Today’s Lake and Shed framed conversation is about the fifth Cormoran Strike novel, Troubled Blood. Nick discusses Rowling’s history with the divinatory art of astrology and the occult resources and reference works she brought into play in writing a novel whose primary embedded text is a murder scene’s astrological chart. John talks about the astrological clock structure of twelve houses in which Galbraith tells this remarkable story.
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.
Tomorrow? Another look at Troubled Blood, this time with an introduction to Rowling’s ties to Clerkenwell from Nick and with John making a case for reading Troubled Blood as a re-telling of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book One, with Strike and Margot as the Redcrosse Knight and Robin and Oonaugh as Una. Stay tuned!
Links to posts mentioned in today’s Lake and Shed conversation for further reading:
* Nick Jeffery: Troubled Blood — The Astrologers in the Acknowledgements
* J. K. Rowling, Author-Astrologer, Pt 1: How Did We Not Know About This?
* Troubled Blood: Strike’s Natal Chart
* Astrological Clock Structure of Troubled Blood
This is a tentative listing by category of the posts at HogwartsProfessor about Troubled Blood. There’s much more work to do on this wonderful work!
1. Chiastic Structure
Rowling’s fixation on planning in general and with structural patterns specifically in all of her work continues in Troubled Blood. From the first reading, it became apparent that in Strike5 Rowling-Galbraith had taken her game to a new level of sophistication. She continued, as she had in her four previous Strike mysteries, to write a story in parallel with the Harry Potter septology; there are many echoes of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth and equivalent number in the Hogwarts Saga, in Troubled Blood. Just as Phoenix was in important ways a re-telling of Philosopher’s Stone, so Troubled Blood also echoes Cuckoo’s Calling — with a few Stone notes thrown in as well. The new heights of Rowling’s structural artistry, though, extend beyond her patented intratextuality; they are in each of Strike5’s first six parts being ring compositions themselves, the astrological chart embedded in the story chapters, and the six part and two chapters correspondence in structure between Troubled Blood and Spenser’s Faerie Queen.
* Structure Part One
* Structure Part Two, Notes Two to Six
* Structure Part Three, Notes One to Three
* Structure Part Four, Notes One to Three, Eight, and Ten
* Structure Part Five, Notes One to Four, Nine
* Structure Part Six, Notes One to Four
* Structure Part Seven, Ring Latch, Story Axis
* Astrological Clock Structure of Troubled Blood
* Career of Evil Echoes
* Order of the Phoenix Echoes
* Cuckoo’s Calling Echoes
* Philosopher’s Stone Echoes
2. Literary Alchemy
Per Nabokov, literary artistry and accomplishment are known and experienced through a work’s “structure and style.” Rowling’s signature structures are evident in Troubled Blood (see above) and her characteristic hermetic artistry, literary alchemy, is as well. Strike5 is the series nigredo and Strike and Robin experience great losses and their reduction to their respective and shared prima materia in the dissolving rain and flood waters of the story.
* Strike’s Transformation
* Robin Ellacott and the Reverse Alchemy of the First Three Strike Novels
* Lethal White as the Alchemical Pivot of the Strike Series
* The Wet Nigredo: Troubled Blood’s Black Names, Holiday Three Step, and Losses
3. Psychology/Mythology
Rowling told Val McDermid that if she had not succeeded as a writer than she would have studied to become a psychologist:
V: If it hadn’t worked out the way it has. If you’d sat there and written the book in the café and nobody ever published it, what would you have done with your life, what would you have liked to have been?
JK: There are two answers. If I could have done anything, I would have been really interested in doing, I would have been a psychologist. Because that’s the only thing that’s ever really pulled me in any way from all this. But at the time I was teaching, and I was very broke, and I had a daughter and I think I would have kept teaching until we were stable enough that we were stable enough that I could change.
Because of her lifelong study and pre-occupation with mythology, it is fitting that in Strike5 readers are confronted with a host of references to psychologist Carl Jung and to a specific Greek myth which Jungian psychologists consider essential in understanding feminine psychology. All of which leads in the end to the Strike series’ equivalent of the Hogwarts Saga’s soul triptych exteriorization in Harry, Hermione and Ron as Body, Mind, and Spirit, with Robin and Strike as Handless Maiden and Fisher King, the mythological images of anima and animus neglected and working towards integration.
* Carl Jung and Troubled Blood
* A Mythological Key to Cormoran Strike? The Myth of Eros, Psyche, and Venus
* The Anima and Animus: The Psychological Heart and Exteriorization of the Cormoran Strike Novels
4. Valentine’s Day
The story turn of Troubled Blood takes place on Valentine’s Day and the actions, events, and repercussions of this holiday of Cupid and Heart-shaped candies, not to mention chocolates, shape the Robin and Strike relationship drama irrevocably. Chocolates play an outsized portion of that work symbolically, believe it or not; the word ‘chocolate’ occurs 34 times in the first four Strike novels combined but 82 times in Troubled Blood. I explore the importance of this confection in two posts before beginning to explain the importance and appropriateness of Valentine’s Day being the heart of the story, one that is in large part a re-telling of the Cupid and Psyche myth.
* Troubled Blood: Interpreting the Poetry of Cormoran’s Five Gifts To Robin
* Troubled Blood: Poisoned Chocolates
* Troubled Blood: The Secret of Rowntree
* A Mythological Key to Cormoran Strike? The Myth of Eros, Psyche, and Venus
5. Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen
Troubled Blood features several embedded texts, the most important of which is never mentioned in the book: Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen. Serious Strikers enjoyed the luxury of not one but two scholars of Edmund Spenser who checked in on the relevance and meaning of Rowling’s choice of the greatest English epic poem for her epigraphs, not to mention the host of correspondences between Strike 5 and Queen. Elizabeth Baird-Hardy did a part by part exegesis of the Troubled Blood-Faerie Queen conjunctions and Beatrice Groves shared her first thoughts on the connections as well. Just as Lethal White’s meaning and artistry is relatively unappreciated without a close reading of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, so with Strike 5 and Faerie Queen.
Elizabeth Baird-Hardy
* Day One, Part One: The Spenserian Epigraphs of the Pre-Released Troubled Blood Chapters
* Day Two, Part Two: The Spenserian Epigraphs of Troubled Blood Chapters Eight to Fourteen
* Day Three, Part Three: The Spenserian Epigraphs of Troubled Blood Chapters Fifteen to Thirty
* Day Four, Part Four: The Spenserian Epigraphs of Troubled Blood Chapters Thirty One to Forty Eight
* Day Five, Part Five: The Spenserian Epigraphs of Troubled Blood Chapters Forty Nine to Fifty Nine
* Part Six: The Spenserian Epigraphs of Troubled Blood Chapters Sixty to Seventy One
* Spenser and Strike Part Seven: Changes for the Better
Beatrice Groves
* Trouble in Faerie Land (Part 1): Spenserian Clues in Troubled Blood Epigraphs
* Trouble in Faerie Land (Part 2): Shipping Robin and Strike in the Epigraphs of Troubled Blood
* Trouble in Faerie Land (Part 3): Searching for Duessa in Troubled Blood
John Granger:
* How Spenser Uses Cupid in Faerie Queen and Its Relevance for Understanding Troubled Blood
* Reading Troubled Blood as a Medieval Morality Play
6. The Ghosts
Rowling’s core belief is in the immortality of the soul and her favorite writer of the 20th Century is Vladimir Nabokov, whose work is subtly permeated by the otherworldly. No surprise, then, that Troubled Blood is haunted by a host of ghosts, most importantly the shade of Margot Bamborough but to include the women murdered by Dennis Creed and Nicolo Ricci. Their influence is so obvious and so important that it has spurred discussion of the spectres that haunt the first four Strike novels whose presence had not been discussed prior to the revelations of Strike 5.
* Troubled Blood: The Dead Among Us
* The Ghosts Haunting Troubled Blood
* The Ghosts Haunting Cuckoo’s Calling, Silkworm, Career of Evil, and Lethal White
7. The Names
The Cryptonyms or Cratylic Names of Troubled Blood are as rich and meaningful, even funny, as those found in Lethal White. From Paul Satchwell’s “little package” to Roy Phipps as the Spanish King Phillip, from the nigredo black elements of Bill Talbot and Saul Morris to the Spenserian echoes of Oonaugh Kennedy and Janice Beattie, and the Rokeby-Oakden coincidences, Strike5 is full of name play. Did I mention that the detectives solve the mystery largely through their exploration of names? Douthwaite and Oakden only pop-up after Strike has revelations consequent to serious reflection on their names and pseudonyms. Rowling-Galbraith really wants her real-world readers to be reflecting on the Dickensian names of all her characters.
* The Cratylic Names of Troubled Blood: A Top Twenty Round Up
8. The Flints and Gaffes
Rowling commented in one of her interview tableaus for Troubled Blood that she had worked extra hard to get the dates right in this most complicated of novels and that her proof reader and continuity editor found a big mistake. Serious Strikers, though, were left crying “Alas!” and laughing aloud at the number of bone-headed gaffes in The Presence’s longest work to date. It remains her best as well as her longest book to date, but, really, get the woman the help she needs to comb the book for errors pre-publication. Can you say, “Isla”?
* Troubled Blood: Flints, Errors, and Head Scratchers
* Troubled Blood Gaffes: A Second Look at Ages and Dates
9. The Astrology
The principal embedded text in Troubled Blood, the one Robin and Cormoran read repeatedly, create keys for, and discuss throughout the book, is Bill Talbot’s ‘True Book.’ It features an astrological chart for the exact time and place of Margot Bamborough’s disappearance in 1974, which map Talbot used to try and solve the case. Strike is profoundly disgusted by this approach but spends, as does Robin, much of his time trying to figure out the chart or at least what Talbot made of it. Troubled Blood, consequently, turns into something of an exploration of astrology and its relevance to understanding ourselves and the world. Unpacking what Rowling means by it, not to mention what the natal charts of Robin and Cormoran tell us about these charactes, their relationship, and Rowling-Galbraith’s intentionally hermetic artistry, is a large part of the exegetical work to be done on Troubled Blood.
* Nick Jeffery: Troubled Blood — The Acknowledgements
* Part Three, Note Five
* Troubled Blood: Strike’s Natal Chart
* Astrological Clock Structure of Troubled Blood
* Astrological Allegorical: The Sun Signs of Characters in Troubled Blood
* A Second Look at Talbot’s Chart: What Does it Reveal to the Unbiased Eye?
10. The Tarot Card Spreads
We know that Rowling has significant skills when it comes to astrology. What is less well appreciated is that almost from childhood she has played with tarot card reading which knowledge has informed her work. This is comic in Trelawney, say, but comes to the fore in Troubled Blood‘s card spreads: the Celtic Cross in Talbot’s ‘True Book,’ his embedded three card spreads in the illustrations of that tome, and Robin’s two readings, one in Laemington Spa and the other in her flat at story’s end.
* Part Three, Note Six
* Part Four, Note Five
* Part Five, Note Five
* Part Six, Notes Five, Six, Eight
* Bill Talbot’s Tarot: The Embedded Occult Heart of Troubled Blood
* Robin Ellacott’s Tarot: The Missed Meanings of Her Twin Three Card Spreads in Troubled Blood
11. Who Killed Leda Strike?
To Rowling-Galbraith’s credit, credible arguments in dedicated posts have been made that every person in the list below was the one who murdered Leda Strike. Who do you think did it?
* Jonny Rokeby and the Harringay Crime Syndicate (Heroin Dark Lord 2.0),
* Ted Nancarrow (Uncle Ted Did It),
* Dave Polworth,
* Leda Strike (!),
* Lucy Fantoni (Lucy and Joan Did It and here),
* Sir Randolph Whittaker,
* Nick Herbert,
* Peter Gillespie, and
* Charlotte Campbell-Ross
12. Embedded Texts
All of Rowling’s novels feature books and texts, written work as well as metanarratives, with which her characters struggle to figure out in reflective parallel to what her readers are trying to do with the novel in hand. Troubled Blood is exceptionally laden with these embedded texts. Beyond Talbot’s True Book and Spenser’s Faerie Queen noted above, we are treated to selections from The Demon of Paradise Park, Whatever Happened to Margot Bamborough?, Astrology 14, and The Magus.
13. The Murderers: Creed and Beattie
A demon-possessed psychopath and the brain-damaged lonely woman… Each is described as “a genius of misdirection” and being without remorse or empathy. The actual murderers in Troubled Blood are distinct, certainly, but paired as well, as one of the many mirrored pairs in this story.
14. Feminism
Troubled Blood, Rowling has said, is a commentary of sorts on changes in the history of feminism. It is an unvarnished, even brutal exploration of the heroic age of the feminist movement, its front and back, largely through the personalities, circumstances, choices, and experiences of two pairs of women, Margot Bamborough and her plucky Irish side-kick Oonaugh Kennedy and the paired through time couple of Irene Bull-Hickson and Janice Beattie.
15. Rokeby 3.0
Jonny Rokeby makes his first appearance, albeit only by phone call, in Troubled Blood and yet it has reset thinking about Strike and his biological father considerably. Kurt Schreyer thinks the head Deadbeat is more Snape than Voldemort — and, if this is the case, we need to re-read the series to see how much Strike’s emotional injuries from childhood neglect have misshaped his understanding of his dad so he lives in upside-down land.
* Guest Post: Rokeby Redux – Is Strike’s Father More Snape than Lord Voldemort?
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