Nick Jeffery and John Granger opened the Orthodox New Year with a conversation about, you guessed it, Rowling-Galbraith’s Hallmarked Man. Both of them confessed that they were struggling with the most complex and carefully integrated novel in the author’s oeuvre, with five different candidates for the body in the silver vault, a cast of characters for each candidate, all of them spun together with the Strike-Ellacott cum Murphy-Bijou ‘shipping madness as it unfolded. Neither of them was ready to talk about the book’s structure in any detail.

They chose instead to discuss the most obvious and most neglected of Rowling’s Seven Shed tools, the signature writing elements she uses to craft the inspiration from her Lake springs and from her touchstone Golden Threads into the stories that fascinate her admirers around the world. That tool is her ‘Big Twist’ finish, the surprise ending that shocks the reader caught in Rowling’s narrative misdirection, the story clues sprinkled throughout a story to foster believing something that isn’t true. Every Rowling reader knows this is what she is doing, but very few are conscious of the set-up until the narrative trap is sprung.

One thing that readers can be looking for, consequently, are the ‘pushes’ Rowling puts into her story to have us accept as facts that we have some reason based on textual evidence (and Tools, Springs, and Golden Threads) to think may not be true. Whence John’s prediction post Running Grave that Robin was sterile. Whence Nick’s theories that Charlotte was murdered and that Cormoran and Robin will forever be best mates, not husband and wife.

The ‘pushes’ in Hallmarked Man that John felt were positioning of a Strike-Ellacott reader for a judo move in Strike 9? There are five, three of which turn on paternity):

* Per Ed Shardlow, that Murphy is not a good guy deserving of Robin’s sympathy but a very bad man, in fact the man behind the gorilla mask (and if his surname has any mythological weight, the likely murderer of Castor and Pollux in Strike 10);

* That “proper man,” Edward ‘Uncle Ted’ Nancarrow, is Cormoran Strike’s biological father consequent to an incestuous union with his much younger sister, Margaret (aka ‘Peggy,’ aka ‘Leda Strike’);

* That Cormoran Strike is the biological father of Bijou Watkins, Esq.’s daughter, Ottolie, and that he was risibly reckless in his DNA testing for paternity;

* That Jonny Rokeby was fooled by Peggy-Leda and Ted’s management of his positive paternity test the way that Cormoran was hoodwinked by Bijou’s sleight of hand with his negative result; and

* Peggy-Leda told her older brother that she was going to tell Whittaker that Rokeby wasn’t Cormoran’s father, which led to her execution staged as a suicide.

On to Week Three of Hallmarked Man! Next week we’ll discuss Rowling’s consolation tweet to Strike and Robin fans in “extreme trauma” from Strike 8’s last chapter, a message that included a Cupid and Psyche painting, in addition to conversation about the importance (and difficulty!) of getting the surface story straight before diving beneath it

Thank you for your support!

The Quadrigal or ‘Reading at Four Levels’ (John Granger, December 2021)

The ‘Locked-Room Mystery’ or ‘Impossible Crime’ Subset of Detective Fiction (Wikipedia)

Boris Akunin (Gregori Chkhartishvili) and the Erast Fandorin novels (Wikipedia)

Who Killed Leda Strike? Uncle Ted Did It (John Granger, January, 2020)

Who Killed Leda Strike, Suicide Victim? Leda, Rokeby, Whittaker, Ted, or Dave? (John Granger, December 2020)

The Value Of Interpretive Speculation or “Why We Know Dave Didn’t Kill Leda” (John Granger, January, 2021)

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