Today’s Lake and Shed framed conversation is about J. K. Rowling’s first Cormoran Strike novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling. Nick and John debate the degree of Rowling’s dishonesty about writing a detective series before she was outed as ‘Robert Galbraith’ to include whether she really had any other plan than for the book to be published by the company and edited by the editor who handled Casual Vacancy. The ‘Lake’ point that Nick explores is the identity of the real Deeby Mac, namely, Di Brooks, Rowling’s former security director and currently her office manager, a veteran with years of experience in the SIB. John’s ‘Shed’ point is his pushback against the idea that Calling wasn’t really the first book in the series because Rowling has said she had the idea for it after Silkworm and only chose it because the case would make her detective famous. John argues that the many echoes that connect the first, fourth, and seventh books but especially Calling and Running Grave mean that Calling is the point of origin around which the ring of the first seven novels was constructed.

New to the Lake and Shed Kanreki Birthday series? Here’s what we’re doing:

On 31 July 2025, Joanne Murray, aka J. K. Rowling and Robert Galbraith, will be celebrating her 60th birthday. This celebration is considered a ‘second birth’ in Japan or Kanreki because it is the completion of the oriental astrological cycle. To mark JKR’s Kanreki, Dr John Granger and Nick Jeffery, both Nipponophiles, are reading through Rowling’s twenty-one published works and reviewing them in light of the author’s writing process, her ‘Lake and Shed’ metaphor. The ‘Lake’ is the biographical source of her inspiration; the ‘Shed’ is the alocal place of her intentional artistry, in which garage she transforms the biographical stuff provided by her subconscious mind into the archetypal stories that have made her the most important author of her age. You can hear Nick and John discuss this process and their birthday project at the first entry in this series of posts: Happy Birthday, JKR! A Lake and Shed Celebration of her Life and Work.

The eight HogwartsProfessor birthday videos posted thus far in this series can be read at the links below:

* A Lake and Shed Reading of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

* A Lake and Shed Reading of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

* A Lake and Shed Reading of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

* A Lake and Shed Reading of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

* A Lake and Shed Reading of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

* A Lake and Shed Reading of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

* A Lake and Shed Reading of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

* A Lake and Shed Reading of The Casual Vacancy

Tomorrow? It’s The Silkworm, the first Comoran Strike novel by conception, not publication, in Rowling’s oeuvre (or ‘in Robert Galbraith’s, if you prefer the second of Mrs. Murray’s pseudonyms), in which Nick reveals the real-life feuding authors behind the Strike2 bitter battles between book-men (and Jenkins!) while John talks about the metaliterary heft of Silkworm’s “novel inside a novel about novels.” See you then!

Links to posts mentioned in today’s Lake and Shed conversation for further reading:

* Meet the Real ‘Deeby Mac:’ Evidence from the Amanda Donaldson Lawsuit

* Cuckoo’s Calling and Running Grave: The Essential Echoes and Parallels Between the First and Seventh Strike Mysteries

* Did Charlotte Campbell Commit Suicide or Was She Murdered? The Argument from the Faked Suicide-Murders in Cuckoo, Lethal White, and Running Grave

* Rowling Says The Silkworm was the First Cormoran Strike Novel

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