too many parties and gigs to go to!

I’d be interested in your thoughts.

Leda Strike Timeline

Peggy (Leda) born in 1954.

Ted and Peggy (Leda) mother died when Ted 16 and Peggy (Leda) 2.

Peggy (Leda) forcible separation from Ted at the age of two.

Peggy (Leda) lived with her paternal grandmother. Ted stayed with their father, Trevik.

Ted leaves home for National Service (age 18?)

Ted returns from National Service after Trevik dies. (age 25?) Married Joan. Peggy (Leda) (age 11?)

Peggy (Leda), at age 18, escapes her paternal grandmother, and runs away with a youth who’d come to Truro with the fair. Changed her name to Leda. Ted (32 years old).

Leda married youth from the fair when she was 18 years old. She had run out on her husband after only two weeks and that her sole motivation in marrying Strike Snr. (who, according to Aunt Joan, had arrived in St. Mawes with the fair) had been a new dress, and a change of name.

“Leda had never stayed still long enough to present a stable target. Often her children remained in a school for mere weeks before a new enthusiasm seized her, and off they went, to a new city, a new squat, crashing on her friends’ floors or, occasionally, renting. The only people who knew what was going on, and who might have contacted social services, were Ted and Joan.”

1990? Leda brought Shanker (age 16), who had been stabbed, home to their squat.

1991 Leda Strike met Jeff Whittaker.

1992 Nick Herbert and Strike had a joint eighteenth birthday party at the Bell pub in Whitechapel.

1992 Leda had fallen pregnant in Strike’s eighteenth year, while he was applying for university.

Leda married Jeff Whittaker in 1992.

Switch born in December 1992.

Leda died in 1994, (age 40?), when Lucy (age 19?) and Strike (age 20?)

8. Okay, now that we have Leda’s life in a mental picture, walk us through your Means Before Motive breakdown of the most likely suspects.

Fiona’s Theory about Leda’s death: Means before motive

• Means: Three Suspects

1. Member(s) of Ricci family or Ricci gang member.

2. Jeff Whittaker.

3. Shanker.

All had access to drugs.

• Motive

1. Unpaid drug debt (Whittaker) and Ricci’s killed Leda as a warning, or

2. Rival gang to Shanker’s cousin’s takes revenge (knowing Shanker is close to Leda) and kill Leda as a warning, or

3. Drug induced murder by Whittaker.

Shanker’s knowledge of organised crime in London is peerless. He knows what happened, blames Whittaker, but has never said anything to Strike. (Refer Troubled Blood, chapter 27, where Strike recalls helping Shanker make a ‘delivery’ in ‘92 or ’93 and Shanker’s reaction to Strike’s recall of that).

Maybe Leda was suffocated while she slept (similar to Margot Bamborough’s death), then injected with heroin by her killer.

• Opportunity

· Jeff Whittaker (lived at squat; a drug user).

· Shanker (frequently visited the squat; was close to Leda).

· Member(s) of Ricci family or Ricci gang member (local drug dealers) making a delivery.

9. So Shanker is both a suspect and a person of knowledge; he either did it or knew who did it? How important is Strike’s memory of the Ricci drug deal delivery for Shanker in all this?

10. The beauty of this theory is that it’s been so well set up; who has Shanker who revered Leda on their suspect list when she revered her so – and yet it was just that relationship that would have made her so vulnerable to targeting by the Riccis if Shanker stiffed them… Hence his warning Strike off the Riccis with such care in Troubled Blood and obscuring how he knows about Barnaby is Hallmarked?

John Notes 10 June

I’m intrigued by the Ricci-Shanker connection. Shanker knows about Barnaby’s and that Knowles was dispatched there; Strike sees Marco Ricci later in the story making a delivery to Barnaby’s. If I’m following your notes, Shanker’s panic about Strike investigating the Riccis in Troubled Blood isn’t out of concern for his adopted brother but from the fear that Cormoran will learn of his relationship with the family -- and, as you speculate, that Leda was killed by them as a message to young Shanker not to cross them. Shanker testified against Whittaker to scapegoat him and perhaps because he knew the Riccis would kill him if he told the truth.

• Great plot twist and one that explains the whole Knowles plot line in Hallmarked Man and the police interest in Strike’s source of information; Shanker is being presented as a dangerous criminal to readers who are blind (as are Strike and Robin) to the possibility that he was the natural suspect in Leda’s death because of his proximity to nihilist forces. The delivery Strike made for Shanker to Ricci and Shanker’s response to Strike’s memory is a critical catch in all this; well spotted!

I don’t think your timeline precludes either Ted being Strike’s father or Trevik molesting Leda as a young woman -- or another possibility. Her birth years and years after Ted’s suggests that Trevik was not her father, that her mother’s death wasn’t natural, and that Ted may have been Leda’s father via an incestuous relationship with his mum, both victims of Trevik’s abuse. Leda’s adoption by her grandmother after her mother died may have been to protect her from Trevik or her simply being cast out by him. Incest is a live issue, I think, in the Cornwall household.

A Pen to Change the World: The Life of J. K. Rowling, Solomon Schmidt, Skyhorse Publishing (2026).

John Gardner’s advice to book reviewers was that the only criterion that is valid for judging a work of fiction or non-fiction is whether the author achieved or failed to achieve their intention in writing. That guidance is as good for texts in which the author has not shared their ambition explicitly as it is for those in which the writer spells it out; I’ll be writing about this later in the week with respect to those who continue to beat down on Hallmarked Man without considering the possibility that their confusion and discomfort with Strike 8 was exactly what Rowling intended her novel to do to her readers.

Today, though, I’m reviewing Solomon Schmidt’s A Pen to Change the World: The Life of J. K. Rowling, a book I have known to be in production from soon after the author began writing it and a copy of which I was mailed in hope of my writing about it here. The good news is that Schmidt spells out what his book is meant to do in the acknowledgements chapter, or, more precisely, what kind of book he was not writing, so it will be relatively easy to gauge its success. To keep the review simple, which is to say only ‘easy to follow,’ I’m going to share the three things I struggled with while reading the 500 plus pages of Pen to Change, the three reasons to disregard those cranky-pants misgivings, and three thoughts I had about Rowling and her work that I wouldn’t have had except for reading Pen to the end.

[Nick Jeffery has posted his review of the book at the Hogwarts Professor weblog, which I will be reading as soon as I am done writing my review, believe me.]

Three Things That I Wish Were Not True About A Pen to Change the World

• I’m a Subject Matter Expert so I noticed some Mistakes

I’ve been reading, writing, about, and giving public talks online and in person about J. K. Rowling and her work since 2001. I’m known as the “Dean of Harry Potter Scholars” because of the books I’ve written, the contributions I’ve made to the niche field of Rowling Studies, and the several generations of Potter Pundits and Serious Strikers I’ve mentored and worked with.

A Pen to Change the World is more than 400 pages of text before the Source Notes and Index, each of which pages makes assertions of fact, trivial and substantial, about Joanne Murray and the books she has written under the pseudonyms of ‘J. K. Rowling’ and ‘Robert Galbraith.’ There were bound to be some miscues and I involuntarily cringed in reflex when I spotted them; Schmidt’s errors will become the accepted version of events and that is lamentable.

Three examples? The first Harry Potter post Deathly Hallows play pitched to Rowling was a prequel, not a sequel. Rowling has claimed that ‘Hogwarts’ came from a plant she read about on a trip to Botanic Gardens in London; it’s a name that occurs repeatedly as a school name in Molesworth, the only school boy series we can say with confidence she had read and knew well. Rowling said in her Harvard commencement speech she learned a core truth about life from reading Plutarch during her Classical Studies at Exeter; the quotation she cited is not from Plutarch but from a 20th Century psychologist, Otto Rank, a mistake she made by misreading an online quote anthology page.

There are more — and every one of those mistakes is just as trivial as the ones I’ve shared when put in the context of all that Schmidt gets right. Still. I cringed as a reflex at each.

• It Does Not Have the Content I Most Want in a Literary Biography

The same week that I received my reviewer’s copy of Pen I also received a copy of Michael Drout’s The Tower and the Ruin: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Creation that the friend who made the publication of my first book possible had sent. It is a critical biography of Tolkien written by a Wheaton College professor who has been studying and teaching that subject for some thirty years. It weaves biography, bibliography, and Tolkien’s works magisterially.

A Pen to Change the World is nothing like that.

To be fair, it couldn’t be. Rowling is very much alive, she has not authorized a critical biography (I should say ‘none that we know of;’ rumors of same exist), her friends and family know very well that they are not to speak about her to those outside their circle, and her brigade of barristers sent Schmidt threatening letters for even trying to penetrate that barrier.

More to the point, Schmidt was only looking to write a straight forward biography, the story of a life, not a ‘critical biography’ in which the stories written by the author are interpreted in light of the life, the defining traumas, the core beliefs, etc. As he writes in Pen’s acknowledgements: “this biography was never intended to be a work of literary criticism.” He does relate repeatedly the influence of Anne Rowling’s death on her daughter and he does make some fascinating connections between Rowling’s family and the characters and events in Casual Vacancy.

But that kind of explanation and exploration, the sort of thing Rowling has invited in her ‘Lake and Shed’ discussions of her stories’ origins, is not what Schmidt set out to do. I can be as disappointed as I want that this book wasn’t the kind of book I hope someday to read, something akin to Ward’s Planet Narnia or Shippey’s Tolkien: Author of the Century. I cannot fault Schmidt, though, for not trying to write that kind of book. Especially because he has succeeded in writing the book he set out to write and for which there has long been a need.

• It Marks British Spellings as Errors

The editors at Skyhorse Publishing decided that British spellings of common words that differ from American spellings are errors that need to be marked in text with a parenthetical (sic). That (sic), Latin for “thus,” means that this mistake was in the original text, caught by the biographer, editor, or AI device, and left as is as a mark of authenticity.

You will appreciate how many words there are in this category after reading A Pen to Change the World because you will have stopped again, again, and again at the (sic) to find the mistake — and realize it is just a British spelling. Which is not a mistake or even a misspelling. I can only hope that the UK edition of Pen will not have these attention breaking stoppages which will mystify readers ‘over there.’

Three Reasons You Will Enjoy Reading Pen and Will Want This Book on Your Shelf

• Pen is Exactly What It Says It Is — and Satisfies the Need It Aims To Satisfy

It’s been twenty five years since the publication of Sean Smith’s J. K. Rowling: The Genius Behind Harry Potter, a work that for all its failings has remained unchallenged as the go-to publication for a narrative telling of Rowling’s life. The need for an updated version has grown every year since Genius hit the shelves, Smith for unknown reasons has not written one, and most writers looking for details of the author’s background, I suspect, refer more often to the ‘facts’ to be found on Rowling’s thoroughly bleached Wikipedia page.

Rowling turned 60 last July and her 24th book Hallmarked Man came out that September — and the most recent biography stops when she was 35 and had written four Potter novels. A new biography that did not attempt a critical or literary look at the life and the works would have to include a quarter century of interviews, essays, controversies, accomplishments, as well as the twenty books, screenplays and play script she had a hand in.

And that, as noted above, is what Schmidt set out to write.

In my judgement, he has succeeded. It’s not complete for all the reasons mentioned, none of which are Schmidt’s fault. Until Rowling authorizes a critical biography, takes the muzzles off her husband Neil, her friends Sean and the Sisters of Swing, and her sister Dianne, and opens her archives to a historian cum literary maven, the best we can hope for and ask of a Rowling biography is that it be factual, engaging, accessible, and comprehensive — everything she has related about her life experiences, beliefs, reading, and ambitions between two covers.

Which is what you get in A Pen to Change the World. For the serious reader and re-reader of Rowling-Galbraith, it’s an enjoyable read and a reference work you’ll want to have on your shelf of her two series of novels and three stand-alones.

• The Author is a Rowling Fan but Gives Her Critics Air Time

Schmidt is clearly someone who admires Rowling as a writer, as a philanthropist, and as a person. Whatever criticisms he makes of her choices — and they are few — are muted and balanced by her defense.

The book, however, does not read as hagiography, either. Schmidt’s coverage of the ongoing (never-ending?) transgenderism conflict between Radical Gender Extremists and both Gender Critical Feminists and traditional believers, though he clearly has an opinion on the subject, is not one-sided. He covers the controversy and the history of its battles with illustrative quotations and citations.

• The Photos? No, It’s the Notes!

I confess.

I looked at the two sets of color (not colour!) photographs in A Pen to Change the World before, during, and after my reading of the book. Most of them are familiar to Rowling Studies adepts. The ones from the Ben and Bryonny Rowling family vaults, however, were new to me and a delight: 70s vintage family and school snaps. Photographers will grimace (as will Rowling, alas) but to those of us whose childhood family pictures look much like this, they’re a blast from the kodachrome past. And who knew Rowling camped out as a child?

The Sean Smith biography got all of its revelations about Rowling’s first marriage from her first husband and mother-in-law in Porto. Schmidt’s ‘big finds’ were in Rowling’s paternal cousins who filled in a lot of blanks about the Rowling and Volant extended families. [I’m sure Nick Jeffery has written about this in his review of Pen but check out his October 2021 ‘Rowling’s American Family’ that profiles Ben and Bryonny with special emphasis on their bitterness about being shut out by their famous cousin.]

As fun as the fotos are, though, they’re not a reason to buy the book. A very good reason to buy the book is Schmidt’s ‘Source Notes,’ ninety pages of url, text, and interview references cued to the page in Pen in which the quotation or fact is mentioned.

No, it doesn’t have every interview Rowling has done. No, it isn’t especially easy to use, flipping from text to the Source Notes in the back. Yes, it would be great if we had a searchable resource online for subject inquiries across all Rowling interviews, cf., the old Accio-Quote.

But for those of us used to searching through the HogwartsProfessor weblog, The Rowling Library Index, Accio-Quote, the Harry Potter Lexicon, and Beatrice Groves’ Literary Allusion in Harry Potter to find the interview in which Rowling explained the meaning of Remus Lupin or how Casual Vacancy was about the “light of God shining from every soul,” this Source Notes collection of Schmidt’s is going to be a real time saver.

For those starting out in Rowling Studies, I recommend working your way through the interviews as they are listed in Pen to Change the World. For old hands, be sure to read the interview in which Rowling said something you had never known or had long ago forgotten (an experience I had at least once every fifty pages). Examples? The ₤4000 loan to pay for childcare during her teacher training that saved her as a single mum in Edinburgh (accio-quote.org/articles//2004/0304-scotland-,acdonald.htm). Rowling’s admission that before she’d started her final draft of Philosopher’s Stone “I really had planned all seven books” (youtube.com/watch?v=ehLLNV4zX2M&t=13s—23:06-23:40). [That url, alas, doesn’t work, and I’ll be asking the author about it when Nick and I interview him!]

Three Thoughts I Had about Rowling’s Work that I Had Only Because I Read Pen to Change

How about this for fun? On page 11, Schmidt found a quotation from Rowling in which she said that an Aunt’s aside about a charm bracelet she loved as a child — “Ah, but no really nice woman likes jewellery” — marked the author forever; “What I gained that afternoon along with my new set of clinking charms was an association between wickedness and jewellery that has never entirely left me.” On page 80, Rowling, remembering feeling crushed when she was robbed of all her mother’s keepsakes, said, “Jewellery (sic) does not change, it cannot decay; it is a way of holding tight to the past.” [Yes, ‘Jewellery’ merits a (sic) on page 80 but not 11…].

For Strike fans who love to interpret the Hallmarked Man Christmas charm bracelet and Rowling’s Sleep Tight, Evangeline clues Twitter Header Christmas gift charm bracelet, that’s a revealing internal Rowling contradiction. No wonder it’s Shanker that cues Strike into what he needed to buy for Robin…

That’s an “Aha!” moment you get while reading A Pen to Change the World. Here are three more, to include the death of a favorite character cued up on Pen’s last page:

• Anomie and Anomia

I have been studying words that are key in the Psalter and in Orthodox prayers in all my free time since I moved to South Carolina, one of which is “iniquity.” I was intrigued by it because it is the chiastic center of the Trisagion Prayers and, though the Greek word translated as “iniquity” is also translated “transgression” and “lawless,” it occurs six times in Psalm 50 (51), a staple of Orthodox worship. The word is anomia, with the alpha prefix being a negator, “not-,” and nomos meaning “rule, convention, norm,” the unwritten but socially enforced laws of a shamed based culture.

Reading Schmidt’s discussion of Ink Black Heart in Pen, the last Rowling book covered in the biography, for the first time incredibly I made the connection between anomia, Durkheim’s anomie, and Rowling’s villainous online Anomie in Strike 6. Silly as I’d been for not thinking of it earlier, the realization was a ground shaker for me, one touching on the halves of my study focus, professional and private. Your mileage may vary.

• “Screaming Matches” in Fantastic Beasts meetings

I’ve argued almost from the publication of the first Rowling ‘Original Screenplay’ that the author had to be humming ‘Look what They Done to my Song’ after every meeting with the Two Davids and Steve Kloves. The latter’s comment that they had to teach Rowling how “to fit the woman to the dress,” i.e., chop up her story lines so they fit inside blockbuster formula parameters, made that obvious to me, beyond what was evident in the divide between the shooting script and the published screenplay (scroll down to the bottom of this post for the five pointers to Rowling’s lost story).

Schmidt quotes a Wall Street Journal article in which the conferences between Rowling and Warner Brothers about the films in development featured “screaming matches,” “threats of boycotts,” and “tears” (314). You want to know why Rowling’s Bronte Studios is making the teevee adaptations of Harry Potter for HBO+? There you have it.

• Linda Ellacott will Die in Sleep Tight, Evangeline

One thing that set my teeth on edge was something that Schmidt repeats like a refrain throughout A Pen to Change the World, namely, the idea that the death of Rowling’s mother was the pivotal event of her personal and her creative life — and the real source of the depth and breadth of the Harry Potter novels. I disagree, frankly, especially about the latter piece. Rowling’s mother hadn’t died when the author had her inspiration on the train home from another weekend in Manchester with Michael (no, Schmidt did not find Michael or learn anything about him that is not well known already).

But here’s the thing. Every time Schmidt brings up the tragedy of Anne Rowling’s MS and death at 45, he has another quotation from Rowling, a different one, verifying its importance. As annoying as I found the refrain, it sure is interview-evidence based — and Rowling has only alluded to Michael once and without naming him.

On the very last page of Pen’s text, however, with Schmidt reporting his last Rowling grieving over her mother quotation did I have the epiphany. Linda Ellacott will die in Strike 9.

Here’s the paragraph in question, one taken from ‘A Letter to My Sixteen-Year-Old Self’ (2009):

Examining her life, Rowling had once written an imaginary letter to her sixteen year old self. “I … really like you, which you will find impossible to believe, given that you are racked with insecurity and self-loathing,” she noted. “Jo, give yourself a break. You’re not the only one who feels small and inadequate; you’ll realise (sic) eventually that everyone is the wizard of Oz.” She provided these additional words of counsel: “Never cut short a phone call with your mother. Never forget to say ‘I love you’.” (402)

Nick and I have been saying since the publication of Hallmarked Man that its principal function in the ten book series is to set up the dramatic revelations, agonies, and transformations that will happen in the last two books of the capstone trilogy. Robin Ellacott calls out her mother Linda in devastating fashion on the trip home to Masham with Murphy. If you’re like me, you were thrilled by Robin’s take-no-prisoners “enough of this bullshit” boundary drawing with an over=protective mother.

But how will Robin feel about her Strike 8 behaviors — her cutting short phone calls with her mother, when she deigns to take them, her argument with her about minding her own business — if Linda dies suddenly as Matt Cunliffe’s truly overbearing mother had died in The Silkworm? Linda Ellacott’s death in the next to last Strike mystery in parallel with Matt’s mother’s demise in Strike 2 will be Rowling’s opportunity to share with the world through her fictional doppelganger what it feels like not to have said goodbye properly to your mum.

There are more Rowling-Robin echoes that Serious Strikers will be startled by — e.g., Rowling discussing the “grief for the baby” she felt after the miscarriage in Porto (285), Rowling’s conversation with her children about her choice “if you had to choose between us and writing” (“I would choose you, but I would be very grumpy” 311) — but the “cut short phone calls” regret, that’s the keeper.

So, my conclusion? What I wrote as a subtitle for this review: “A Pen to Change the World: The Life of J. K. Rowling by Solomon Schmidt is a Rowling Biography that is an invaluable reference text for Potter Pundits and Serious Strikers.” I’d add that it’s a light, engaging read, delightfully well documented in its Source Notes, organized in a natural sequential progression, illegitimate conception to TERF persecution and victory in the Trans Wars. It will be the standard biographical reference until Rowling authorizes a critical biography to which she, her husband, sister, and best friends all contribute freely.

It does exactly what it set out to do and did so against strong head winds. I recommend it highly and will be keeping it close at hand when writing posts that include Rowling biographical points.

Nick Jeffery and I last September played with the idea that Rowling-Galbraith had given characters names or behaviors that strongly suggested they were meant to be read as ciphers or types of astrological signs, Aquarius and Aries to Taurus and Virgo. It was a game we enjoyed on the moderator’s channel, a role-playing exercise in which we were the fanatic readers who saw things-no-one-else-can-see and created towers of argument and evidence that Rowling the Astrologer was sending us Zodiac-encrypted messages. Like the best jokes, ‘Hallmarked Astrology’ died a natural death and we took off our Sorcerer’s Apprentice pointy, velvet, midnight blue hats with radiant stars to post about other things.

I revived the game last week with Ed Shardlow and, being Ed, he immediately came up with a few associations Nick and I had missed. I resolved to post these “findings” on the off-chance that Rowling-Galbraith did this deliberately as a game for her family to enjoy, in which each of her children and husband placed a wager on the date that someone in Strike fandom would post on the secret astrological backdrop to Strike 8. My hope, of course, is, in addition to the family member with the best guess for the date winning the prize, that Rowling will buy the person who spotted this pattern a new house from a prize fund she keeps in an off-shore tax haven.

So, let’s begin.

The twelve signs of the zodiac are in the order of the astrological houses: Aries, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces. The astrological signs by month are a bit different; starting with Aries they are: Aries (March 21 - April 20), Taurus (April 21 - May 20), Gemini (May 21 - June 20), Cancer (June 21 - July 22), Leo (July 23 - August 22), Virgo (August 23 - September 22), Libra (September 23 - October 22), Scorpio (October 23 - November 21), Sagittarius (November 22 - December 21), Capricorn (December 22 - January 19), Aquarius (January 20 - February 18), and Pisces (February 19 - March 20). Let’s go with the houses for our starting line and proceed with the calendar.

Aries, appropriately enough, was the first one we spotted, the one that launched the Find The Sign mad-reader role-playing game. Kenneth Ramsay, owner of the silver shop in the basement of which William Wright was murdered, has a surname that means “like a ram,” the symbol of Aries. You can read the accepted qualities of a person born with Aries as their star sign here; not much of a match, frankly, but there’s no disputing the Ram-Aries connection.

Taurus has as its symbol the Bull and we encounter her in an adjacent square to Kenneth Ramsay, Pamela Bullen-Driscoll, another silver shop owner and Ramsay’s sister-in-law and sometime part-time employee. ‘Bullen’ means ‘from Boulogne’ per Reaney & Wilson but it certainly syncs with the astrological sign. For Taurus’ natal qualities, see here; I’m not seeing Pamela as a cartoon Taurean but the name-link is a strong one.

Gemini has as its symbol the Twins, stand-ins for Castor and Pollux. Robin the horse rider (and car driver) is the one and Strike the Boxer is the other (see here for much more on that and here for the astrological sign’s natal signatures). In Troubled Blood we had a ‘Gemma,’ but Hallmarked Man’s twins are either the two Ellacott cousins, Dirk and Barnaby, or Decima and Rupert, the latter of whom refers to his beloved half-sister as his soul twin, anime gemelle (hat tip, Ed Shardlow).

Cancer? We have Jonny Rokeby in recovery from stress-induced prostate cancer, for starters, but Todd Jameson and William Wright are described twice as carrying the heavy crate in the silver shop “walking crab like” (chs 20 and 113). Cancer’s defining characteristics can be found here.

Leo the Lion has a host of representatives and representations; see Ed’s post on the lions of Hallmarked Man (and here) and my notes on the characters with leonine names in Strike 8 for more on that. I think the newborn Lion Mullins is the first lion we meet in the book with Hafsa Mohamed being his lioness shadow. Rokeby has the middle name Leonard and was saved by his drummer friend Leo. Read about the Leo qualities per astrology here.

Virgo — astrology here — is a soft point in our collection. The symbol for virgo is a young woman carrying wheat which could be reflected in Fiona Freeman’s relationship with Craig Wheaton. Or not? Ed points out that there is a “shief of corn” in a building’s ornamentation.

We’re back on stronger ground with Libra whose scales are a charm on the beloved Christmas gift bracelet and a token for Robin [“a tiny pair of silver scales (‘That’s Libra, it’s my sign, I used to have a keyring with that on it.’ ‘Yeah, well, I’m team rational.’)”]. Astrology notes here — and yes, Robin is a real match, carefully drawn.

Scorpio seemed a miss — no scorpions anywhere — but the other Scorpio symbol is the eagle. There’s one on the masonic sash on Tyler’s corpse and, wait for it, Sapphire n-Eagle, Tyler’s reflection in the Ironbridge basement. Astrology here. Being Team Scorpio I’d like to think the sacrificially loving and heroic Tyler, the Christian knight, was one, too, but I’ll let the less biased make the call there.

Sagittarius is the archer and Hallmarked Man is crowded with them, especially of the False Cupid variety. Start with the Longcasters, especially Dino and Valentine, and move on to deadbeat adoptive dad Ivor Powell and Susan Iverson (Ivor is a synonym for bowman). Supposedly averse to commitment, check out their erotic qualities per the zodiac here.

Capricorn the goat — astrology here — is not nearly as well reprsented. Todd Jameson makes a reference to “sacrificial goats” in the Masonic Hall (ch 28) and Bradley (the Gibson Delivery Service’s doorman) and Gretchen’s boyfriend both sport goatees (chs 25 and 45).

We get a strong come-back in the Zodiac game with Aquarius the water bearer (astrology here). Ryan F. Murphy is carrying his water bottle everywhere and Pat fills the office aquarium with water.

And for the finale, Pisces the fish. The three prominent animals frolicking about Strike 8 are lions, sheep (rams!). and fish. As Ed Shardlow’s noted just last week, “Fish are a recurring theme of The Hallmarked Man – with Strike-the-fish, countless servings of fish and chips, and the strongly seafood-themed dinner at the Dorchester.” Astrology here.

So the Cancer, Virgo, and Capricorn echoes in character names and behaviors or story symbols are real stretches. The other nine are pretty good, emough to at least foster a smile.

So what? I cannot see any possible meaning here. I post it for your amusement and in the ridiculous hope of winning a new house down payment from the interest off Rowling’s horde of galleons in her Cayman Island Gringott’s vault. Those who find better signatures of Cancer, Virgo, and Capricorn than I have, please report your discoveries in the comment boxes below!

Last week Ed Shardlow posted his thoughts about The Hallmarked Man being written in playful but meaningful parallel with Rowling’s “political fairy tale,” ‘The Hallmarked Man Meets The Ickabog.’ Nick Jeffery and John Granger called him up both to congratulate him on Arsenal winning the Premier League Cup — Go, Gunners! — and to learn as much as they could about the parallels he noted. After acknowledging the correspondences with Casual Vacancy, the trio explored Ed’s argument about the Ickabog echoing just beneath the surface of Hallmarked Man, straight up and in inversion.

The Ten Questions, Links, and Helpful Notes

1. Nick, can you provide some context for this conversation? How did we get to the point that we expected Hallmarked Man to echo in characters, plot points, and themes either Casual Vacancy or The Ickabog? No one thought that was in the cards when Rowling-Galbraith and her publishers locked down the series at ten books.

• ‘Parallels Series Idea’ Pillar Post

• Evan Willis’ Tetractys Theory: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

2. Open subject for the triumvirate to discuss here: there are a bunch of Casual Vacancy parallels in Strike 8 that have to be acknowledged. Name your favorites; I’ll start this ball Rowling…

• Ironbridge and Pagford seemed to be sister cities

• each book ‘begins’ with the sudden and tragic death of a man who haunts the rest of the novel, Barry Obama Fairbrother and Tyler Powell

• The peanut allergy that Tyler and Andrew Price have; and

• The incest secret in the Longcaster and Wall families

3. Having noted those, Ed, why are you so sure that it’s The Ickabog which is the parallel text with Hallmarked Man? Is the quantity of the parallels you and others have found, their quality, or the overarching feel of the works?

• Ed’s Post: ‘The Hallmarked Man Meets The Ickabog’

4. I was surprised by your sheep parallel. I know my Ickabog memories are not fresh, but were there a lot of lambs and ewes in Strike 8?

• Ed’s Post: ‘The Hallmarked Man Meets The Ickabog’

5. And the fish?

• Ed’s Post: ‘The Hallmarked Man Meets The Ickabog’

6. Is there something akin to the Freemasonry of Hallmarked Man in The Ickabog?

• Inversion of ‘Political Fairy Tale’ with modern touches and gritty detective novel and Medieval coloration via Freemasonry symbolism and ritual

7. Sandy Hope, our partner in the Group Adventure of charting Hallmarked Man, had a bunch of parallels that she shared in the comment thread to your post:

• One of my favorite parallels you mention is the Old Forge and the Ickabog’s cave, in which both Robin and the Ickabog tell tragic stories of birth. The Old Forge also reminds me of the transformation of the dungeon once Mrs. Beamish gets a stove installed and starts baking and feeding the prisoners. Mr. Dovetail’s broken mind is restored by Mrs. Beamish helping him remember better times, and Robin’s own brokenness is soothed by Strike’s transformation from a self-serving, manipulative jerk to a selfless, compassionate listener and genuine friend. In both stories the fire is warm and purifying. Comment Url

• One of my favorite parallels was “sticking to the game plan,” the ill-fated idea shared by Strike via Uncle Ted and also Lord Spittleworth. RFM reminds me of Ma Grunter, trying to appear sober when they’re actually drinking on the sly. Dangerous Dick de Lion is not unlike King Fred the Fearless, who both have to learn about being contrite. Robin’s bracelet is rather like Daisy’s bandalore: both gifts are initially a hit but end up secretly hidden or stolen. Comment Url

8. My favorite parallels were between the incest and ectopic pregnancy in Hallmarked Man and the Ickabog’s manner of conceiving children and birthing them. Did you laugh out loud when you figured that out? I did when I read your post -- but it bears some explaining --

• Ed’s Post: ‘The Hallmarked Man Meets The Ickabog’

9. Let’s go around the table again and talk about the connection between the two books we haven’t talked about yet --

• Avenging Ghost of Beamish and Powell

• Eslanda/Jolanda

• Sandy Hope’s Footprint Clue

• Image of St George

• The monster’s cave, the Old Forge on Sark, and an ectopic pregnancy

• Woman talking monster into returning to human society

• Ed’s brilliant parallel Character list

10. You discuss in your post that you went through two stages before arriving at your conviction that The Ickabog was the model: first the overarching story and then on re-reading The Ickabog for specific detailed parallels. Do you think we should do a re-read of Casual Vacancy -- Nick is always ready for a trip to Pagford -- to see if there aren’t specifics there, too?

This is the third in a three part series of posts in which I attempt to tease out the meanings of the names chosen by Rowling-Galbraith for characters in The Hallmarked Man. The hardest part of writing these posts has been narrowing down the list of names to be explored; there are well over one hundred and thirty new names of note in Strike 8 and the author makes a point of highlighting their importance both by making the meaning of names a pivotal clue in solving the novel’s core mystery and by giving characters names that are easily confused with one another or multiple names. Parts one and two in this series can be found here and here; my conversations with Nick Jeffery about those posts are here and here. If there are names I have not deciphered about which you’d like an interpretation, please tell me about it in the comments boxes below (or offer your interpretation there!).

In my second post on Hallmarked Man’s cryptonyms, I pledged to discuss the meaning of ‘Jim Todd,’ a.k.a. Jim Philpott and Todd Jameson. Ed Shardlow beat me to it, and, frankly, I can only hope I would have figured out the embedded story that Ed uncovered. For the importance of the name of the “egg-shaped” man stuck riding in circles on the Tube in relation to Robin’s ectopic pregnancy and struggles with her status as a woman and as a detective in Strike 8, see Ed’s post on the subject and our conversation with him. I think it is the most important name in a book crowded with new names and an important marker with respect to Rowling’s story-within-a-story artistry.

Ed having taken my former #1 name for this list, I will replace it with a name I’d never encountered, one used for a baby whose existence and paternity is problematic, at best.

1. Ottolie Watkins (Honbold? Strike?)

Ottolie is the daughter of Belinda ‘Bijou’ Watkins, a brash barrister who seems determined to advance her social standing via winning a husband with a Pregnancy Trap. Readers only meet Ottolie once and that briefly when Strike arranges to meet with Bijou in the Strand Hotel on the sly for a pregnancy test to prove he is not the baby’s father (at story’s end, Bijou reports sans shared documentation that Strike is off the hook in this regard).

I confess to complete ignorance with respect to the name ‘Ottolie,’ never having met a person with that name or encountered a character in a work of fiction bearing that nominal burden. Which just tells you I need to get out more. Its anglicized version ‘Ottilie’ is very popular in the UK and becoming so in the US. Per wikipedia:

Ottilie continued to gradually increase in use among socially influential British families during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Between 2010 and 2018, it was among the top 50 names most often given to newborn girls whose parents published a birth announcement in The Daily Telegraph and was the most popular name for girls for the first time in 2019. Ottilie has remained a popular name for girls in subsequent years among readers who published a birth announcement in the British newspaper. One study found that Ottilie was the second most popular name chosen by billionaires for their daughters. The name has also increased in overall popularity in England and Wales since 2010. It has ranked among the top 500 names for girls in those countries since 2015 and among the top 100 names for girls since 2022.

‘Ottilie' is #71 on the list of most common names for girls in the UK and I’d never seen it before Strike 8. It’s meaning historically and etymologically is “wealth” or “prosperity,” more specifically, “prosperous in battle,’ a feminine variant of ‘Otto.’ I know that a girl with that name growing up in the schools I went to would have been battle-tested or at least teased to the point of torment, something akin to the Boy Named Sue.

I think, though, that rather than skill in conflict, the name is a marker of the mother’s ambitions to become wealthy as the wife of Andrew Honbold, QC, or, failing that, notoriously name worthy as Mrs Cormoran Strike.

How about the mother’s names, given and adopted? ‘Belinda’ means “beautiful” or “a bright serpent,” gotta love the latter given her snake in the grass quality, ‘Bijou’ is an “intricate jewel piece” worn as a marker of marital and social status, and ‘Watkins’ is a diminutive per Reaney & Wilson’s Oxford Dictionary of English Surnames, Rowling’s name reference book, of ‘Walter,’ “mighty army” (p 474).

And ‘Honbold,’ the target daddy’s surname? It’s not in Reaney & Wilson, but ‘Hon’ in surnames is from the Old German ‘Hun’ for either “giant” or “bear cub,” and ‘bold',’ at least as seen in hortatory virtue names of England’s Puritan past like ‘Godbold’ means zealous or bold. Forgive me for thinking it’s a play on the abbreviation for ‘the Honourable’ honorific and ‘bold’ as in ‘arrogant, brash.’

Ottolie, then, is well-named. The character’s mother is a social climber with few scruples and the name resonates with class pretension and a touch of nouveau riche over-reach. A favorite of those who publish birth announcements in papers of record and of billionaires, the little girl has been positioned by her mother (by the author) for fitting in with the best people.

2. Calvin ‘Oz’ Osgood

The first thing to note about this name is that it is simultaneously a character’s name and a name that another character, the murderer and sex trafficker Ian Griffins, uses as his persona or mask. Griff goes as far as to wear a wig to look like Osgood (or just different than himself) and to create an online presence including an email address and social media postings as Osgood.

I confess to thinking this bizarre. The real Osgood is aware of the mirror site and his ‘Oz’ online doppelganger but seems to do nothing beyond express exasperation that another person is representing himself as the real Calvin in cyber space. In this gap, Ian Griffins successfully uses Osgood’s reality as a producer-promoter to engage and seduce young women, who would find that Osgood’s online presence when checking up on their new ‘friend.’

I am clueless about this sort of thing but a lot hangs on it in terms of The Hallmarked Man crimes and the Agency’s struggle to figure out whodunnit.

• If the Met had done their job properly and gotten the Osgood emails, supposedly deleted, soon after the murder in the silver shop vault, the case is broken by tracking down the Oz impersonator.

• If the real Calvin Osgood tracks down his online doppelganger and exposes him as a fraud, perhaps even involving the police, maybe Griff is only forced to find another virtual identity, but maybe Sofia Medina’s life is saved and maybe the police figure out the evil in Ironbridge.

Is Rowling-Galbraith embedding a message here about our responsibility to take online fraud more seriously than does the real Osgood? Or is it more a commentary about the reality of online personas in general in comparison with the person named? We all present a self-flattering image of ourselves in social media and in internet postings; is the message here in this use of names to conceal a killer that we shouldn’t believe how people present themselves in virtual spaces?

On to the name.

‘Calvin’ to most people today, I suspect, is most well known as a newspaper cartoon strip character, the beloved young boy of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes. It’s originally, however, a surname, one that becomes popular as a given name among Protestants as homage to the 16th century French reform theologian John Calvin.

It would be very hard to overstate the depth and breadth of Calvin’s influence on the history of Europe and Western civilization; his writing is the touchstone of the Protestant Reformation which is the engine that broke down the fortress such as it was of Catholic Europe and birthed modernity.

It would be at least as hard to overstate the irony of naming a music producer ‘Calvin,’ given the theologian’s severe piety and ideas of predestination, or that the novel’s murderer would think that name was a good cover.

Of course Griffin does not go by ‘Calvin’ or ‘Osgood,’ but by ‘Oz,’ the name of Baum’s fictional world that Dorothy visits with her dog Toto. In that, it seems, Rowling is telling us via Griff that this was at least a signal to his marks that he wasn’t who he said he was online?

As for ‘Osgood’ the surname, Reaney & Wilson are of little help (344) simply reporting that that the -good aspect of it derives from both -gold and -god. The Wisdom Library online, though, suggests it is something of a puritan virtue name:

The name Osgood is of Old English origin, derived from the elements "ōs" meaning "god" or "divine" and "gōd" meaning "good." Therefore, the name Osgood essentially translates to "divinely good" or "god-good." It was a relatively common Anglo-Saxon name, reflecting the importance of both religious belief and positive attributes in naming practices. Variations and related names include Osgoode and the shortened form, Oz.

Again, I think we’re meant to read this name as simultaneously a deep dish of irony and of misdirection. What better cover for a murderer and sex fiend than the name of a pious theologian bible-fundamentalist tied to a Roundhead name celebrating one’s closeness to God?

3. Sofia Medina

Sofia Medina is a Spanish college student funding her course with an Only Fans site. She is seduced by Ian Griffin posing as Calvin Osgood, she participates in the silver vault murder as an unwitting accomplice (primarily as a driver but also in erasing Tyler Powell’s identity beneath his William Wright mask), and is brutally murdered by Griff to cover his tracks. Robin connects the testimony of Powell’s flat mates about Sofia’s appearance at the apartment building the day of his murder with the clothing of the murdered girl.

The name? ‘Sophia’ is the Greek word for ‘wisdom,’ the knowledge much greater than the knowledge we have from our senses or our thinking. ‘Medina’ has no entry in the Oxford Dictionary of English Surnames because it isn’t English. Per Wikipedia:

Medina is a common Mediterranean toponymic surname of Spanish-Moorish and Sephardic Jewish origin.

The surname was derived from several cities and towns of Spain… The use of the term dates back to the Muslim rule of Al Andalus, Emirate of Sicily and the times of Islam in Malta (8th–15th century) and it originates from the Arabic word madīnah (مَدِيْنَة) which means “city” ultimately derived from Aramaic. Many families that came new to these places took it as a surname during the Reconquista. The surname was imported to the Spanish colonies by the conquistadores. Medina is a common surname among Moriscos and Conversos/Marranos too.

So we have a student making her way by selling her body online given a name that means either ‘Wisdom of the City’ or ‘Wisdom of the Moors.’ I don’t think Rowling-Galbraith was taking a dig at Muslims here which leaves a pointer to the topos of traditional bias for the country versus the city in terms of where real wisdom is to be found.

4. Gretchen Schiff

Sofia’s Austrian roommate Gretchen was also manipulated by Ian ‘Oz’ Griffin into a pornographic photo shoot. Her first name is a derivation of Margaret, the Greek word for ‘Pearl’ and a reference to Christ, the Pearl of Great Price. Pearls are natural symbols of the Light of the World because, as with gold and silver, they appear to be solid light.

‘Schiff’ per the Wisdom Library simply means ‘Ship:’

The surname Schiff is of German origin, derived from the Middle High German word "schif," meaning "ship." As such, it originated as an occupational name for a shipbuilder, ship owner, boatman, or someone who lived near a prominent ship. It may also have been a topographic name for someone living near a landmark resembling a ship. Alternatively, in some instances, it may have been a Jewish (Ashkenazic) surname, an ornamental name from the German word for "ship," or an adoption of the German surname. Associated names include Schiffer, Schiffman, and Shipman.

Schiff is more often than not a Jewish name which makes the Sofia-Gretchen pairing as roommates a mirroring of sorts; both have symbolic first names and religious marker surnames. That both women with such wisdom resonant names fall prey to a satanic manipulator may be meaningful.

5. Sapphire Neagle

Once again, Reaney & Wilson gives us nothing for ‘Neagle’ but there are interesting meanings to be found online. From a DNA Origins Analysis site (!):

The last name Neagle is of Irish or Scottish origin, and it is derived from the Gaelic name MacFhiodhbhuidhe, which translates to “son of the dark or swarthy leader”. It is believed to have originally been used as a nickname for people with dark hair, which is a common physical trait for many Irish people.

That seems a wild stretch to me but what do I know about Gaelic derivations? Nada. It is also potentially derived from the name ‘Neil,’ a name close to Rowling’s heart, which became ‘Nigellus’ by faulty Latinization (‘Neil’ is Scottish for ‘Champion’ a la ‘Nicholas,’ the ‘victorious champion of the people,’ and ‘Nigellus’ is from ‘Niger,’ the Latin word for ‘black’).

And ‘Sapphire’ is the gemstone, like the pearl another symbol of hard light. As such, she is the buried treasure, the hidden jewel that Strike finds in Griffin’s basement prison, the light in the darkness that the champion raises from the dead, if you will, by his heroic blood sacrifice. Tyler Powell had been trying to do the same for Chloe-Jolanda but was murdered ritually underground in a silver vault for his efforts. Strike acts as Powell’s avenger in the finale.

There’s another Tyler-Sapphire connection.

Strike assumed that the number 32, which was picked out in red beads on the sash on the corpse, referred to one of the masonic degrees, and quickly discovered that he was right. Achieving degree thirty-two gave a Freemason the rank of Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret, was symbolised by wavy swords and a Teutonic cross bearing an eagle that also appeared on the sash, and was superseded in status only by the highest degree of all, Sovereign Grand Inspector-General. (400)

Tyler is dressed as a Masonic Christian knight in mockery by Ian Griffin with an eagle sash laid over his mutilated corpse. Sapphire wears her eagle embedded in her last name.

6. Susan Iverson

‘Susan’ is from the Hebrew word for Lotus flower or Lily, even white rose. Like ‘Pearl’ via Margaret-Gretchen, these white flowers are alchemical markers for the albedo or white stage of purification. Rowling loves to peg female characters with the names of flowers; if there is a Golden Thread of Cratylic Names in her work it is the strand connecting Lily Potter and Susan Iverson (and Chloe/Jolanda).

‘Iverson,’ too, is linked with ‘Pearl,’ because per Reaney & Wilson (250) it means ‘Ivor’s son.’ Beyond being startled by ‘Ivor,’ the name of Tyler Powell’s deadbeat adopted father in Florida (making the brutalized hero of the novel another ‘Iverson’), I thought immediately of ‘ivory,’ another white and semi-luminescent treasured excrescence.

That thinking, alas, is not what ‘Ivor’ means here Reaney & Wilson say ‘Ivory’ is just an affectionate diminutive for ‘Ivor.’ ‘Ivor’ means “archer, bow warrior” a la “Longcaster:”

Ivor is an English masculine given name derived either directly from Norse Ívarr, or through Welsh (which spells it Ifor) or Irish and Scottish Gaelic (which spell it Íomhar), all of which likely derive it also from the original Norse form. The Norse name is derived from the Old Norse elements ýr (yew, bow) and herr (warrior, army): hence, 'archer, bow warrior'. It is possible the old Norse name Ívarr comes from the Celtic root and may be related to the Celtic root of -iv which is found in St. Ives for example, itself possibly referring to yew.

Another ‘False Cupid’ reference akin to Valentine Longcaster? I think that is a good bet, especially as daddy Ivor is anything but a sacrificially and selflessly loving father as adopted parents are supposed to be (and which his son Tyler promised to be to Jolanda’s child).

Susan Iverson, one of the Metropolitan Police force agents in charge of the Silver Vault murder investigation, has become Wardle’s lover at the end of Hallmarked Man. She knows more about Murphy’s secret doings than any other character in the series so I suspect Wardle, a loving dad, will be learning some of what off-screen Murphy was up to in Running Grave and Hallmarked Man in pillow-talk with Lily Bow-Warrior.

7. Kim Cochran

Neither of these names are especially suggestive as pointers to who or what this character is meant to represent. ‘Kim’ is a unisex name derived from the surnames Kimberly or Kimball and ‘Cochrane’ is a place-surname alluding to a town in Renfrewshire (R&W, 102). ‘Kim,’ of course, is the name of Rudyard Kipling’s greatest novel, perhaps the best boy’s coming of age novel outside of Great Expectations, Kidnapped, or the Harry Potter novels; if it’s a bit of literary allusion or hat-tip to Kipling, though, it’s a stretch for Kim Cochran outside of her possibly being a secret agent.

‘Kim’ in street language and online slang is a reference to the type of woman who wants to be like Kim Kardashian. This meaning I think is a match with the Agency detective formerly of the Met who uses her feminine wiles to win a place in Strike’s bed probably for a honey trap payoff of some kind.

And ‘Cochran’? I think it is a play on the word ‘cock’ as in ‘penis’ and someone in pursuit of ‘getting some.’ Read in this light, ‘kim’ could be read as somewhat assonant with ‘cum.’ Rather Nabokovian.

Vulgar, I know, but I think we’re meant to read Kim as the anti-Robin. Think of Robin’s thoughts after Todd Jameson escapes from her on the Tube; she worries that the former Met policewoman and a woman trying to bed Strike will ridicule her boss as a poor detective and lesser woman. Reading Cochran’s name as a sexual-tag is my best bet for the meaning Rowling-Galbraith hopes we’ll take away.

Put a marker down, though, on Cymberline, a neglected Shakespeare play (the one most likely not to be recognized as a Shakespeare play?), less as a source for the name ‘Kim’ (though it is that, just not so much for this Rowling character), than for the allegorical drama playing out in Hallmarked Man.

8. Trevik Nancarrow

‘Trevik’ means ‘from the big farm or estate’ and ‘Nancarrow’ is an old Cornish clan name meaning “the valley of the deer.” One of the candidates for ‘Last Known Speaker of the Cornish Language’ is a John Nancarrow. Rowling-Galbraith has given Uncle Ted’s father and Strike’s grandfather an archaic name speaking of the feudal past in Cornwall.

That Trevik chose to give his daughter the name Peggy, like ‘Gretchen’ a derivation of ‘Margaret’ the Pearl, speaks to his connection with a pre-modern past; her decision to drop that first name to become ‘Leda,’ the mythological consort of Zeus and mother of heroes and beautiful women, declares her choosing to connect with the pre-Christian past.

It’s the feel of ‘Trevik Nancarrow’ that strikes me more than its meaning as such. The name resonates with depth, something like the echo you hear when shouting down a well, that suggests a person of legend or at least far removed from the mundane and secular present. Trevik seems to have been something of an ogre, certainly feared and despised by his son and by the daughter born many years later than his heir; I’m looking forward to learning more about him and about Leda’s out-of-time conception and separation from her daddy in the next two books.

9. Carmen, Dirk, and Barnaby Ellacott

It’s about time that we talked about the Ellacotts, right? From the Surname Database:

This most interesting surname, prominent in Devon, Cornwall, and Wiltshire, is of Anglo-Saxon and Cornish origin. Firstly, it may be of Anglo-Saxon origin, as a variant of Elcot, a locational name from places so called in Berkshire and Wiltshire. This placename is composed of the Olde English pre 7th Century personal name "Ella", a short form of various compound names with the first element "aelf", elf, and the Olde English "cot, cote", a cottage, shelter for animals. The name is also of Cornish origin, where it derives from some lost or unidentified place called Ellacott, Ellicoat or Elcoat. The placename is composed of the Cornish personal name "Elli", probably from the Welsh (Celtic) personal name "Elisedd", a derivative of "elus", kindly, benevolent, and the Olde English "cot, cote", as above.

A treat, that is. Robin’s family name is Cornish and means a “welcoming shelter for animals.” What a great name for the daughter of a sheep scientist and the partner of a Western Man.

We have three new Ellacotts in Hallmarked Man, one by marriage and two by birth.

‘Carmen’ is Robin’s new sister-in-law or at least she is the mother of Robin’s latest nephew, Dirk. Carmen is a free-spirit, to put it mildly, and her relationship with Robin’s middle brother Martin is volatile. Are we meant to think of Carmen and Jose the Quarreling Couple of Bizet’s opera? I have to think so.

That the two name their preemie newborn ‘Dirk’ suggests this is the case beyond their arguing and his always coming up short in their exchanges. The name, after all, means “long straight bladed dagger,” and, while that could mean the boy whose name is “little sword” is the son of Excalibur the Dumpster Entrepreneur as Martin suspects, a dirk is the weapon Jose deploys to kill Carmen at the end of the opera.

‘Barnaby’ is the full-term baby born to Robin’s older and favorite brother Stephen and his wife the veterinarian. It’s a curious name on at least two counts.

One is the richness of its allusions to a British past. ‘Barnabas’ is the name of an almost forgotten Apostle of Christ (cf., Acts 14:14), the meaning of which name is a matter of no little discussion; I’ll go with “Son of Consolation.” As a given name, it was most popular in the UK in the 17th Century, the Civil War era of peak Puritanism, and seems to have been reborn in Nigeria and west Africa today. Like ‘Trevik,’ ‘Barnaby’ seems a blast from the past and a bit of a head-scratcher for the Ellacotts.

Perhaps, though, they are Dickens readers? A love for Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty, like familiarity with Martin Chuzzlewit (Mark Tapley’s jollity makes that a Granger family favorite), is the mark of a real Dickens re-reader. There is a religiously inspired riot near Westminster in that novel that Rowling-Galbraith may be pointing to vis a vis the Islamicist terrorist attack in Hallmarked Man.

I think that less likely than it being an out-there echoing of an internal story point. Shanker tells Strike early on in the detective’s search for the identity of the Ramsey silver vault body that Knowles’ body was “Gawn to Barnaby’s” (369). It takes Strike almost another seventy chapters to stumble upon Brian Judge’s Scrap as Marco Ricci just happens to enter it — in another one of Rowling’s signature not-quite-credible coincidences (cue Ghost of Tyler Powell prodding?) — and to make the rhyming slang connection with Barnaby Rudge (649).

In between the Shanker tip and the scrap yard epiphany, Robin gets the news of her nephew’s birth and a picture twice likened to a sumo wrestler in size and visage. In conversation with Murphy, she connects the two:

Yes,’ said Robin.

‘Have you found out what Barnaby’s is? Or who it is?’

‘No,’ said Robin, reminded yet again that she still hadn’t bought her new nephews presents. (547)

In a book in which names play such an important part, perhaps the largest of Ellacott babies is given the name ‘Barnaby’ just to keep this Shanker allusion current in our short term memory as it does with Robin.

10. Ralph Lawrence/ John Auclair

‘Lawrence’ is a Granger family name; it’s the middle name of my great-grandfather, my grandfather, and father as well as my older brother’s given name. So I know what it means. It’s originally Lorence. The historical meaning is simply ‘from Laurentius,’ a city outside of Rome.

The city has its name, however, from the laurel tree, so the name came to mean ‘he who wears the laurel wreath,’ the victor or champion.’

It becomes a Christian name, consequently, in Italian (Lorenzo) as a synonym for Christ the Victor, Christus Victor, a “victory [via ransom or sacrifice] over the powers which hold mankind in bondage: sin, death, and the devil.” The more common English equivalents for ‘Lorence’ are ‘Victoria’ and ‘Nicole.’

But there’s more! The literal meaning of Lorence from the French is similarly ‘rich,’ in that ‘rich’ means simultaneously ‘full of meaning’ and ‘solid gold valuable.’

L’or in French means ‘Gold.’ -Ence as a suffix means “the state or quality of.” ‘Lorence’ from that etymology means ‘the Golden One.’

This as with ‘laurel-wreath-Victor’ is another dominical name in that Christ is the “true light.” Gold among traditional people is considered solid light, the original metal and the destination of all other metals, hence the use of gold in wedding bands and the color of a nimbus or halo. ‘Christos’ in Greek is resonant with ‘Chryses’ the Greek word for gold.

There are more than 100 names that derive from ‘gold’ because of this association. Fun equivalents A to Z from around the world include Aurelia (Auriel, Ariel), Cressida, Dior (Dory), Eurwen (Arwen), Flavia, Gilda, Hema, Jin (Jinhua), Kim (!), Laurelin, Melora, Oralie (Orabel, Orel), Paziah, Zareen (Zareza).

The most obvious English one is derived from Yiddish: ‘Goldie.’ Popular names that come from ‘light’ and its association with “the light that comes into the world in every man” include Nora, Clara, and Lucy.

Ralph Lawrence? ‘Ralph’ has the slang meaning of ‘to vomit’ but etymologically its “Wolf-Counsel,” a high-powered Germanic moniker. I think the mysterious MI6 character Rowling introduces in Hallmarked Man is going to play a large role in the high stakes alchemical drama of the last two books, all of which lead to a Golden One.

I want to sneak John Auclair in here because his was the cryptonym in Hallmarked Man that made me laugh out loud. ‘John’ of course I know for the same reason I know ‘Lawrence;’ it means “God is gracious” or “God is merciful.” The meaningful piece of the “silver collector” and “advertising millionaire” name, though, is in the surname.

‘AU’ is the periodic table of the elements acronym for gold from the Latin au-reus. ‘Clair’ is from the French for ‘clear’ or ‘bright.’ As a noun it can mean “moonlight.” -Clair as a suffix in the surname ‘Auclair,’ then, means “clear gold,” which I think is Rowling the Cryptonominalist’s clever “silver.”

Alchemy and astrology are conjoined sacred sciences with planets and elements being paired. The most important of these pairings are gold with the sun and silver with the moon; gold is more highly valued than silver, from this view, not because of scarcity but because gold is the greater light, a better symbol of the Light of the World, and silver, as moonlight is to sunlight, only a reflection of that correspondence.

Rowling points to this relationship and meaning with ‘Au-clair’ at the start of the book, perhaps with an as playful and subtle tip of the hat to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island with her ‘John Silver.’

I’ll close this Cryptonyms series on that note! Please share your own interpretations in the comment boxes below or a list of ten more names you think are worth deciphering…

Soon after Ed Shardlow joined the Group Adventure in Charting The Hallmarked Man, he began noting with wild regularity the echoes he was seeing between Strike 8 and Rowling’s Covid-era fairy tale for lockdowned children everywhere, The Ickabog. Evan Willis in his Tetractys Theory posts about the ten book structure of the Strike-Ellacott series had proposed that Rowling-Galbraith would continue ‘his’ Parallel Series fun with either Casual Vacancy or The Ickabog, noting that either one could follow as the ‘first book post Potter’ because the former was the first book published and the latter the first book conceived and largely written.

There was some chatter in the first week that Casual Vacancy was the obvious book-behind-the-Strike-novel because Ironbridge and Pagford seemed to be sister cities and each book ‘begins’ with the sudden and tragic death of a man who haunts the rest of the novel, Barry Obama Fairbrother and Tyler Powell. The peanut allergy seemed a pointed reference, too.

I think after reading Ed Shardlow’s exegesis you’ll agree that the book-in-parallel with The Hallmarked is indeed The Ickabog. Enjoy! [John, exiting stage left]

The Parallel Mysteries of The Ickabog and The Hallmarked Man

Prior to the release of Strike 8, there was good reason to believe that the first seven Strike books could be seen as parallels to the seven Harry Potter books, each corresponding to the respective counterpart in the other series. This has been dubbed the Parallel Series Idea (PSI). Having exhausted the Potter series, there was fair speculation that Rowling in the remaining three books of the Strike & Ellacott series would draw inspiration from her three standalone books – The Ickabog, The Casual Vacancy and The Christmas Pig.

There were various suggestions about which of those might come first. But there was no clear consensus, with factors such as date of publication, date of conception or writing, alchemical progressions and mythological allegories failing to agree on an obvious candidate. And that’s before we even get started on what the geometric structure of the series might be if it wasn’t going to be another seven-book ring cycle.

So, on my first reading of The Hallmarked Man, I was looking for signs that it reflected one of those three books, with an agnostic and open mind as to which it would be. Then, right from the off with Decima’s interview, the plot elements of a man being killed in circumstances surrounded by mistaken and disputed events, and the importance of finding out the truth – for Decima, but also in other ways for Strike and Robin – made me look to The Ickabog as the most likely parallel text. A book all about the importance of telling the truth, a killing that’s subject to a cover-up, and an eponymous figure whose identity, true nature and very existence are in question,

Both books draw comparisons and contrasts between the powerful and the vulnerable in society. From the prosperous capital city to the desolate Marshlands. From Heberley House to a filthy council flat. From the castle to the orphanage. From The Dorchester to the foodbank. From the rich who can do what they want, to the poor who must do whatever they can to survive.

The Ickabog uses a medieval feudal setting to show a simplified model of society. In The Hallmarked Man we visit Sark, which is pretty much as close as one can get to a feudal country in the modern world.

So, with various aspects framing a potential connection to The Hallmarked Man, I have given The Ickabog a re-read to see how well that theory lines up with the text. I will run through a number of correspondences that were apparent as I came across them, list some characters with their possible analogues in the other work, and finish with a few key convergences, that satisfy me that there is a deliberate synchronicity between The Ickabog and The Hallmarked Man.

Firstly, sheep play a role in both books. There are various sheep references in The Hallmarked Man; perhaps most emphatocally the Golden Fleece, and most significantly the sheep charm on the bracelet Strike gives Robin. Sheep also pop up at a few key moments in The Ickabog; from the shepherd who provides the trigger for the whole story with his petition to the King, to the scraggy sheep of the Marshlands that provide the Ickabog with wool fibres, and finally the healthy and well-fed sheep tended by Roderick Roach in the new Cornucopia.

The shepherd’s lost dog is a rather tragic figure, who gets caught in brambles and once freed receives a kick from Spittleworth. There’s an echo there with the cruel and violent treatment of the dogs involved in the illegal fighting in The Hallmarked Man.

Fish are a recurring theme of The Hallmarked Man – with Strike-the-fish, countless servings of fish and chips, and the strongly seafood-themed dinner at the Dorchester. Fish also crop-up in a few key moments in The Ickabog. Firstly in the form of King Fred’s erstwhile Chief Advisor, Herringbone, who sadly pays the ultimate price for his integrity, and then in the form of the old woman expert on the country’s fish, who is the first victim of the Ickabog Defence Brigade, and is later recalled with the fish prospering in the River Fluma. Indeed, the old woman has fish tanks that get smashed up, leaving prone fish floundering on her floor, reminiscent of Strike-the-fish going belly-up and needing resuscitation.

In fact the fish in the river are described as “silver salmon and trout”. Silver is another vital theme in The Hallmarked Man, and there are a few other instances of silver in The Ickabog. There’s the silver-topped cane with which Ma Grunter administers punishments, the silvery mushrooms that the Ickabog is partial to (“You don’t get many silver ones on the marsh”), and most crucially the silver medal, posthumously awarded to Major Beamish, which saves both Bert and the Ickabog when he dives in front of Flapoon’s bullet.

Otto Scrumble wears a couple of different wigs to disguise himself as Widow Buttons and Professor Fraudysham, and Griff wears wigs and disguises to perpetrate his crimes.

Griff kills Sofia by taking her to the woods and burying her there. Private Prodd in The Ickabog has a similar fate planned for Daisy.

The twin cities in the middle of Cornucopia – Kurdsburg and Baronstown — are linked by a bridge. Bridges are a recurrent theme in The Hallmarked Man, not least the town Ironbridge and its eponymous bridge, in the middle of Britain and home to Griff and Tyler.

Absolutely central to the plot of The Ickabog is the killing of Major Beamish and subsequent cover-up. That’s a plot point reflected in The Hallmarked Man in the form of the killing of Ben Liddell, tragically killed, not in combat, but when unarmed and vulnerable, and subsequently covered up by his own government, that should have protected and honoured him.

The police in The Hallmarked Man are shown to be flawed – lacking investigative ability, prone to corruption, inept even. All of these are criticisms that can be laid at the Royal Guard and especially the Ickabog Defence Brigade. On the other hand, the treatment of Ickabog by the authorities has similarities to the response to terrorism in The Hallmarked Man, especially the fear generated and spread about it.

Ma Grunter twice hits Daisy on the ear with her cane, reminiscent of the blow that Strike receives from Griff and the subsequent damage done to his ear.

Lady Eslanda being imprisoned in Spittleworth’s home has echoes of first Chloe and then Sapphire being imprisoned in Griff’s house. The name Eslanda has quite an overlap with the name Jolanda, and there’s some suggestion that it can mean “violets”, like Jolanda does, or “emerald” (like a variation of Esmerelda) which links to Sapphire as another precious stone.

Towards the end of each book, the female protagonist has finally found the elusive subject of the book, and persuades them to reintegrate with society, because humanity is worth it: Daisy in talking the Ickabog into the planned reveal to the people of Cornucopia, and Robin in persuading Rupert to come back to the UK and be a father to Lion. In both cases it is the noble role of the parent that she appeals to.

The Ickabog combines aspects of both male and female and is able to reproduce with no outside assistance. Rupert and Decima are male and female and consider themselves soul mates – two halves reunited. They also are two aspects of a single Longcaster essence, through their shared father, who combine to produce a healthy offspring.

In those aspects Rupert could be the Ickabog, but perhaps he is also King Fred – well-intentioned but rather naïve, and responsible for untold suffering because he runs away from his problems rather than confronting them. King Fred, like Rupert and the Ickabog, is also rehabilitated by taking on a fatherly role.

Here are some other suggested corresponding characters between the two books:

• Captain Goodfellow – Niall Semple, or Tyler Powell

• Major Beamish – Ben Liddell

• Lord Spittleworth – Lord Branfoot (and Griff)

• Daisy Dovetail – Chloe (and Robin)

• Bert Beamish – Strike

• Cankerby (the sneaky, eavesdropping footman) – Shanker

• Roderick Roach (guardsman turned sidekick) – Wardle

• Lord Flapoon – Todd Jameson

• Spittleworth’s Mansion – Heberley House

Each book is driven by finding the answers to two or three key questions. In The Ickabog these are: Who killed Major Beamish? And, is the Ickabog real? In The Hallmarked Man, it’s: Who is the body in the vault? Does Rupert love Decima? And, Robin questioning Strike's true feelings and intentions.

Perhaps the match between those is that despite the fact that the Ickabog is in fact real, it didn’t kill Major Beamish. And despite the fact that Rupert did really love Decima, he wasn’t the body in the vault. But in both cases those simple truths are hidden from the protagonists by a web of lies and deception.

One very important connection between the two books was pointed out by Sandy Hope. A footprint provides a key piece of evidence in both. In fact in both cases the footprint reveals not one, but two findings. In The Ickabog, the people of Cornucopia realise that all the footprints are identical and the Ickabog must be hopping on one foot. Bert also realises that the footprints are exactly the same as the feet of the toy Ickabog carved by Dan Dovetail, and deduces that the attacks are being faked using feet carved by the imprisoned carpenter. In The Hallmarked Man, the bloody footprint under the body in the vault shows that significant time elapsed between the killing and the mutilation, and also that the killer seems to have a limp.

When setting out on his Ickabog hunting spree, King Fred imagines himself spearing a serpent-like monster. This is the image of St George, who is a recurrent theme in THM – lots of St George’s flags, the St George’s cross on the flag of Sark, St George’s Avenue and the Liberty Clock which plays out that scene in diorama.

The Ickabog’s cave; dark, cosy and lit by a fire, is like the Old Forge on Sark. In the latter, Robin finally tells Strike about her ectopic pregnancy. In the former, the Ickabog tells Daisy about the nature of Ickaboggle births, saying, “When babies are bornded, we who have bornded them die”. Just like an ectopic pregnancy.

When Bert confronts Spittleworth at the mansion, the book reads, “Spittleworth had the crazy notion that Major Beamish had risen from the dead to punish him”. As John Granger has pointed out, at the climax of The Hallmarked Man, Strike takes on the role of an avenging angel. Through the cocktail of bravado, alcohol and righteousness, he becomes possessed by the spirit of Tyler Powell, dispensing justice from beyond the grave to Griff and his cronies.

So, lots of connections. Some stronger than others, but a few there that I find convincing. I’m sure I’ve got some of them wrong and I hope that some of these ideas inspire others to provide greater clarity or pick up on other links that I have missed.