Category: The Running Grave

J.K. Rowling is an exuberantly successful namer and I particularly enjoy it when her names involve literary sources or clues. Of the new names that we meet in The Running Grave the most obviously literary name is that of Colonel Graves’s Labrador ‘Gunga Din.’ Gunga Din is a reference to a Kipling poem (an author Rowling has referred to before, see here and here). This poem was once very popular (a Wodehouse character notes as among his marriageable attractions the fact that he can recite it from memory) although it now reads as painfully unmodern in its attitudes. Graves’s choice to name his dog ‘Gunga Din’ suggests that he, like his son-in-law might be ‘a man who didn’t particularly mind being offensive and might even pride himself on it,’ and it fits with the kind of unthinking attitude that believes that just kidnapping his son and hoping he’ll snap out of it will solve the family’s problems (see the great discussion of this name in the podcast!)

There is also another possible literary reference in this family’s names – in the surname of the Delaunays. Although not a perfect match the name recalls Shelagh Delaney – a well-known UK playwright. Delaney is particularly likely to be referenced by Rowling because she was obsessively referenced by Rowling’s favourite band of teenage days: The Smiths. The Smiths twice used images of Delaney in their cover art and Morrissey’s lyrics often quote her – he has said ‘I’ve never made any secret of the fact that at least 50 percent of my reason for writing can be blamed on Shelagh Delaney.’ This reference, if it is a reference, may not signify much beyond Rowling’s affection for either, or both, Delaney’s writings and Morrissey’s lyrics; but it is perhaps relevant (given the Graves’s history) that Delaney’s most famous play – A Taste of Honey – is an exploration of racial and class tensions within a family.

One of the best literary names of The Running Grave is given by Robin to her plant. In The Running Grave we get the pleasing information that while Murphy’s lack of green fingers has killed off most of Robin’s plants, even he has been unable to cause any harm to her beloved philodendron. And we learn simultaneously that Robin has given Strike’s gift a name: Phyllis. This is a highly suitable name for a plant as it is a female name derived from the Greek for ‘green leaf.’ But it is also an excellent name for Strike’s gift because it intimates the way Robin feels about him. Just as the plant’s heart-shaped leaves intimates Strike’s feelings for Robin, so does the name she gives it reflects back the same feelings: Phyllis being a name familiar from pastoral poetry for a ‘sweetheart.’₁

Rowling has placed a well-thumbed copy of Percy H. Reaney and R.M. Wilson’s A Dictionary of English Surnames on her virtual ‘desktop’ as a nudge that we should look for the clues embedded in her names. I was delighted on looking up her own nom-de-plume within it, for example, to find a hint about her own English-to-Scottish identity. There could hardly be a more Scottish name than Robert Galbraith, and yet it is a Scottish name for a foreigner. Galbraith means ‘British foreigner’ or ‘stranger-Briton’ – ‘a name given to Britons settled among Gaels.’

 

Naming is an important literary skill for ‘when we meet a name that just seems right… a peculiar magic happens that is related to aesthetic pleasure: the instance both modifies and validates the invisible conventions that we didn’t know we knew.’¹ Harry Potter is saturated with ‘cratylic’ names – names which declare the nature of the character who bears them. The term ‘cratylic name’ was invented by Anne Barton in her book The Names of Comedy (1990) and the name derives from Plato’s Cratylus: a dialogue in which Socrates explains the nature of language through an explanation of names. His interlocutor Cratylus believes in the divine origin of names and hence thinks that the form of a name – its sound, for example – will ‘fit’ the thing named. Plato’s dialogue suggests that if names have no inherent link to the things they signify then language is arbitrary, but if there is some intrinsic connection between sign and signified – name and thing – then language could be seen as a divinely inspired guide to reality.  

The idea of an intrinsic connection between name and thing was often held to exist at the level of sound. As Rowling notes Dumbledore’s name sounds ‘endearing and strangely impressive at the same time.’ The success of this name works primarily at the level of sound with its dependable repeated ‘d’ and a warmth imparted by the soft ‘um’ sound. But this onomatopoeic theory of language has not been generally accepted for – as Socrates notes in Cratylus – so few words sound like the thing that they name. In Plato’s dialogue, therefore, Socrates rejects the philosophical study of language as inferior to the study of things. Socrates’s disappointment, however, is the writer’s opportunity for in fiction writers have the chance to create names that fit their owners to perfection. Cratylic names – named after Cratylus’s hope that names tell us about natures – are one of fiction’s most ubiquitous and enjoyable forms of naming.

I have written about some of the best cratylic names in Strike up to Troubled Blood here and Hogwarts Professor has an exhaustive list of the cratylic names of Lethal White here. One of the most important new names in The Running Grave – that of Will Edensor – follows a long-term habit of Rowling’s naming, in that (like Snape, Runcorn, Flitwick and Dudley Dursley) Will is named after a place. I suspect that Rowling may take her liking for place-naming her characters from one of her favourite authors, P.G. Wodehouse. Wodehouse’s own name is a place name – ‘Wodehuse’ is an early form of the common place-name Woodhouse – which may have encouraged him in naming so many of his characters – from Roderick Glossop and the Hon. Galahad Threepwood to Lord Emsworth – after places. (And it might even be a nod this shared penchant for place-naming, that Rowling has actually named a place after Wodehouse in Strike – Wodehouse Terrace where Anna and Kim live in Troubled Blood.)

The village of Edensor (pronounced Enza) is a fascinatingly equivocal place. For it should be an ancient place – named in the Doomsday book with an Old English name meaning ‘sloping bank or ridge of a man called Eadin’ according the Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names (another book that appears on Rowling’s homepage!). But it now exists as a custom-built ‘model village,’ commissioned by the 6th Duke of Devonshire and built on his land within Chatsworth Park in the 19^th century. Described as ‘a delightful hotch-potch of traditional house designs, from mock Tudor to Swiss cottage,’ this village nonetheless encapsulates an astounding abuse of power for ‘the 6th Duke decided to demolish the old estate village and rebuild it out of sight in the 19th century, because it spoiled his view of the estate from Chatsworth.’

The significance of this naming is difficult to read. The history of the effect that aristocratic privilege has had on the village of Edensor fits well with the grand home and wealth of the Edensor family, but this history of a village and all its villagers being uprooted for the sake of Duke’s view suggests all is not well in this family. I wonder if the wilful deracination of this village fits with Will’s own wilful uprooting of himself from his family. The novel opens with the heartbreaking death of Will’s mother longing to reconnect with her estranged son. It is the knowledge of his mother’s death that finally opens Will’s eyes to the fact that the cult’s cant about ‘flesh objects’ has blinded him to the truth of his love for, and connection with, his family. Children, like villages, should not be uprooted from the soil in which they belong.

The name source for Charlotte Campbell?

I enjoyed Louise Freeman’s analysis of the paired meaning of the etymologies of Charlotte and her sister Amelia’s names:

Amelia’s name meaning of “hard-working” sets up her role as the series’ opposite of Charlotte, whose name means “free.” Amelia, like Charlotte, presumably has all the money she needs from the family fortune, but Amelia chooses to work for a living. Charlotte, in contrast, takes on little work other than cushy modeling gigs, and rejects as much responsibility as possible, including that for her own children. As she told Strike in Franco’s, “I don’t want to be needed, I never did. I want to be free.”

This pairing of a ‘hard-working’ versus a ‘free’ sister feels classic because it goes all the way back to the Gospels in the sisters Martha and Mary ( Luke 10:38–42). There is a famous painting of these sisters which Rowling must (surely!) have seen, as it is a Vermeer which hangs in the main art gallery of the city in which she has lived for the last thirty years. (And Rowling likes seventeenth century religious art: Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus is her favourite painting).

 

I mention this painting because I think that there is another painting, also hanging in Edinburgh’s National Gallery, which I think Rowling will also have seen, after living for so many years close to this fabulous gallery which stands, free to enter, in the centre of the city. This is Johann Wilhelm Tischbein’s popular painting of a writer and famous beauty: Lady Charlotte Campbell.

 

This painting is popular enough to be sold as a postcard in the gallery shop and my friend Ellen Pasternack when she visited Edinburgh sent me a postcard of this ‘famous beauty’ saying that she thought it likely she was the inspiration for Rowling’s character. And I bet she is right! As well as being noted for her stunning looks the historical Charlotte Campbell (1775–1861) has a slight overlap with the fictional one, being famous for her gossip about high-society circles. She wrote novels with titles such as Flirtation (1827) and The History of a Flirt (1840) but she was best known for her Diary Illustrative of the Times of George IV (1838-39) which is gossipy in the knowingly grand way that Charlotte is: ‘What amused me most was to observe how Lady —- courted the foreign ministers, and specially the royal Duke of —–, whom she followed from room to room as if she had been his attendant in waiting.’

A drawing of Charlotte Campbell also hangs in the National Galleries of Scotland and looks like it could have been used as a guide for her casting….

Rowling may also have been drawn to the name of this famous beauty in naming her own as Campbell is a name with some interesting and equivocal associations not least (as I have written about before) in being part of Rowling’s own blood line: 

In August 2005 it was reported that Rowling had recently been informed that her biological great-grandfather was:

Dugald Campbell, an adventurous doctor, born at Lamlash, on the isle of Arran, in 1858, who later travelled to Hawaii, where he helped to establish a free health service for all. The discovery has prompted Rowling to visit the Campbell family burial plot on the island and to e-mail historians in Hawaii seeking information about her great-grandfather.

The Campbells have, shall we say, a chequered history in relation to some other Clans and their motto is a proud reference to this history: ‘Ne Obliviscaris’ (‘Do not forget’). This motto appears to be an intentional riposte to those who might consider that the Campbells would be glad to forget aspects of their history, though it is explained by the current Duke of Argyll with admirable diplomacy as: ‘we have taken great pride in our achievements, yet are conscious of our mistakes, something reflected in our family motto ‘Ne Obliviscaris’.’

Charlotte’s tenacious hold over Strike and her unwillingness to forget him, or let him forget her, fits well with the Campbell motto of Ne Obliviscaris.

My favourite cratylic name in Strike, however, is that of the hero himself. 

Cormoran Strike has an avowedly cratylic Christian name – his mother named her big, Cornish baby after a Cornish giant – but his surname is more subtly cratylic and tells us rather more about his true nature. Rowling has said that she found it in a book about Cornwall, so that it is part of Strike’s Cornish heritage but its meaning is unexpected: ‘‘I’ve been told it’s something to do with corn,’ he said, ‘measuring corn.’ (Cuckoo’s Calling, Chap 3).

As the Surname Database puts it:

This unusual and very interesting name is an early medieval English occupational surname for someone who was employed to maintain the accuracy of a measure of corn by passing a flat stick or “strike” over the rim of the vessel holding the grain, thus levelling the grain and removing any excess. The derivation is from the Old English pre 7th Century “striccan” or “straccian” to stroke or smooth, Middle English “strike(n)”. This was an important and responsible position in medieval England, particularly since there was some dispute over the measure to be used.

A ‘strike’ is an accurate measurement of corn: to ‘strike’ grain (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) is to make it ‘level with the rim of the measure by passing a strickle over it,’ as in the medieval citation ‘see that your corne be mesured withe..a trewe bushell & that euery bushell be strekyn.’ Measurement of this kind is conceptually linked with the justice that is at once the divine tuning fork and pilot light of Strike’s moral character. According to the biblical concept of justice ‘with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again’ (Matt 7.2) – a phrase that Shakespeare famously echoes in the title of his play Measure for Measure. This, one of Shakespeare’s most political plays, opens with the words ‘Of government the properties to unfold’ and the play stages a searching exploration of the complexities of good government, and how rulers can (and should) balance justice with mercy. The use of ‘measure’ in the title of links with the way in which just measurement is a cornerstone of an ordered society: ‘dead pharaohs would be buried with measure-sticks in hand. Early on, the right to assess – and enforce – measurement became concomitant with political authority. We call them rulers for a reason. Defining and maintaining standard weight and volume – particularly in the all-consuming food and drink trade – continued as one of the state’s central obligations for millennia.’

In The Cuckoo’s Calling and Troubled Blood – in which Strike’s epigraphical avatar is Artegall, the Knight of Justice – it is justice which is the moral centre of Strike’s being, drawing the plangent note of sympathy from his breast at the very opening of the series. But in The Running Grave truth is added as a twin beacon to his moral guiding lights: ‘Truth, to Strike, was sacrosanct. Justice was the only other value he held as high’ (The Running Grave, Chap 38). And interestingly, one type of truth – ‘canonical’ truth – is likewise etymologically linked to measurement. The word ‘canon’ – used in fandom as well as by the Church to define what is ‘canonical’ (and therefore accepted as true) – is derived from the Semitic word kaneh, a name for a reed which was marked in lengths and used like a ruler and hence came to mean a guide for what ‘measured up.’ ²

When near the end of The Running Grave Strike mocks Wace’s Pharisaic claims of moral purity, the reader enjoys the irony all the more for believing that Strike is indeed the vessel he sarcastically claims to be: ‘On the contrary. I’m just like you, Jonathan,’ said Strike. ‘Every day, I get up, look myself in the mirror and ask, “Cormoran, are you a righteous vessel for truth and justice?”’ (The Running Grave, Chap 112). I like the word ‘vessel’ here: it reminds us of one of those measuring cups filled with corn ready to be struck with a striking stick: ‘see that your corne be mesured withe… a trewe bushell & that euery bushell be strekyn.’ Strike – also known as ‘Stick’ – has a perfectly cratylic name.

 

¹ Burrow, Colin. (2012) ‘I, Lowborn Cur,’ London Review of Books 34.22 (22 Nov): 15-17, esp. 17.

² Lee Martin McDonald, ‘What do we mean by Canon? Ancient and Modern Questions,’ in Jewish and Christian Scriptures: The Function of “Canonical” and “Non-Canonical” Religious Texts, ed. James H. Charlesworth and Lee M. McDonald (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 11.

In 2012, J.K. Rowling told the New York Times that one of her three “desert island books” would be The Collected Works of Shakespeare, an answer which, according to Jo, is not in fact cheating, since she owns collected works in a single volume.¹ Given that her other two picks were the collected works of P.G. Wodehouse and the collected works of Colette, we might be tempted to raise the question of whether her desert island picks are indeed her three favourite authors, or whether she has simply prioritised the sheer number of pages that can be squeezed into her carry-on bag.

On balance, I think that it’s safe to assume that Rowling wouldn’t choose someone she wasn’t very fond of to be her desert island companion—and so, we can place Shakespeare in a prominent position among her favourite authors.  (Side note: “The Collected Works of J.K Rowling” would definitely be my number one desert island pick, so if the publishers could get to work on assembling a single volume, I’d be very grateful!)

More evidence of Rowling’s views on Shakespeare came in a 2017 interview with Mugglenet, where in a discussion about the prophecy and Harry being The Chosen One she said: 

It’s the “Macbeth” idea. I absolutely adore “Macbeth.” It is possibly my favorite Shakespeare play. And that’s the question isn’t it? If Macbeth hadn’t met the witches, would he have killed Duncan? Would any of it have happened? Is it fated or did he make it happen? I believe he made it happen.² 

Here, Rowling is deliberately highlighting the influence of Shakespeare on her work; but that influence is not confined to just this example of the problem of fate and prophecy in Macbeth. In Dr. Beatrice Groves’s two part series on Shakespeare and Harry Potter (Part 1 and Part 2), she draws connections between the Potter series and several different Shakespeare plays: from Winter’s Tale, to Othello and King Lear, and even to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (which will be the topic of Part 2 of this blog series, so stay tuned).

So far, though, we have yet to see a similar exploration of Shakespeare’s influence on the Strike & Ellacott series (at least, to the best of my knowledge we haven’t—if one of the brilliant minds in the fandom has indeed written such an analysis, please let me know!). But in The Running Grave, we see for the first time not one, but two direct quotations from Shakespeare’s plays, making this novel the perfect entry point for a Shakespeare-Strike analysis. (ShakeStrike? Strikespearean? If we’re coining a new field of study, we should pick a great mash-up name, shouldn’t we?) In the course of writing this blog, as I dove deeper into the novel and refreshed my memory of Shakespeare’s plays, I came to believe that the Shakespearean influence on The Running Grave is even stronger than just the two quotes by themselves would suggest.  In this three part series of posts, I will first explore these influences and then (in the grand TSEF tradition) speculate wildly about what this could mean for The Hallmarked Man.

[Before I begin, a quick disclaimer: I am by no means a Shakespeare expert, simply an enthusiastic amateur. I can only hope to not embarrass myself too much, and that my musings here might spark some serious analysis from one of the friends of the podcast whose literary background in this area is much stronger than mine!]

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The first Shakespeare quotation in The Running Grave appears in chapter 64, when Strike first reads about Charlotte’s death online. In the article, Charlotte’s half-brother Sacha Legard quotes from Romeo and Juliet: “Death lies on her like an untimely frost / Upon the sweetest flower of all the field” (4.5.33-34).  As Sacha is an actor, it makes sense that he would choose this quote—one of the most famous lines from one of the most famous plays by one of the most famous playwright of all time—to memorialise his sister, comparing her suicide to the tragic death of Juliet. In our episode covering this chapter, Episode 22: The Darkening of the Light, Dr. Kurt Schreyer pointed out just how appropriate this memorial is: “it’s the image of a fragile budding flower in the springtime that has been suddenly killed by an “untimely” frost and now will never live to ripen fully in summer. “Untimely” means unseasonable or ill-timed – premature”. 

On a closer reading, it seems to me that the deaths of Charlotte and Juliet may in fact have a great deal more in common than the simple fact of their “untimeliness”. In fact, the numerous parallels between the two deaths may reveal a great deal about Charlotte’s distorted perspective of herself and Strike, as well as hint towards further Shakespeare connections in the narrative of The Running Grave.

The first of these parallels is that both Charlotte and Juliet’s suicides are preceded by a kind of “false” or threatened death. In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet attempts to escape a forced marriage to Paris by taking a potion which creates the illusion of death, putting her into a cataleptic state from which she will awake to escape into exile with Romeo, her chosen husband. We can find echoes of this strategic false death in Charlotte’s history of suicide attempts, which Strike’s old friend Ilsa “scathingly categorised… into two categories: those meant to manipulate, and those that were genuine” (p. 941). Strike himself acknowledges this manipulation when he wonders if “she threatened (as she’d done so many times before) to kill herself if he didn’t give her what she wanted?” (p. 488)—and what Charlotte wanted, of course, was Strike. 

Both Charlotte and Juliet, then, use the threat or appearance of death to keep hold of the man they love. Of course, one might argue that Juliet, in taking the only path open to her to escape a forced marriage, is a much more sympathetic figure than Charlotte, who has a history of threatening or attempting suicide in order to manipulate and abuse. However, there are certain shades of grey that bring the two characters into a closer alignment. We know, through Strike, that Charlotte is genuinely unhappy, and always has been; he calls her “a walking suicide” (p. 941), and the conversation he has with Amelia at the end of TRG is revealing of her mental state:

‘But she wouldn’t ever… there was a – a darkness in her.’ 

‘Yeah,’ said Strike, ‘and she was in love with it. It’s dangerous to make a cult of your own unhappiness. Hard to get out, once you’ve been in there too long. You forget how.’ (p.936)

In a book that has a great deal of sympathy for the victims of cults, and a nuanced ethical understanding of the damage that these victims cause to themselves, their families, and the people around them, this explicit comparison invites us to feel sympathy for Charlotte, and reminds us of her suffering as a human being. While Charlotte does use the threat of suicide to manipulate and to abuse, she is at the same time consumed with feelings of pain, darkness, and desperation that are very real.

On the other side of the coin, there are shades of Charlotte’s deliberate manipulation to be found in Juliet as well, who herself threatens suicide to achieve her own ends. When she meets with Friar Lawrence, she tells him to “Give me some present counsel, or, behold, / ’Twixt my extremes and me this bloody knife / Shall play the umpire” (4.1.62-64). In essence, she gives the Friar an ultimatum: “Help me to get out of this marriage and reunite with Romeo, or I’ll stab myself right here.” In the face of this threat, the Friar has little choice but to provide Juliet with the sleeping potion that puts into motion the tragic events of the play’s conclusion.

It is at this point that we come to the second parallel between Charlotte and Juliet: the moment in which their seeming or threatened death becomes an actual suicide. In both cases, this suicide could have been stopped with the delivery of a message. In Romeo and Juliet, the letter that Friar Lawrence writes to Romeo informing him of the plan is never delivered due to an unfortunate mishap. Romeo, believing Juliet to have genuinely died, arrives at her tomb and kills himself with poison. When Juliet awakens to find her lover dead, she then stabs herself in the heart with his dagger. 

We see undelivered messages the night before Charlotte kills herself as well, and we are presented with several hints that these messages, if received, could have saved her life. Strike, in the immediate aftermath of reading about her death, considers the possibility: “She must have done it right after calling him. Had one of the voicemail messages he’d deleted made her intentions explicit? After threatening to go to Robin and tell her what Strike really was, had Charlotte broken down and pleaded with him to contact her once more?” (p. 488). Later on, he returns to this thought and wonders: “Could he have stopped it happening? Yes, probably, but at what cost?” (p. 489). Finally, in the last chapter of the epilogue, Robin thinks that “Charlotte’s final attempt had been no empty gesture. She’d been determined to live no longer – unless, it seemed, Strike had answered the phone” (p. 941). 

We have seen this pattern from Charlotte before, in Troubled Blood, when she contacts Strike during a genuine attempt at suicide. In this first instance, Strike reads the messages she sends him, and races to a payphone in order to save Charlotte’s life. However, two books later, with his love for her finally dead and buried, Strike does not receive Charlotte’s messages. Concerned more with the damage she might do to his business and his partner than the possibility that she will hurt herself, he deletes them without listening. 

In her final moments, Charlotte, like Juliet, understands that her love is lost to her forever: 

He knew why Charlotte was taking things this far: she’d at long last admitted to herself that Strike wasn’t ever coming back…She’d correctly intuited that he must be in love with his business partner, and this certainty was driving her to new heights of vindictiveness. (p. 466)

Charlotte, finally accepting the fact that there will be no reunion with Strike, chooses to kill herself rather than carry out her threats toward Robin. In doing so, she fashions herself into the figure of Juliet, a beautiful life cut tragically short by the loss of her love. In the “agreed mythology” of Strike and Charlotte’s relationship, Strike is Charlotte’s Romeo, the man who “continued to love the woman who’d been generous enough to love a mutilated man” (p. 160).

But Strike is not Charlotte’s Romeo, and the shared mythology of their relationship is a delusion. Strike does not follow Charlotte into death; instead, her death leads to his own emotional and spiritual revelations, that is, the rebirth that he experiences sitting in St John the Baptist church in chapter 64. In the way that Romeo and Juliet’s deaths brings peace to their warring families, so too does Charlotte’s death bring Strike a kind of peace: a reconciliation of the long-standing inner war between his romantic feelings for Robin, and the patterns of behaviour that he now understands as stemming, in part, from a traumatic past.

The connections between Charlotte’s death and Romeo and Juliet underscore the differences between perception and reality and the emotional power of delusion and false belief that we see throughout the novel.  But is this the only Shakespeare connection that we can see in these chapters? I believe that there is another, more subtle, Shakespearean influence present in The Running Grave, and that we are pointed towards it by the date of Charlotte’s death in the very early hours of June 24. As we have discussed in the podcast, this date is symbolically significant, being St John the Baptist’s Day. However, it also coincides with another important holiday, and one with a substantial Shakespearean connection: Midsummer.

Continuing in Part 2 of this series, A Midsummer Night’s Delusion, I will explore the parallel echoes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in The Running Grave, looking at both Charlotte’s distorted perspective of her relationship with Strike and Robin’s experiences in the nightmarish setting of Chapman Farm. Check back soon, or follow us on Twitter for blog updates!

Notes:

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/books/review/j-k-rowling-by-the-book.html
2. https://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/2007/07/28/jkrhbp3/ 

Hit and Miss Predictions: influences on The Running Grave

Part 2: The Bible

Prior to the publication of Running Grave I tweeted some predictions (in response to Rowling’s request for guesses) and made seven predictions here. One of these predictions dealt with the I Ching which Rowling had told us, months prior to publication, would be the epigraph text. I guessed that it would play a double role and create a link with Strike’s life (with Prudence or the commune) but this guess proved a dud, and indeed the I Ching’s appearances within the plot seemed to be linked with red herrings. The emphasis on ‘the pig acts in the abysmal,’ (Hexagram 29) for example, suggested that Mazu’s sadism was going to be part of the answer to ‘pigs’ – but it wasn’t. Reaney’s tattoo of The Wanderer (Hexagram 56) marked him out as important, but the interpretations of this hexagram have an almost painfully ironic relevance to Reaney’s story: ‘If he is obliging towards others, he wins success… Prisons ought to be places where people are lodged only temporarily, as guests are. They must not become dwelling places’ (I Ching, trans. Richard Wilhelm). 

My other predications that went AWOL were Rokeby’s death, a musical clue and (sadly!) the kiss. As I’m marking my own homework, I’ll say that these all felt like quite near misses: Charlotte’s death was a good substitute for Rokeby’s (they are twinned as the two major figures from Strike’s past who act as over-arching but largely absent antagonists for him in the plot), there was no musical clue (but music did play a major role in the story via Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ and the chanting) and while there was no kiss, the book ended on a comparable step-of-no-return which (if lacking in the reciprocity of a kiss) was an even more irrevocable step on Strike’s side – a declaration for love from which there is no retreat. Another semi-hit was my suggestion we might be seeing Felbrigg Hall feature – no luck there, but Chapter 89, one of the most important and intimate scenes in the novel, takes place in Felbrigg Lodge: ‘Robin stirred, and groped in the darkness for his hand. Finding it, she squeezed. ‘I knew you were there,’ she murmured drowsily, half-asleep. ‘I knew you were there.’ 

Another near miss was that Strike’s joke would be on the money. Strike’s joke doesn’t inadvertently finger the murderer as it does in books one and six, but he does make a quasi-joke which deflects the reader’s attention from clues about the murderer:  

‘Ah, righ’, you fallen for the act as well, ’ave ya?’ said Saxon with a sneer. ‘Got you twisted round ’er little finger? You ain’ never seen ’er pissed an’ angry. Little church girl? She’s got a scary fuckin’ temper on ’er—’

‘If that was a crime, I’d be inside myself,’ said Strike.  

Abigail’s strength and bravery seem very appealing when we first meet her. Her choice to take on that most heroic of jobs, a fire fighter, on her escape from her abusive childhood forms an obvious parallel to Strike’s choice, after freeing himself from the same location, to become a detective. Abigail is carving a niche for herself in a male world, and many a reader will be rooting for Strike here as he squashes down the entitlement of a man who mistakes his own desire for Abigail as a right to control her actions. Rowling cleverly uses Barry Saxon to hide some home truths about Abigail in a source that none of us will trust. Accurate information (including a nightmare that turns out to be a murder confession – ‘Cut it up smaller, cut it up smaller’) is concealed by virtue of coming from an unlikeable and unreliable man who is out for revenge: ‘An she killed someone ‘erself, when she was in there!’

I found Abigail an attractive character on first meeting her and I suspect Strike did too. His awareness of her beauty, toughness and vulnerability reminded me of how much I had disapproved of him sleeping with a suspect in this novel’s pair – Cuckoo’s Calling – and when Abigail offered, I was pleased that Strike had (finally!) learned this lesson. It never occurred to me that Abigail, unlike Ciara, might be a serious suspect but (given his foolishness with Bijou) this should have been a hint that encouraged me to wonder if there was a deeper reason that the author was not allowing him to become entangled here!

Alongside these definite misses and quasi-hits, two of my predictions unequivocally found their mark. The first was that Running Grave would include allusions to the mythic landscape of Aylmerton. I guessed that local ghost stories would influence the plot and we not only had wraiths of Charlotte and Strike ghosting Bijou but a whole cult based on the visitations of the Drowned Prophet. The ghostly aspect came true beyond my expectation and, in addition, there was another link with Norfolk’s ritual past in the ring of wooden posts (twice likened to Stonehenge) which connect to Norfolk’s most important archaeological find – a 4000-year-old timber circle popularly known as ‘seahenge’ (I’ve written this up here).

The other prediction that hit the nail on the head was the ‘pull of the spiritual.’ I predicted that, just as it was ‘only in the seventh Harry Potter novel – Deathly Hallows – that we first see a church bringing a sense of the numinous into the story… [So] St John the Baptist Church… will counterbalance the false church with a genuine spiritual pull.’ This came true with the scene in Aylmerton Church – the most important spiritual moment in the novel, and my favourite scene of the whole of Strike (I’ve written it up here). But the pull of the spiritual was also visible in other ways in the novel. For example, SwanFan17 – a listener to The Strike & Ellacott Files – convincingly suggests that Will’s story recalls the parable of the Prodigal Son:

And he said, A certain man had two sons:

¹² And the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me. And he divided unto them his living.

¹³ And not many days after the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living.

¹⁴ And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land; and he began to be in want.

¹⁵ And he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country; and he sent him into his fields to feed swine.

¹⁶ And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat: and no man gave unto him.

¹⁷ And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger!

¹⁸ I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee,

¹⁹ And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants.

²⁰ And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.

²¹ And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.

²² But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet:

²³ And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry:

²⁴ For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry.

²⁵ Now his elder son was in the field: and as he came and drew nigh to the house, he heard musick and dancing.

²⁶ And he called one of the servants, and asked what these things meant.

²⁷ And he said unto him, Thy brother is come; and thy father hath killed the fatted calf, because he hath received him safe and sound.

²⁸ And he was angry, and would not go in: therefore came his father out, and intreated him.

²⁹ And he answering said to his father, Lo, these many yes do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment: and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends:

³⁰ But as soon as this thy son was come, which hath devoured thy living with harlots, thou hast killed for him the fatted calf.

³¹ And he said unto him, Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.

³² It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.  (Luke 15.11-32)

When this was mentioned on the podcast, I was immediately interested because the Prodigal Son is such an important structuring story throughout literature – particularly in Shakespeare. 

It is a story Shakespeare mentions in a third of his plays and it would have been very well known to his audience – a nice example of this is how popular it was in domestic decoration in the early modern period. In Thomas Middleton’s play A Mad World My Masters a dwelling place is decorated with it: ‘the curtains indeed were wrought in Venice, with the story of the prodigal child in silk and gold; only the swine are left out, my lord, for spoiling the curtains.’ When similar curtains are mentioned in Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays – Falstaff suggests ‘the story of the Prodigal’ as a good choice for a wall-hanging – it carries a hint for the importance of this story to the plot. For the Prodigal Son is crucial to Shakespeare’s Henry IV part 1 in shaping the narrative Hal wishes to project about himself – the narrative of a son who was lost but is found (and this is play which may well have influenced Harry Potter, as I’ve argued before).  As SwanFan17 notes the famous biblical parable has lots of parallels with Will’s story – both errant sons drain their trust funds, get very hungry and feed pigs. And when the son returns he meets with a striking generosity of forgiveness from his father, but rather less enthusiasm from his brother. This story was so well-known in Shakespeare’s time that Falstaff merely saying ‘What, will you make a younker [younger] of me?’ is an allusion to it – to be a ‘younger [son]’ is to be the Prodigal Son. Will is the younger son, likewise, and the Prodigal parallels (in drawing attention to the most famously grumpy elder brother in literary and religious culture) draw attention likewise to the disgruntled sibling motif of the novel. Sibling rivalry is not only crucial to the murder plot, it forms connections with the murders of books 1 and 4 – strengthening the 1-4-7 story axis in Strike (the story axis around which the Harry Potter stories are structured).

I also like this idea of Will’s overarching storyline as a carrier of biblical allusion because Will – like Strike in St John the Baptist’s Church – is another character seeking after spiritual truth in this novel. While the UHC claims to be a syncretist religion which studies the revelations of other major faiths, the only ‘holy book’ regularly consulted is Jonathan Wace’s own. But when Will reads the bible, it gets through to him: ‘I was reading it yesterday. John, chapter one, verse 4:1: “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world”.’ Will is an intelligent young man with a Strike-like desire for finding out the truth. Although in his case it has led to him almost setting fire to a chapel and the bin-fire that is the UHC – rather than, Strike-like burning that cult to the ground – this bible-verse awakens something in him. Wace calls for unquestioning obedience, and for all his cant about honest sceptics intellectual enquiry is deeply frowned upon – which means that Wace’s claim to be a true prophet is inherently suspect. Will’s drive for the truth not only saves himself and his daughter, but also unwittingly saves Robin too. In trying to find out who she really is, and whether what she says about his mother is true, Will goes to the crucial blind-spot by the fence and – by finding and moving the rock – alerts the agency to Robin’s danger, enabling her escape.

The blind-spot by the barbed wire is a ghostly spot – it is near where Daiyu’s luminous figure runs, near to locations said to be haunted by local spirits: the White Lady of the Shrieking Pits and the Grey Spirit of Beeston Priory. This blind-spot is likewise the place Robin begins to feel that being subsumed by the cult is to have entered an Other World: ‘separated from her colleague by only ten yards, she felt like a ghost who had no business conversing with the living.’ This haunting episode is alchemically transformed when the most supernatural moment of the series so far occurs in precisely the same spot. This one spot, a place that the cult overlooks, the literal barrier between the UHC and the ‘Bubble World’ becomes a form of ‘thin place’ – a connecting place between this world and the Other World. When Robin’s connection to Strike enables her to break free from the cult, it does so through a supernatural knowledge focussed on this place, the very spot where she had once felt herself shut out from reality: 

Robin stood up and had taken a couple of steps towards the door when something strange happened.

She suddenly knew – didn’t guess, or hope, but knew – that Strike had just arrived beside the blind spot at the perimeter fence. The conviction was so strong that it stopped her in her tracks.

The cult’s ‘blind spot’ becomes the place where Robin sees with her inner eye – her love for Strike opening her perception to a truth unknowable through natural means.

Robin’s moment of spiritual insight is the companion moment to Strike’s scene within St John the Baptist’s Church and both (along with the importance of the bible – literally and figuratively – to Will’s story) fulfilled the prediction that we would get the pull of spiritual and a sense of the numinous in a new way in Running Grave.

Strike’s moment of spiritual insight is the recognition of the truth of his own nature as he sits inside a church. Suitably for a novel which introduces a psychologist into the plot, Rowling plays some clever tricks with Strike’s psychology at this point, as he replays in St John the Baptist a much earlier passage in the novel:

These thoughts of Leda led inevitably to thoughts of Charlotte Campbell, because he knew that plenty of armchair psychologists, including close friends and family members, thought he’d been so irreparably damaged by Leda’s parenting, he’d been inevitably drawn to a similarly chaotic and unstable woman. This had always irritated Strike, and it irritated him now as he sat with his whisky, staring out of his attic window, because it so happened that there’d been profound differences between his ex-fiancée and his late mother. (Chap 12)

Armchair psychologists can be annoying even (or especially) when they are right, and the narration cunningly has Strike bat away their insight with a plausible but specious line of argument: ‘because it so happened that there’d been profound differences between his ex-fiancée and his late mother.’ Yes, absolutely. Does that invalidate the previous point? Absolutely not. We’re back with the Johari window: this is something that everyone else knows about Strike, but it won’t do him any good until he knows about it himself, something that won’t happen until he enters the church at Aylmerton. But when he finally comes to true self-realisation it leads to the Johari window opening onto the kairos moment: his full self-understanding leads to full self-disclosure. A decision that he comes to as he sits psychologically held within the church walls, supported by its ‘forms and structures’ will change his life forever (and for better): he will finally make a declaration to Robin from which there is no going back.

 

By @beatricegroves1 author of Literary Allusion in Harry Potter

‘Joyous is the lake:’ influences on The Running Grave

Part 1: The I Ching

 

The Joyous is the lake… it is a sorceress.

The I Ching; Epigraph 26 in Running Grave

In the last ten years, Rowling has only given occasional interviews and among these there are two stand-out moments, both which speak to the influence of the unconscious on her craft. The first was the revelation (in the 2017 BBC documentary ‘Harry Potter: A History of Magic’) that the Masonic symbol from the 1975 Sean Connery and Michael Caine film The Man who Would be King was an unconscious influence on the creation of the Deathly Hallows symbol (I’ve written this up in a piece for this month’s Rowling Library Magazine). The second was the startling, and wonderful, answer she gave in 2019 in a BBC4 radio programme ‘The Museum of Curiosity’ when she suddenly decided to be open about the metaphors that guide her creativity:

Well, I’ve never said this before because I always think it sounds so bonkers, and, although it’s something I think about a lot, I’ve always been a bit wary about articulating it to anyone else.

But I envisage my process thus: I feel as though I go through a lot of trees which are my day to day concerns, what we all deal with all the time, and those I see as trees inside my head and then I get to a place which is my work place where there is a lake and there’s a shed. And this is my process.

I feel as though the inspiration is the thing that lives in the lake that’s very mysterious, that I never see. But it hands me stuff. And then I have to take this unformed stuff – sometimes it can be reasonably formed, sometimes it’s very blobby like molten glass or something, and then I have to take it into the shed and there I have to work on it.

And because I’ve had this metaphor in my head for many many years, when I read something that I’ve written I have a sort of shorthand that I say to myself, “too much lake, not enough shed.” When I go back over something – I should have spent longer in the shed.

And then there are some bits you think, “Oh that’s too sheddy. I’m not sure you added a lot out of the lake that day.” And in a dream world, obviously, the lake gives you something good, but then you work on it properly in the shed and you turn out the finished product. And I even apply this to other writers. I’ll read something and I’ll think “This is pure shed.”

Rowling’s ‘Lake’ seems to be related to the pools in C.S. Lewis’s Wood between the Worlds (which Rowling has spoken of before) – it is noticeable, for example, that she has to push through trees to reach her lake. But since reading Running Grave, I’ve also wondered if it might be related to the ‘Lake’ of the I Ching. ‘Tui, The Joyous, Lake’ is a trigram as well as a hexagram so it appears frequently throughout the I Ching and even on a casual flick-through it is a name that might stand out. 

In the October 2023 Q&A for Running Grave Rowling told us that it is possible that the copy of the I Ching she used for every chapter epigraph in this book had been sitting on her bookshelves for thirty years, awaiting this moment. In an explicitly I-Chingian example of randomness, Rowling caught sight of the book when mulling over epigraph texts and suddenly realised how perfectly it would ‘express some of the obliqueness but the simplicity of the Universal Humanitarian Church’s ethos.’ But Rowling provided far more information in her preceding Twitter exchanges on this topic at the end of September when @IrisD1981 ’s question ‘Why did you choose to link this story to the I Ching?’ elicited this answer:

One of the key hallmarks of a fascistic/totalitarian movement, as defined in a brilliant essay by Umberto Eco on ‘Ur-Fascism’, is that it’s syncretistic, which means it combines different forms of belief that may be contradictory. That artificial fusion enables the ideology/religion to claim it possesses an all-encompassing world view, a one-stop-shop for truth. I wanted the UHC to have incorporated religious practices from all over the world and to have appropriated aspects of other cultures, to give itself an attractive gloss of multiculturalism and diversity. I had an old copy of the I Ching on one of my bookshelves that I bought second hand years ago, and I don’t think I’d ever opened until I was creating the UHC. One morning I walked past the book case and thought ‘that could be interesting.’ I immediately knew I wanted to use it, because the I Ching is in so many ways absolutely antithetical to the UHC, containing bits of philosophy and comments on human nature, sometimes oblique but occasionally quite direct, that contradict everything the UHC – and particularly Mazu – stands for. It seemed to me that the I Ching’s conception of the ‘superior man’ – or person – as an individual of quiet strength, independent thought and wisdom couldn’t be further from the UHC’s determination to turn adherents into mindless automata fit only to parrot its talking points, effectively forbidding intellectual enquiry. I also liked the idea of Mazu posing as something she emphatically is not – biracial – and taking the I Ching as her own personal device of judgement and punishment, when it is anything but that. To tell you the truth, I became fascinated by the I Ching while writing the novel, and learned how to count out the yarrow stalks in the traditional way so I knew exactly how it worked (and when I say ‘worked’, I don’t claim it’s a divination device, but I do think it’s a very interesting tool for meditation and reflection).

Frankly this answer alone has reconciled me to Twitter Blue – it is a gift that Rowling is able to answer at length when she wants to! – and Pools followed it up with a question that elicited my favourite ever epigraph response. Pools wrote that she has ‘started using it [the I Ching] as a writing tool, to explore possibilities for characters and worlds, and to help spark ideas when I’m stuck’ and Rowling responded: ‘The Faerie Queen worked like that for me, too.’  I love this answer because it implicitly lifts The Faerie Queene above all her other epigraph texts but also because it suggests that once she has found the right epigraph text, that text begins to influence her own writing. Echoing Pools’ words here means that Rowling implies that Spenser’s poem sparked ideas for her in Troubled Blood and helped her ‘explore possibilities for characters and worlds’ – it suggests that the poetry, plots and character arcs of The Faerie Queene (which I’ve explored here, here and here) are even stronger sources for Troubled Blood than we may have realised.

Something particularly satisfying about Rowling’s twitter discussion about the I Ching is the way in which she describes her epigraph text as embodying a moral code that is oppositional to that of characters in her novel. 

I immediately knew I wanted to use it, because the I Ching is in so many ways absolutely antiethical [sic] to the UHC, containing bits of philosophy and comments on human nature, sometimes oblique but occasionally quite direct, that contradict everything the UHC – and particularly Mazu – stands for.

Rowling means ‘antithetical’ – but her misspelling of it as ‘antiethical’ works brilliantly given the context of the way in which it is the ethics of the UHC which are at odds with the I Ching. We’ve seen her making meaningful spelling mistakes on Twitter before and in addition to the insights they provide into her thought processes, they are interesting for suggesting that even long posts like this are not precomposed and copied into twitter but written out unmediated, unpremeditated.

Rowling’s description of choosing her epigraph text for Running Grave because it is antithetical to the ethos of the UHC is fascinating for the wider insight it provides into her use of epigraph texts. The ethos of The Running Grave, like that of the I Ching, is deeply at odds with the UHC – so Rowling has chosen an epigraph text that rejects the morality of the novel’s antagonists and aligns itself with that of the novel and its heroes. As I’ve argued before I think this is how the is how the Victorian women poets in Ink Black Heart work too. Rowling’s real-world celebration of these (often forgotten) female poets acts in opposition to Anomie (and other antagonists in the novel) who through misogyny and even femicide attempt to undermine female creativity. Anomie attempts to erase a woman from her own creation while the epigraphs celebrate often overlooked female creativity. And the rarified air of fairyland in Spenser’s Faerie Queene works this way too. Rowling’s choice of a chivalric romance creates a framework which throws the misogynistic horror of Creed’s evil into even sharper relief. 

We do not know far in advance of writing a novel Rowling begins scoping out its epigraphs, except in the case of Deathly Hallows, which she chose nine years before the novel came out: ‘I’d known it was going to be those two passages since Chamber was published.’ It is not beyond the bounds of possibility, therefore, that Rowling’s original flicking through the I Ching had already occurred prior to her evocative description of her creative process as the Lake and the Shed (recorded summer 2019) and certainly other Chinese texts were influencing her at this time. She had spoken the year before of the importance of the Shan Hai Jing (or strange creatures from the guideways through mountains and seas) for the Fantastic Beasts franchise and put an image of it up on her website.

 

 

(For more on the influence of this and other Chinese texts on Fantastic Beasts see here and my essay ‘The Snake Woman in Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts’). Another classic Chinese text – The Art of War – was visible in her 2020 bookshelf video on Twitter  (thank you, as ever, to Nick Jeffrey who spotted it!). Maybe in 2018, when Rowling was becoming interested in classic Chinese texts such as the Shan Hai Jing , she likewise felt drawn to take a look through the I Ching and think about the Chinese influences the UHC was going to spuriously claim for itself. 

Whenever she read it, I think it likely that she would have been caught by its use of natural images such as the mountain and the lake for deep mental states and found it resonated with her own understanding of her own creativity as a lake: ‘Knowledge should be a refreshing and vitalizing force… it harbors the quiet security of a heart fortified within itself’ (Hexagram 58, The Joyous, Lake, I Ching)

 

The Problem of Knowledge in The Running Grave

by Kurt Schreyer

 

“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is.”  

– Søren Kierkegaard

 

To begin with the obvious: Robert Galbraith’s The Running Grave is a mystery novel. Not merely in the sense that it’s a detective story, but more importantly because it explores the boundaries between what we know and can express, and those mysteries, great and small, that we embrace although they are beyond words and demonstrable facts. 

How do we know things? And how do we distinguish what we think, or believe, or want to believe, from what we actually know? Is it even possible not to impose our thoughts and beliefs on the world and the people around  us? Can we open our eyes, so to speak, and see them as they are? As a famous detective once said, “Never theorize before you have data. Invariably, you end up twisting facts to suit theories instead of theories to suit facts.” But even Mr. Sherlock Holmes would admit that this is easier said than done.

As if in response to Conan Doyle, detective fiction seems to have set itself the task of testing Holmes’s dictum. The convoluted plot of Raymond Chandler’s 1939 novel The Big Sleep is so difficult to follow that it famously stumped Howard Hawks’s film adaptation of the book, and they were forced to call the author and plead for help. But Chandler knew no better than they “whodunnit.” For him, the journey of the main character, Philip Marlowe, was the important thing for readers to consider, not the solution to the case.  In fact, Chandlerian crime fiction and its many imitators on page and screen often embrace mystery over “The Answer.” From Margery Allingham’s 1952 psychological thriller The Tiger in the Smoke, to the sprawling novels of James Ellroy’s “LA Quartet” series, obfuscation has become the rule. Recent readers of Galbraith’s The Running Grave have found this to be true as well, and some have shared their elaborate and rather impressive evidence boards on social media.¹

Yet the truly fascinating thing about The Running Grave is not its intricate plotting. All mystery stories more or less expect the reader to play the detective. Far beyond the conventional question of “Who done it?” Galbraith’s seventh novel in the Strike & Ellacott series raises the epistemological “problem of knowledge.” It asks: “What do you know and how do you know it?” – about the world; about other people; about ideologies and religious beliefs; about our origins (the theme of paternity & birth is pervasive); and above all about the undiscovered country of Death. This brief essay demonstrates how relentlessly Galbraith pursues these challenging questions as it examines some of the more significant claims to knowledge and belief of the book’s major characters. Warning: Spoilers ahead! 

 

To Know or Not to Know?

When detective Robin Ellacott first visits the Rupert Court temple of the Universal Humanitarian Church (UHC), she hears its founder, Jonathan Wace, tell the conversion story of his friend Rusty Anderson. “Something had awoken in him,” says Wace, “and I knew in that moment that his heart had opened to God at last, and I, whom God had helped so much, could show him what I’d learned, what I’d seen, which made me know – not think, not believe, not hope, but know – that God is real and that help is always there, though we may not understand how to reach it, or how to even ask for it.”

 For readers familiar with the Harry Potter series, Wace’s proclamation contains an unsettling echo of Dumbledore’s reassurance to the students of Hogwarts. He concludes with a challenge for his audience: “If I tell you today that I know–know beyond doubt–that there is life beyond death, and a divine force that seeks to guide and help any human who seeks it, you’ll demand proof…yet you can take a first step, now. A first step towards proof, towards the absolute certainty that I possess.” But as “X” (née Twitter) user @Ankis1988 has pointed out to me, Robin’s later “come to Jesus moment” in chapter 87 turns out to be quite different from – and yet directly parallel to – Wace’s supposed religious insight. We read: “She suddenly knew–didn’t guess, or hope, but knew–that Strike had just arrived beside the blind spot at the perimeter fence. The conviction was so strong that it stopped her in her tracks.” “I knew you were there,” she subsequently tells Strike before drowsily but emphatically repeating: “I knew you were there.” How she knew is a question left for the reader to solve: was it a divine inspiration? A telepathic connection? Or simply an intuition born out of knowledge accrued over time, years of living and working closely with her professional partner? Perhaps it’s merely a lucky guess on her part? 

Strike himself has “irrational” knowledge, insights acquired without empirical evidence or concrete logical deduction. Most conspicuously, he knows, from years of experience in his tragic relationship with Charlotte, what she had written to him in the suicide note that her sister Amelia had burned. “He knew just how accurately he’d guessed the contents of Charlotte’s note by Amelia’s expression,” we’re told. Strike knows Charlotte so well that, in a scene reminiscent of Harry’s speaking to Dumbledore in an apparently ethereal limbo resembling King’s Cross, he converses with her after her death. The italicized typeface on the pages of chapter 64 remind the reader that their dialogue is taking place inside his mind. But he speaks to her, often forcefully contradicting her, as if she was seated next to him in the pew of St. John the Baptist Church. Does Strike tacitly admit the possibility of an afterlife here? I have my doubts, but some readers have speculated that the “sheep-faced man” who briefly but kindly and gently tries to console the bereaved Strike may not be the rector but a mysterious, symbolic Christ-figure. 

 

Goddesses & Higher-level Truths

Claiming to have knowledge of and direct contact with souls dwelling in the afterlife, Mazu Wace manipulates new recruits into her cult by gaining knowledge of their secrets through shaming rituals that she terms, appropriately enough, “Revelation.” As one of Robin’s letters explains, “The people who were called on had to take a chair in the middle and confess things that they were ashamed of. When they did, they got abused and shouted at. They all ended up in tears… Mazu led the Revelation session and was definitely enjoying herself.” Even as they gain access to the hidden thoughts and fears of their cult followers, the UHC cloaks their supposed dogma – their claims to higher spiritual truths – in what Robin calls “a huge amount of jargon”: “Whenever a question was posed about contradictions or inconsistencies in church doctrine, the answer was almost always that they would be explained by an HLT (Higher-Level Truth), which would be revealed when they had progressed further along the path to pure spirit.” After her escape and the agency’s success with the case, Robin is “certain many, if not most, members would be cured by this eruption of revelations, by the evidence that they’d been thoroughly hoodwinked, that Papa J was no hero, but a conman, a rapist and an accessory to murder.”

Throughout the novel, both she and Strike are depicted as agents not only of justice but also of truth. Wace touts the Drowned Prophet Daiyu as a “speaker of truths, bringer of justice” and his book titled, significantly, The Answer declares, “only the Blessed Divinity knows the truth.” But in chapter 66, Robin countermands this assertion when it is quoted by Emily Pirbright: “But there is truth, said Robin firmly. It’s not all opinions or memories. There is truth.” Relentless in the pursuit of knowledge and truth, Robin aptly adopts the undercover name Rowena, which is shared by the founder of the ever-studious Ravenclaw House at Hogwarts. Wace mocks what he perceives to be Robin’s virginal naivete by giving her another name. He dubs her “Artemis,” but this goddess will hunt him down – pursuing justice until, in the words of her partner, she has burned “his church to the fucking ground.”

 

The Piltdown Hoax

Strike naturally shares her passion, and he confronts Wace after his “Super Service” at Olympia. The venue takes its name from the region in Greece famous as the ancient site of the Olympic games but also for its religious sanctuaries. Though this clash of titans is entertaining, Strike unfortunately does not yet have “The Answer,” the full picture about who is behind the death of Daiyu Wace; his knowledge is inaccurate and problematic. During the exchange with Jonathan, however, he lands a hilarious rhetorical punch when he refers to Wace’s son as “Piltdown Man.” 

There’s more to this joke than Jiang’s primitive appearance. It is a reference to one of the biggest frauds in the history of modern science involving a forgery that fooled the scientific community for nearly half a century. In 1912, lawyer and dilettante paleontologist Charles Dawson claimed to have discovered a skull near Piltdown, East Sussex which proved the existence of the so-called “missing link,” in human evolution. Experts from the British Museum, King’s College London, the Royal College of Surgeons, and many other members of the scientific establishment debated the validity and significance of Dawson’s discovery, but his detractors could not definitively disprove it. 

It took more than forty years to demonstrate that Piltdown Man was a fraud composed of human and orangutan bones. Even so, it would take another half century to identify the forger as no other than Dawson himself. Before 2016, various theories pointed the finger of blame at him or else British anthropologist Arthur Keith, Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, or even Arthur Conan Doyle, who lived near Piltdown. Sometimes the acquisition of knowledge demands a great deal of time and labor by dedicated professionals. As one scientist has stated, “Piltdown is a caution for scientists to not be guided by preconceived ideas. Test alternatives and explanations.” ²

 

Conclusion 

The traditional whodunnit plays a mind game with the reader by misleading them with red herrings and concealing, but eventually imparting, vital information – “The Answer” or solution – about its central crime. But Robert Galbraith’s The Running Grave plays a deeper game by raising epistemological questions about the nature of human knowledge and belief. And it leaves its readers with a fantastic final conundrum: the mystery of what Robin, now that she knows Strike’s feelings for her, will do next. 

We don’t know. Or do we? We certainly believe in “the plan” J. K. Rowling has for the pair and, I suppose, … 

“We’ll see.” 

 

---

Notes

¹See https://x.com/DorothySlayers/status/1712305543572844848?s=20

²Quoted from: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-edition-1.3716870/century-old-mystery-of-piltdown-man-hoax-finally-solved-1.3717066

Welcome to Part Two in our series of guest posts written by Dr. Beatrice Groves, author of Literary Allusion in Harry Potter. (You can find Part One here.) Dr. Groves teaches Shakespeare and Renaissance English Literature at Oxford University, and her blog Bathilda’s Notebook can be found over on Mugglenet. In this second and final part of the series, Dr. Groves discusses her seven predictions for The Running Grave! 

 [I have not read any pre-released chapters of Running Grave – only the blurb: there are no spoilers in this blog!]

Last year I made four predictions for Ink Black Heart and achieved a strike rate of three out of four – with which I was pretty happy! (Not that it helped me spot the murderer though – one of my predictions was that Strike would make a joke which would point to him and although it came true, I still failed to spot it!). We’ve had an in-depth discussion, as I mentioned yesterday, on The Three Broomsticks podcast of what Running Grave being the seventh book might mean for its parallels with Deathly Hallows and so, remembering that seven is the most powerfully magical number, here are seven predictions for Strike Seven!

Prediction 1: Strike’s joke is on the money

I’m repeating this successful ‘strike’ for Ink Black Heart for Running Grave. Humour will be used to deflect from a clue to the murderer again – this is trademark Rowling – and I think it will once more be Strike who makes the joke. Remember that Cuckoo’s Calling moment when Strike bites back the comment ‘What, her too?’ (24) on discovering that another of John Bristow’s siblings has died. The reader is distracted by the black humour of the moment, but it is indeed a case where losing one might be bad luck but losing two begins to look like carelessness. Given that we’re expecting some ‘closing the circle’ moments with the first book, I’ll be looking out for a repeat of this ‘Strike is unconsciously on the money’ joke. 

Prediction 2: Rokeby’s ending

My second guess is another repeat prediction – this time of something which was a conspicuously failed guess for Ink Black Heart: Rokeby’s death. I don’t think Rokeby is the ‘Snape’ of the series in the sense that we are going to discover that he has always held a candle for Leda or that he is has been protecting Strike from death all these years without the latter knowing it, but I do think he’ll be the character for whom new information in book 7 (delivered after his death?) will make Strike and the reader view him in a new, and slightly more favourable, light.   

Prediction 3: A musical clue

Music is one of the places where Strike’s personal arc (see his psychologically interesting choice of Denmark St as a place to live and work) intersects with the individual plot of each book. Rereading Cuckoo’s Calling after having read Troubled Blood and Ink Black Heart brought the importance of its musical clue into new focus. (There are loads of musical clues in Ink Black Heart although the majority of these are red herrings ). Troubled Blood has the clearest musical clue – Strike cracks the case after letting Pat listen to the music she wants – and this is a satisfying link with its paired novel, Career of Evil as that was the novel based around song lyrics. The important musical clue in Cuckoo’s Calling, likewise, means that I’ll be looking out for one in its paired novel, Running Grave. The clue in Cuckoo’s Calling comes when Rochelle raps Deeby Macc’s lyrics:

No hydroquinone, black to the backbone,

Takin’ Deeby lightly, better buy an early tombstone,

I’m drivin’ my Ferrari – fuck Johari – got my head on straight

Nothin’ talks like money talks – I’m shoutin’ at ya, Mister Jake. (282)

On page 211 we’re told that Strike can just make out ‘—ck J—’ on the back of a Guy Somé hoodie on a runner in the CCTV and a hundred pages later learn that the custom-made hoodie Somé sent Macc had ‘some of his lyrics on the back’ (314). It is never actually spelt out that this means that the lyrics Rochelle provides – ‘[fu]ck J[ohari]’ – are a crucial clue that the runner is the killer (he has been killing time in Macc’s flat before he goes to kill Lula). The reader has to listen to the lyrics and work out this clue for themselves.

The importance of musical clues later in the series brought this early clue into sharper focus on a reread and, of course, it is important in other ways too. The Johari window is a psychological term that visualises how self-disclosure and self-discovery play out in our relationships with others or, as Robin puts it, ‘It’s all to do with how well we know ourselves, and how well other people know us’ (360). Making Johari into a clue is a witty thing to do in a detective novel (where the reader is constantly trying to work out how well they know the characters) and making it into an undisclosed clue – never fully spelt out – is particularly on point! But it also works well as a framework with which the reader can view the central relationship of the series. Robin and Strike’s relationship takes place as a dance of what is visible to others (all their friends know what is going on!) being invisible to themselves before finally moving into the ‘known known’ quadrant in Ink Black Heart. Here’s hoping for full knowledge between them, building on the full self-knowledge they reached in the previous novel, in Running Grave.

 

Prediction 4: A double I Ching connection

My fourth guess is that the I Ching will connect both with the Norfolk cult (either the Universal Humanitarian Church or the commune from Strike’s childhood or both) and Prudence via her being a Jungian therapist, and Jung’s interest in the I Ching.

Prediction 5: Allusions to the mythic landscape of Aylmerton

I have previously discussed the rich myths which lie embedded in the Norfolk landscape of which Rowling has given us teasing glimpses in her Twitter headers. The round tower of Aylmerton is traditionally linked with Viking raids, there are the so-called shrieking pits nearby and there is a putative secret underground tunnel linking Aylmerton with Gresham Castle (where the Pastons lived) and Beeston Priory’s haunted ruins. Both the ghosts of Beeston Priory and the shrieking pits – the white lady and the grey spirit – carry more than a whiff of Hogwarts about them, and I think it likely that some of this evocative local history will get at least a passing mention! On a similar note, another of Rowling’s headers – ‘Lions Mouth’ lane (brilliantly identified by @CormStrikeFan) – borders the Felbrigg Hall Estate and I wonder if, lightly fictionalised, this stately home will become the headquarters of  the Universal Humanitarian Church? 

 

 

 

Prediction 6: The pull of the spiritual

Aylmerton’s surrounds not only have a richly storied history, but also rich spiritual connections. Alongside the church itself, there are the possibly biblical origins of the name of ‘Lions Mouth’ lane; the wayside cross outside Aylmerton church that may once have marked the Walsingham Way; the supposed underground tunnel from that cross to Beeston Priory containing a statue of the Old Testament idol the golden calf; the haunted ruins of Beeston Priory itself and the unquiet spirit said to linger in the shrieking pits. In particular, the fact that the cross just outside Aylmerton Church is an ancient way marker for the pilgrimage route – the Walsingham Way – which criss-crossed medieval Norfolk may be, as I discussed yesterday, a pointer towards a similar kind of ‘double quest’ in Running Grave. We already know from the blurb that this detective story is starting out a little bit differently – a quest to save someone rather than a quest to find their murderer. We have also been presented with a fake ‘church’ (the Universal Humanitarian Church) and a true church (St John the Baptist Church, Aylmerton). It is only in the seventh Harry Potter novel – Deathly Hallows – that we first see a church bringing a sense of the numinous into the story. Perhaps St John the Baptist Church – or Walsingham itself (the place where Richeldis de Faverches built ‘England’s Nazareth’ after a vision in 1061, one of most important shrines in medieval England and still a major site of pilgrimage to this day) – will counterbalance the false church with a genuine spiritual pull.  

Prediction 7: The Kiss

‘R’bin,’ he said, giving up and gazing down at her. ‘R’bin, d’you know wadda kairos mo…’ He hiccoughed. ‘Mo… moment is?’

‘A kairos moment?’ she repeated, hoping against hope it was not something sexual, something that she would not be able to forget afterwards, especially as the kebab shop owner was listening in and smirking behind them. ‘No, I don’t. Shall we go back to the office?’…

‘’SGreek,’ he told her. ‘Kairos. Kairos moment. An’ it means,’ and from somewhere in his soused brain he dredged up words of surprising clarity, ‘the telling moment. The special moment. The supreme moment.’

Oh please, thought Robin, please don’t tell me we’re having one. 

 (Cuckoo’s Calling, 367-8)

Robin’s instinctive response to this is pin-point accurate, but its brilliance is only revealed on a reread as we know how much she (and we) now want them to be having one! Ink Black Heart opens with a kairos moment gone wrong – it is, as the epigraph tells us, a moment that changes everything. It is ‘the telling moment’ but the Johari window is not yet fully open. The kiss-that-missed doesn’t reveal Strike and Robin’s true hearts either to each other or themselves. The supreme moment, the kairos moment when the Johari window will be flung wide and each of them finally fully understands themselves and the other will happen in a kiss-that-doesn’t-miss in Running Grave. (Here’s hoping, at least).

Let me know what you think of my predictions and please add your own below! (Though nothing derived from the pre-released material, please – I am avoiding these like the plague so please no spoilers in the comments!)

We’re thrilled to be able to share with you this two-part series of guest posts written by Dr. Beatrice Groves, author of Literary Allusion in Harry Potter. Dr. Groves teaches Shakespeare and Renaissance English Literature at Oxford University, and her blog Bathilda’s Notebook can be found over on Mugglenet. In this first part, Dr. Groves draws parallels between Harry Potter and the Strike & Ellacott series and shares her predictions for The Running Grave. 

 

[I have not read any of the pre-released chapters of Running Grave – only the blurb – there are no spoilers in this blog!]

The run-up to a new Strike novel is for me – as for many – a welcome excuse for a reread of the series. On this reread one of the things that struck me were the Harry Potter connections of which this reread itself is, of course, one. In creating a second series of novels in which relationships mature and easter eggs abound, Rowling has created another series which repays careful rereading. We discussed these parallel rereads when Nick Jeffery, Louise Freeman and I were generously invited on The Three Broomsticks podcast to chat Running Grave/Deathly Hallows parallels with hosts Sophia Jenkins and Irvin Khaytman and of course the Strike diehards rereads are nothing to the international rereading frenzy that marked each new Potter arrival. But nonetheless this poring over previous novels on the look-out for new clues before each new publication, luxuriating in the unfolding relationships and trying to work out how the underlying plot-arc is going to play out is not only something that unites the two fandoms, but a mark of underlying similarities that tie the two series together.

On this reread a number of small connections with Harry Potter jumped out at me– such as the chime in Troubled Blood with arguably Dumbledore’s most famous saying: ‘It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.’ Margot’s own perceptiveness chimes with this, and it is a connection which provides the reader with an instinctual warmth towards her when Gloria recalls her cherished memory of the older woman’s wisdom: ‘We aren’t our mistakes. It’s what we do about the mistake that shows who we are’ (825). Gloria is saved by Margot’s death (it is only this that gives her the impetus to escape her abusive relationship) and this sanctifies that death in a way likewise familiar from Harry Potter. This connection works to increase the reader’s warmth towards Margot, which is quite a feat for such a cold case. It is an example of a parallel which provides an emotional pull for the reader – but other connections may provide clues. It is noticeable, for example, that Strike observes in Lethal White (the pivotal fourth book of the series) that only one of Leda’s three grandchildren resembles her. This seems strikingly close to the fact that in Harry Potter only one of Lily’s three grandchildren (Albus Severus – the one who most interests Rowling) resembles his grandmother. This underlines apparent parallels in the author’s mind between her heroes’ mothers – Leda and Lily who, in addition to their rather similar names, are both loving, beloved and die young. Should this parallel alert us to connections between their deaths? It had me thinking, at least, that Leda’s death, like Lily’s, might have roots in a desire to protect her son, may have had some protective benefit for him not dreamt of by either of them and that it may have both been either unknowingly precipitated by Rokeby (as the ‘Snape’ of the series?) or that he likewise made bootless efforts to circumvent it?

Throughout Strike fandom, over the years, we have discussed at length the parallels between each Strike novel and its parallel number in Harry Potter (see for example my piece on Ink Black Heart and Half-Blood Prince) but on this re-read I particularly enjoyed some of the more general connections. One of these was to do with chocolate and Dementors. The information that Strike recalls in Cuckoo’s Calling, imparted by Bernie Coleman from the Army Medical Corps, about how his family-sized bar of Dairy Milk will help with the hypoglycaemia that causes hangovers, has a nice ‘Madam-Pomphrey- stuffing-Harry-with-chocolate-to-deal-with-Dementor-aftershocks’ vibe. However, when this chime returns in Troubled Blood it is a little more profound:

“He rang off. Robin picked up the rest of the brownie and finished it slowly, savouring every bite. In spite of the prospect of mediation with Matthew, and doubtless because of a much-needed infusion of chocolate, she felt a good deal happier than she had ten minutes previously.” (197)

Chocolate is useful to counteract the effects of Dementors, but it is only Patronuses, of course, who can chase them away. The ability to conjure up a Patronus is linked to friendship throughout Harry Potter, it is often by fixing on Ron and Hermione’s faces that Harry finds he can dredge up a Patronus when all had seemed lost. The wider circle of Harry’s friendship is useful in warding off depression too. One of my favourite moments of the series is Luna’s appearance with her beautiful hare Patronus – ‘‘We’re all still here,’ she whispered, ‘we’re still fighting’ (Deathly Hallows, chap 32) – alongside Ernie and Seamus with the boar and fox Patronuses which Harry taught them all to conjure. These friends save Harry, Ron and Hermione when all had seemed lost and the power of his love for his friends enables Harry to conjure a Patronus even when he feels at his most defeated.

But as Robin/Strike shippers will surely feel the Strike-is-better-than-a-brownie moment, although it speaks to Robin’s love of Strike as her best friend, tells us something more. As Rowling has explained ‘the Patronus often mutates to take the image of the love of one’s life (because they so often become the “happy thought” that generates a Patronus).’  When Tonks’s Patronus becomes a wolf or Snape’s Patronus takes shape as a doe it is a sign of the depth of their devotion: ‘your Patronus only changes if it’s eternal love, unchanging – part of you forever’.  Murphy is a mere ‘also ran’ – whether or not we get the kiss in Running Grave or at a later date, I am confident that Robin’s Patronus has taken fixed form as bear.

But much as I enjoy spotting specific parallels like this, what really stood out for me on this reread, is something more fundamental: the re-enchantment of the mundane in which both series partake. Rowling’s new hero has a name embedded in myth and he is suitably attuned to the mythic strands that remain visible in the workaday world. The opening of Silkworm, for example, finds him noticing the stone griffin standing sentinel over Smithfield market and the face carved over the market’s arch ‘a stern stone face, ancient and bearded, stared back at him from over the doorway. Had there ever been a god of carcasses?’

This might read to us, now we know who Robert Galbraith is (something Rowling had not intended when she wrote Silkworm), as Rowling’s burnishing of the real-world with some of her habitual magic. But in reality, it is the opposite. These moments in Strike function as a reminder that the magical world of Hogwarts was always rooted in an imagination triggered by the real world. Just such a stone griffin seen on London’s streets might have been what inspired Rowling to name Gryffindor; just such a stern ‘ancient and bearded’ stone face might have inspired Slytherin’s statue ‘ancient and monkey-like, with a long thin beard’ (Chamber, chap 17). The prophet-like man in Cuckoo’s Calling – ‘they were momentarily impeded by a tiny hooded, bearded man like an Old Testament prophet, who stopped in front of them and slowly stuck out his tongue’ (126) – feels like an encounter with a Wizard because Mr Dursley’s horror at Daedalus Diggle (a ‘tiny old man… wearing a violet cloak’ [Philosopher’s Stone, chap 1]) is precisely such a real-world encounter reimagined from the perspective of the outsider. Diggle’s eccentricities mark his joyous membership of a magical society rather than being signs of mental illness. Parallels between this nameless man in Cuckoo’s Calling and Diggle are a politicised version of the wider perspective which is always functioning in Rowling’s work: the perception of the numinous in the everyday. Fascinating histories and myths underlie quotidian reality just as they do magical worlds.

One of the ways Rowling has always expressed this idea is through her evocative names. Cormoran’s name comes from a mythic giant and the novels are peppered with names that conjure up wider horizons: such the wideboy journalist Dominic Culpepper (whose name is a nod to Culpeper, the seventeenth century herbalist-cum-astrologist who is such an important source for both Herbology and Potions in Harry Potter) or the blink-and-you’d-miss-her Margaret Bunyan who turns up in Career of Evil (the novel that follows Silkworm – the book which confirmed Rowling’s long-held interest in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, one of the most influential stories of all time). In London, Robin and Strike are surrounded by real-world names that likewise often recall similarly complex histories. For example, the White Swan pub near Robin’s home gives a local habitation and a name to all the symbolic swans that float through the novels themselves, and their mythic hinterlands. 

The name of the White Swan is inscribed not only on its pub sign, but also into the wall of the pub, with its ‘single carved swan’ (Lethal White, 56). I particularly enjoyed this detail as it reminded me of noticing, when I lived in London briefly as a teenager, passing by a pub with one of those generic ‘Slug and Lettuce’ names so common in the 1990s and noticing high up on the pub’s wall a carving of a mitre. Despite the attempted erasure, I knew what the old (real!) name of that pub had been. And ‘The Mitre’ is indeed a classic pub name – the one on Oxford High Street, for example, has been named ‘the Mitre’ since c.1500, after the Bishop of Lincoln’s mitre on Lincoln College’s coat of arms (Lincoln College owns the pub). In a nice serendipity this Oxford Mitre inn plays an important role in one of Elizabeth Goudge’s novels. Goudge is a writer whose deep reverence for the numinous-in-the-everyday made her Little White Horse such a magical read (and Rowling’s favourite childhood novel). And that novel itself – with its magical unicorn mistaken for a workaday white horse – may be one reason embedded in Rowling’s own personal history why white horses (including frequent White Horse pubs) play such an important symbolic role in Lethal White.

Pub names are themselves an interesting piece of Britain’s national history that reach back to the fourteenth century. Pub names are often a simple, easily recognisable visual sign (like a mitre or a white horse) because they go back to a time before mass literacy. Tavern signs evolved from the ‘bush’ of the Roman taberna (a wreath of vine leaves signalling that new wine had been delivered) and when Richard II decreed that all inns had to display a sign, each establishment, keen to be identified by those who could not read as well as those who could, advertised themselves with a clear, often solid-colour image (such as a white horse or a red lion). As Robin tells us the White Horse is one of the ten most popular pub names in Britain – or at least it was when she read this fact (presumably in this 2007 list compiled by CAMRA):

1. Crown (704)
2. Red Lion (668)
3. Royal Oak (541)
4. Swan (451)
5. White Hart (431)
6. Railway (420)
7. Plough (413)
8. White Horse (379)
9. Bell (378)
10. New Inn (372)

This list comes from the fascinating Wikipedia entry on pub names and shows how many inns chose a single animal or object as their sign. Strike readers will no doubt be pleased to see that ‘The Swan’ is doing well in that list and it is interesting that the White Hart – the badge of Richard II and a crucially important symbolic animal throughout Harry Potter (see here) – should also be such a perennial favourite.

While pubs play a large role in Harry Potter (just as they do in Strike), churches –arguably the other most numerous set of ancient public buildings that connect the English landscape with its past – play a much larger role in the more recent series. Churches are important locations in Strike where the mythic past intertwines with the lives of our protagonists. This happens at weddings and funerals (such as Joan’s funeral church functioning as a reminder of the saint underlying Strike’s home ‘St. Maudez, for whom both village and church were named’ [Troubled Blood, chap 48]) and in the surprising cameo of the truncated churchyard of All Saints, Leamington Spa in the same novel marking a dead-end in the investigation. But the novel with the most symbolically important churches so far has, once again, been the ‘pivotal’ novel, Lethal White.

Early in Lethal White Robin steps off her accustomed path into St Nicholas’s churchyard in Deptford – drawn in by the extraordinary skull finials on its gateposts. These memento mori skulls have a fascinating history and a persistent local legend suggests that they may have inspired the Jolly Roger itself and the narrative makes an oblique reference this piratical connection: ‘the finials would have looked at home, Robin thought, moving closer to examine the black eye sockets, garnishing the front of a pirate’s mansion in some fantasy film’ (48). Suitably, the peaceful churchyard beyond these gates – ‘Robin saw a church and mossy tombs lying amid an empty rose garden in full bloom’ – is where she stops to examine the fictions within her own history, the reasons for staying married to Matthew which (like the link with the Jolly Roger) don’t quite add up. The churchyard is a haven for Robin – surrounded by roses, eating her ice-cream, revelling in the ‘free’ hour she has bought herself by chucking her therapy – which allows her both to revisit these painful memories and to start building a future. This is where she first hears about Billy and re-establishes some of her old friendship with Strike and after this absorbing phone call, she ‘forgot to glance up at the White Swan pub… a single carved swan, which reminded Robin, every time she passed it, of her calamitous wedding day’ (56). It is a good start.

 

I have a particular affection for another place of worship in Lethal White – St Mary Undercroft, which Rowling first revealed in a Twitter Header on Valentine’s Day in 2018. This is a sacred space both literally and figuratively submerged beneath the workaday world above:

“Robin’s eyes followed the course of twisting vines that covered the ceiling. Strange faces peered down at her out of the moulding, like the wild Green Man of myth. Heraldic and pagan imagery mingled with angels and crosses. It was more than a place of God, this chapel. It harked back to an age of superstition, magic and feudal power.” (188)

Robin’s acute awareness of the chapel’s symbolic power returns a few pages later:

‘D’you believe in redemption?’
The question caught Robin totally by surprise. It had a kind of gravity and beauty, like the gleaming jewel of the chapel at the foot of a winding stair. (190)

St Mary Undercroft literally underlies the Houses of Parliament and its symbolic power speaks to the importance of the past which underlies the present. It is a symbolism which might appear destablised, perhaps, by the falsity of Raphael’s question but it is false question which generates a truth in Robin’s response: ‘I… yes, I do.’

This chapel is the first place of religion in the series in which holiness is explicitly foregrounded – ‘it had a kind of gravity and beauty, like the gleaming jewel of the chapel’ – but the importance of the sacred is likewise nascent in an crucial detail about Robin’s past. We learn in Career of Evil that it was in a church – reflecting on the large stone crab clinging to the wall of St. Mary the Virgin, Masham – that Robin’s true, truth-questing nature revealed itself to her for the first time: ‘her curiosity on the point had ended up infecting Linda, who had gone to the local library, looked up the records and triumphantly informed her daughter that the crab had been the emblem of the ancient Scrope family, whose memorial sat above it. Nine-year-old Robin had been disappointed by the answer. In a way, an explanation had never been the point. She had simply liked being the only one who wanted to find out the truth’ (401). In terms of the Johari window (which Cuckoo’s Calling made into a framework for the series), Robin’s true detecting nature become known to herself at nine, but it takes many years before it becomes known to others and it seems symbolic that this moment of self-revelation should have taken place in a church.

In Lethal White there is also another important religious symbol, this time an action not a place: Billy’s ‘slipshod half-cross’ (101), a stim that marks him as both mentally unwell and spiritually pure. Just like nine-year-old Robin in her home church, Billy is a rare person who is truly seeking the truth. Unlike everyone else in the novel he is seeking justice for another, and he is seeking it at a cost to himself. (Paradoxically, of course, his goodness will bring its own reward for his search for the truth will uncover the fact that he did not actually witness a murder, freeing him from that nightmare.) His stim is described in the epilogue as apotropaic ‘the tic that seemed for Billy to have something of the significance of warding off evil. Rain continued to lash the restaurant windows’ (642). The truth washes away Billy’s suffering and the epilogue marks a moment of renewal for Robin too: the rain symbolises the way in which, at the conclusion of this novel, both are washed clean of the pasts that had been dogging them. Billy is free of his murderous nightmare, Robin of Matthew.

Rain marking a new start alerts us to one of the central tropes of Rowling’s writing operating here – the alchemical idea of solve et coagula (‘dissolve and rebuild’). This, one of the oldest and most important maxims in alchemy, posits that some kind of dissolution is necessary before purification can begin. It is a maxim Rowling holds so dear she has tattooed it on the inside of her writing wrist and I wrote a three-part blog about its importance in her work here, here and here. This symbolic rain of dissolution continues in Troubled Blood – a very watery novel! – signalling the dissolution that must likewise precede rebuilding for Strike. The floods are the most obvious sign of this, but my favourite watery moment is the synthesis of rain and tears as Robin cries after Strike breaks the habit of a lifetime and apologises to her: ‘the eternal rain fell outside his attic window. Somehow, the texts from Charlotte had made him realise he had to call Robin, had to make things right with her before he set off for Cornwall and Joan’ (512). The rain marks the moment of the turn as solve becomes coagula. Charlotte is at a nadir in her life and determined to embroil Strike in her suffering – but he learns from this destructiveness, this dissolution, to rebuild. Not that, unsalvageable relationship, but to shore up the central relationship in his life: not to call Charlotte, but to call Robin. It is a wonderfully sane response to Charlotte’s text – coagula indeed.

Ink Black Heart is a novel of reprises – yet another final parting from Charlotte, yet another meaningless relationship for Strike, yet another failure of Strike and Robin to openly acknowledge to each other what they mean to each other. One alchemical writer states that the whole work of alchemy ‘is nothing but that of dissolving and making hard again: namely, dissolving the body and making hard the spirit.’  To make the Philosopher’s Stone, solid substances must be dissolved (‘solve’) while the resultant ‘spirit’ must be fixed again into a solid (‘coagula’). The alchemist makes his raw material undergo this process over and over until they – and he – are fully purified. Much as I wish we’d seen the end of Charlottian seductions and Strike’s meaningless couplings, the repetition of both in Ink Black Heart fits with the solve et coagula idea which recognises the difficulty of change. Just as with the CBT exercises that don’t help Robin if she doesn’t do them, to achieve alchemical change the practitioner has to commit to repetition – to repeating the stages of the philosophical Great Work over and over again – before purification occurs. We’re going to see Strike committing again to self-improvement in Running Grave but he is going to need to keep choosing wine over beer, vaping over cigarettes and Robin over random beautiful women before true change can occur.

Alchemical symbolism has an important spiritual dimension and indeed we could think of the solve of Strike’s attraction to Charlotte as the breaking down of a love which was primarily physical (the dissolution of the base solid) to build up his true love for Robin (the fixing of the spirit). This alchemical symbolism is part of the spiritual hinterland in the symbolism of both Strike and Harry Potter and the importance of this dimension is signalled in the pivotal novel of Lethal White by the importance of churchyards, chapels, and Billy’s ‘slipshod half-cross. It is built on in Troubled Blood with the location ( St. John’s Gate was originally the entrance to Clerkenwell Priory), the repeated references to St John crosses, the biblical quotation in golden letters on the door of the nursing home and statue of Jesus within: ‘the almost life-size plaster Jesus looked sadly down upon the killer and the impostor as they headed toward the door’ (759). The word ‘Jesus’ is used over forty times in the series as a swear word, but this statue animates the word’s true meaning. Not only is it a depiction of Jesus but the narrative voice also imputes agency to his sadness – suggestive of the living presence the plaster imitation is intended to evoke. Jesus reappears in Ink Black Heart (in a discussion of a production of Tannhäuser in which he, rather surprisingly, appears ) but also, even more surprisingly, when the swear word the reader has heard so often is suddenly reinvested with its original meaning:

‘Jesus,’ said Robin, hurrying over to them, and finding nothing else to say she repeated, ‘Jesus!’
‘He was definitely on our side an hour ago,’ said Strike.

Suddenly – in a startling moment – ‘Jesus’ is transformed out of the semantically bleached swearword into its true meaning.

Both because of the steady building of religious symbolism in the Strike series from Lethal White onwards (not least, of course, in the appearance of a pelican in Ink Black Heart) and because Deathly Hallows contains the most important religious symbolism in Harry Potter, I’m expecting things to go further in this direction in Running Grave. St John the Baptist Church, Aylmerton is the Running Grave parallel for the parish church of Godric’s Hollow in Deathly Hallows and I’m hoping that its nearby cross – with its evocative surroundings of secret tunnels, Shrieking Pits and ghost sightings – will be important too. And my expectation is that the traditional religion embodied by this church and its nearby cross on the Walsingham Way will form a symbolic counterpoint to the spurious religiosity of the cult of the Universal Humanitarian ‘Church.’

One of my favourite aspects of Deathly Hallows is the way in which the Horcrux Quest – the kind of ‘detective quest’ we see in each Harry Potter novel: solve the clues and defeat the bad guy – is overlaid with a different kind of quest, a ‘Grail Quest’ for the Hallows. The Hallows Quest is about something more spiritual, more esoteric – there are true believers and seekers who are searching for sacred objects most people don’t even believe exist. Harry has to decide what kind of Seeker he is and, having discovered that the Hallows are indeed real, make the final decision to relinquish this quest. Harry chooses not race Voldemort to the Elder Wand, to throw the Resurrection Stone from him and finally face death with no magical aids. I am hoping that the Running Grave will perform the same pitting of one quest against another – that alongside the ‘Horcrux Quest’ to save the young man in thrall to the cult will be a ‘Hallows Quest’ which Strike, like Harry, will have to learn to relinquish.

Harry is a ‘doing’ sort of a hero and his test in the Hallows Quest is to learn not to act: ‘The enormity of his decision not to race Voldemort to the wand still scared Harry. He could not remember, ever before, choosing not to act’ (Deathly Hallows, chap 25). Strike is a ‘knowing’ sort of hero – he would, as Robin reminds him, ‘never choose not to know’ (Troubled Blood, 767). I wonder if this means that he’ll have to learn to leave a stone unturned for once? (But Robin will solve it for him after all?). Alongside the main thrust of the detective plot, I think we’ll be seeing some version of the Grail Quest which touches deeper chords in Strike’s psyche (discovering the truth about something that happened in his Norfolk childhood? Some clue to Leda’s death?) and takes him into uncharted waters. I am hoping for a moment of growth that echoes that of Harry in the climatic moment when he chooses Horcruxes over Hallows:

“Am I meant to know, but not to seek? Did you know how hard I’d find that? Is that why you made it this difficult? So I’d have time to work that out?” (Deathly Hallows, chap 24)

Tomorrow – seven predictions for Strike Seven!

 

[Please remember that Dr. Groves has not read the sample chapters for The Running Grave! Please no sample or any other spoilers in the comments.]

 

The titles of the Strike books were registered as trademarks some months before their publication dates.  Whilst we were browsing the statutory records for these on the government website (yes, we’re that desperate) we noticed something interesting which may give us a hint about an element of the plot of The Running Grave.

Firstly, some background – and it’s a little tedious so bear with us.  None of us here at TSEF are lawyers so we don’t have any in-depth understanding of the process, but it seems trade marks are registered under categories or classes.  There are forty-five different categories and all the Strike books that have been published so far are trademarked under six of these categories (and some under more).  These are: Class 9 (which includes mainly apparatus and instruments for scientific or research purposes, audiovisual and information technology equipment, as well as safety and life-saving equipment); Class 16 (goods made out of paper, office requisites); Class 35 (advertising, business management, office functions); Class 41 (education, training, entertainment, sport) and Class 42 (scientific and technical services).  

Intriguingly, Lethal White has a lot more trademark categories than the others. Without going into too much detail these categories include those for jewelry and watches, leather goods, household and kitchen utensils, textiles, clothing and footwear, and games and sports equipment. Whether these differences are related to the plot, or for another reason – possibly some technical point of law – we do not know.

The registration wording for the different books under each of these categories varies a little, but not much, and generally not in any material, obviously plot-specific way, as far as we can tell.

One small exception is that under Class 9, Troubled Blood has additional wording that relates to perfumes and poisons – wording that wasn’t included for any of the first four books.  Perhaps we can surmise this extra wording was necessary due to the plot?  The Ink Black Heart has this wording too however.  Was it just automatically carried over for the next book?

Now, on to what we found in the registration of the trade mark for The Running Grave.   

The Running Grave is trade marked under the same six classes mentioned above only.  However, the wording included under each category is much more succinct.  Whereas the wording for books one to six has run to a few hundred detailed words per category, The Running Grave generally has less than a hundred words for each section.

However, the what really caught our interest is this wording that is included in Class 9 (scientific instruments and apparatus):-

‘… diving suits, divers’ masks, ear plugs for divers, nose clips for divers and swimmers, gloves for divers, breathing apparatus for underwater swimming…’

None of this wording was included for the trade marks of any of the previous books. 

So, can we consider this a clue? Will the plot of The Running Grave involve divers and diving? Can we relate this to JK Rowling’s Twitter header showing Cromer Pier?  

Or her use of a wave emoji in the tweet she sent confirming the title of the book?

 

Maybe there will be a body washed up on the beach and the police will dive for clues?  Perhaps there’s a witness to someone or something falling from the end of the pier which results in a search by police divers?  As we know from the Silkworm, Strike’s oldest mate Dave Polworth is a scuba diver – will Strike call upon his help once again?  

If anyone has any ideas, insight or legal knowledge then let us know!

We are so excited to be able to share this guest post, written by Louise M. Freeman, Professor of Psychology and blogger at https://fartingsofafaculty.blogspot.com/ about the lasting impacts of trauma and the possibilities of healing from it. Regular listeners of the podcast will know that this is one of our favourite themes to talk about in the Strike & Ellacott novels, so we hope you enjoy Professor Freeman’s brilliant insights into trauma and memory in The Ink Black Heart!

By: Louise M. Freeman, Professor of Psychology, Mary Baldwin University

One of the handful of hints we have gotten about the contents of The Running Grave is that someone–and many suspect Strike’s half-sister and fellow Rokeby-bastard, Prudence–will suggest therapy to Strike. If it is Prudence, it would be logical that the goal of therapy be resolving Strike’s daddy-issues and making peace with Rokeby. But I am going to speculate that, if Strike does get therapy in TRG, it will eventually lead to a darker and more serious subject: Strike’s own trauma history.

We know Strike has long-term effects from the IED blast beyond the loss of his leg. He initially had panic attacks when he had to be driven by others and still has a lingering nervousness about that, something only super-driver Robin has been able to supersede. We saw him have a brief but vivid flashback to the Afghanistan explosion in The Cuckoo’s Calling:

But the photographers ran alongside the vehicle, flashes erupting on either side; and Strike’s whole body was bathed in sweat: he was suddenly back on a yellow dirt road in the juddering Viking, with a sound like firecrackers popping in the Afghanistan air; he had glimpsed a youth running away from the road ahead, dragging a small boy. Without conscious thought he had bellowed “Brake!” lunged forwards and seized Anstis, a new father of two days’ standing, who was sitting right behind the driver; the last thing he remembered was Anstis’s shouted protest, and the low metallic boom of him hitting the back doors, before the Viking disintegrated with an ear-splitting bang, and the world became a hazy blur of pain and terror.

After the office bombing in The Ink Black Heart, I fully expected some sort of trauma reaction in Strike. After all, he and Pat were caught in the actual explosion, and I can only imagine that the sound and smell of the bomb were closer to the IED experience than a couple of photographers’ flashbulbs. Maybe it was the fact that he wasn’t in a car, or maybe he was so focused on Pat’s safety that he wasn’t thinking of himself, much as he managed to let Lucy help drive to Cornwall to reach the dying Joan. But I still would have expected Strike to eventually make some connection between the two times in his life that he’s been bombed, and to at least have a nightmare or two. After all, Robin’s “sleepless nights” and “bad dreams” re-emerged after her encounter with Gus in which he threatened rape.

There are two signs that Strike could be experiencing residual effects of the office bombing.  First, the jumping stump. There are two major causes of this condition:  The first is damage to the peripheral nerves in the amputated limb and, as Strike’s doctor told him, it would be unusual for that to happen so long after the amputation, though, not impossible, given the abuse Strike heaps upon his stump. In the ultrasound , the doctor was almost certainly  looking for a neuroma: a thickening of the nerve ending that can cause both pain and involuntary movements . The medical exam did not detect a neuroma, leaving psychogenic causes  as the most likely explanation for the spasms. In other words, jumping stump is a physical symptom, like panic attacks, that can be triggered by stress or anxiety. The fact that Strike was also having muscle spasms in his face is an additional pointer to an emotional cause, rather than physical injury within the stump, though the pain from the injury surely added to Strike’s distress. 

True, the jumping stump started on the morning of June 5th, before the bombing. But Strike had been under stress for some time, with the agency overloaded with cases, the looming threat of being named in the Campbell-Ross divorce and, most recently, having to listen to a tape recording of Robin making out with Pez Pierce, something that was likely more emotionally distressing than he wanted to admit. And, the jumping stump definitely intensifies after the bombing, getting worse at the Whitstable hotel and on the drive to Leeds, and continuing off and on until Strike goes to the hospital on June 11th. 

A second sign of Strike’s deteriorating mental and physical health is a symptom that has not yet been formally noticed by Strike or any of his colleagues, but one that jumped out at me on my first reading of TIBH. Strike has always had a near super-human memory, recalling, for instance, seemingly insignificant details, like Mucky Ricci’s lion ring, from a long-ago errand with Shanker. Except for personal details like Robin’s birthday and his nephews’ ages, we have almost never seen his memory fail him, with one exception from the Silkworm that has never been mentioned again:  

 

 

“Elizabeth Tassel told me there’s a Jacobean revenge play featuring a poisoned skeleton disguised as a woman. Presumably someone shags it and dies. Not a million miles away from Phallus Impudicus getting ready to—” 

“Don’t,” said Robin, with a half laugh and a shudder. 

But Strike had not broken off because of her protest, or because of any sense of repugnance. Something had flickered deep in his subconscious as he spoke. Somebody had told him…someone had said…but the memory was gone in a flash of tantalizing silver, like a minnow vanishing in pondweed. 

“A poisoned skeleton,” Strike muttered, trying to capture the elusive memory, but it was gone.

But, in TIBH, there are at least 11 occasions where he either forgets something or relies on Robin to remember a detail before him.

1. 1. He can’t remember the breed of evil-looking sheep that Charlotte’s dad kept. (The Ritz)
   2. “I’ve got an idea I’ve seen or heard something about a brotherhood recently but can’t remember where…”  (Chapter 24)
   3. Robin, not Strike, connects the name Preston Pierce to the person mentioned in Strike’s notes from the Red Lion and Sun. (Chapter 34)
   4. Robin, not Strike, remembers that Tim Ashcroft taught Flavia to draw animals. (Chapter 38)
   5. Strike forgets Robin is moving to her new flat. (Chapter 56)
   6. “Can’t remember whether I told you this, but when he talked about Anomie hiding behind a keyboard, he made a gesture suggesting a mask.” (Chapter 75)
   7. Strike can’t remember where he’s heard the name Evola before. (Chapter 78)
   8. Strike can’t remember the name of the “famous public school” where the Latin teacher he knew as a teenager taught.  (Chapter 84)
   9. Strike forgets he hadn’t told Robin what happened when he visited Jago Ross. (Chapter 88) 
   10. Strike can’t remember when they ruled Gus Upcott out as a suspect. (Chapter 96)
   11. Strike can’t remember how long ago his amputation was. He says “Six – no, seven years ago” when it was closer to eight. (Chapter 96)

Now, Strike’s past forty; it would be natural to show some memory decline. He should probably also be screened for sleep apnea, giving his smoking, loud snoring and being overweight; sleep apnea is a known cause of memory loss. But, as with the jumping stump, the memory lapses accelerate after the bombing in Chapter 70, again, suggesting a psychogenic cause. The first five on the list above (pre-bomb) occur between October 2013 and May 2014:  seven months. The last six happen between the bombing on June 5th and June 11th: less than one week. For a guy who has been known for extraordinary memory for five books, this seems a precipitous decline. During my first read of TIBH, I thought Strike was heading for a stroke. Now, I am speculating that this heralds a return of trauma symptoms that Strike may be forced to medically address in the next book, just as Robin had to address hers in Lethal White.

Even more interesting would be if the exploration of trauma history stretches back further than the IED explosion. Norfolk is a near-certain setting for at least some of TRG, as seen in Rowling’s twitter headers, and we have been told in multiple books that a commune in Norfolk was “the worst place” Leda ever took Strike and Lucy when they were children. TIBH told us that Strike, “never went voluntarily into Norfolk and in fact had a slight prejudice against the whole county.” Whatever happened there, it seems to have left Strike with a mild phobia of the entire region, comparable to his fear of being driven by others. That suggests something pretty horrible. 

Could Strike have either experienced physical or sexual abuse there, or seen it happen to others, perhaps even to Lucy or Leda? Or worse, witnessed an apparent murder, like young Billy Knight? I keep going back to the line in The Silkworm that triggered the elusive “silver minnow” memory: “Somebody shags it and dies,” and how similar that is to “He strangled it, up by the horse.” It may be that the therapy suggested to him will need to address issues stretching back to those formative years. 

With any luck, Strike’s hospitalization for the punctured lung will also lead to some much-needed rest and physical therapy for the leg and to an order for a sleep study when his snoring keeps all the other patients in the ward awake. As for whether he addresses the trauma connected to either the explosion or the commune, that’s an issue we could see unfold in the next book. Ethically, Prudence cannot treat Strike herself, but hopefully she could refer him to someone good. 

Fortunately, we’ll find out in less than five months!

You can find more of Louise’s thoughts on Cormoran Strike at www.fartingsofafaculty.blogspot.com

Living Graves: Solve et Coagula in Robert Galbraith’s forthcoming The Running Grave

by Kurt Schreyer 

What might the title of Robert Galbraith’s forthcoming novel The Running Grave tell us about what to expect in the seventh book of the Strike & Ellacott series? Kurt Schreyer, Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri – St. Louis, explores how poets and artists have used gravesites as fertile ground for their own creativity. We are mistaken, he argues, when we associate tombs solely with death, and if we consider how they also represent the possibility of rebirth, growth, and change, we might gain a better sense of what is in store for Strike and Robin.

The earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb;
What is her burying grave that is her womb.

– Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet 

Graves are not dead ends. Quite the opposite: graves have long been associated with artistic creation as well as birth, growth, and change. I’ve been reflecting on Robert Galbraith’s adoption of the phrase “running grave” from Dylan Thomas’s poem for the title of the forthcoming seventh book in the Strike & Ellacott series, and I’d like to share my thoughts and a few prognostications. 

Beginning in about the sixteenth century, the word “running” was applied to plants whose shoots are “creeping, climbing, or spreading rapidly” (OED, 8). Indeed, shoots are still called “runners,” as Thomas seems to be explicitly aware, for he speaks of a “Cadaver’s shoot / Of bud of Adam,” which recalls his poem’s title but with a more explicitly botanic image. So a “running grave” is potentially a living grave. Before you dismiss this absurd oxymoron, I would note that, in a similar way, Shakespeare’s contemporaries used the word – “mould” (i.e. “mold”) to describe the decayed remains of the human body and the earth of the grave as well as the fertile organic topsoil of cultivated land or garden (OED, n.1). 

 

The Society of Dead Poets 

In The Ink Black Heart a gravesite in Highgate Cemetery is the inspiration for Edie and Josh’s cartoon. In fact, there is a very long literary tradition of viewing graves as starting points and fonts of inspiration. Ovid, Virgil, Statius, and Juvenal all borrowed phrases from Roman grave epitaphs for their poetic creations, most famously the formula “Ille ego sum” or “Ille ego qui” which means “I am he who…” Written on headstones, this inscription effectively reanimated deceased persons and allowed the dead to “speak,” as it were, to their visitors. Ancient poets quickly seized on this powerful means of poetically ventriloquizing dead authors, a practice that continued for centuries, so that by the time of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton the literary authority and prestige of a dead poet was often associated with and symbolized by the site of their internment. 

 

 

The prefaces to the 1598 and 1602 editions of Chaucer’s Works couple tombs and vegetable growth. First, a portrait of the poet is featured above the tomb monument of his son, Thomas, and surrounded by heraldic coats of arms hanging from vines supported by a trellis. The title pages are ornamented not only with massive columns, plinths, cornices, and scrolls, but also an ancient funerary urn. But these otherwise cold, hard, and lifeless stones are thickly festooned with vines bearing heavy clusters of grapes. Palms, cornucopia, and other vegetative growths sprout wildly and almost uncontainably from the monument surrounding the book’s table of contents, thus lending a rich graphic illustration to the inscription surmounting it in some variants of the edition: “Chaucer: Out of the old fields, as men sayth, / Commeth all this new corn, fro yere to yere: / And out of old books, in good fayth, / Cometh al this new science that men lere.” What is old is new again; it has been dissolved and remade. The 1602 second edition features a skull-and-crossbones at the bottom of the title page yet at the top may be seen fully ripened grape vines growing abundantly across a trellis. 

Ben Jonson’s commendatory poem, “To the memory of my beloved, The Author, Mr. William Shakespeare” in the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays also associates the author’s book and his tomb: 

My Shakespeare, rise! I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further to make thee a room;
Thou art a monument without a tomb
And art alive still while thy book doth live,
And we have wits to read and praise to give. (19-24)

More than gloomy monuments to time and death, late medieval and early modern tombs are often fertile sites for poetic resurrection and birth. Entombment somehow brought the author to life and into closer proximity. We see the tomb and the womb often associated in Romeo & Juliet and other works of Shakespeare. Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, where so many famous British writers are buried and commemorated, remains to this day a popular destination for literary pilgrims. 

 

Epitaphs, funeral oration, elegy, and the imitation of ancient inscriptions were the hallmarks of humanist classical revival both in Britain and on the Continent. And this was by no means restricted to literary figures. The cenotaph monument to the fourteenth-century Italian painter and architect Giotto in Florence Cathedral is a beautifully evocative “speaking epigram” – a first-person, postmortem address from the artist himself which begins: 

“I am he through whom painting, dead, returned to life
and whose hand was as sure as it was adept.
What my art lacked was lacking in nature herself.
To no one was it given to paint better or more.” 

The power of grave monuments lies partly in the fact that they simultaneously record and resist the passage of time. It was a popular early modern practice to feature a skull or other memento mori on the tomb accompanied by the epitaph – “As you are now, so once was I / As I am now, so shall you be.” In this way, the skull “speaks” to the person holding vigil, and the voice of the grave’s dead occupant fixes the reader in time and space as they ponder their own mortality. Have you ever wondered why so many pre-modern sarcophaguses feature the effigy of the dead person lying within? The sculpted marble, gilded monument, or painted image is a prosthesis of the human body within: it aims to refute the scandal of corruption and the shame of anonymity by preserving the recognizable features of the tomb’s occupant in spite of inevitable decay. 

 

La Petite Mort

It sounds strange, but graves have long inspired – and indeed been the means of instigating – sexual desire and seduction (even apart from necrophilia). In the carpe diem (“seize the day”) tradition begun by the Roman poet Horace, the speaker of the poem will remind the reader, usually imagined to be a woman, that because they are mortal and life is transitory, they should gather rosebuds while they may. Quite often this is a subterfuge for seduction, a naked bid for sex, as is clear in the opening lines of Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”: 

Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.

Marvell subsequently underscores this theme by vividly describing the decomposition of the body after death: 

Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust;
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.

Marvell exploits the inevitability of death out of a desire to “sport us while we may.” Love and death are linked together as the carpe diem speaker seductively urges an exchange of Death for “the little death” (la petite mort) of sexual orgasm. 

Dylan Thomas’s “The Running Grave” bears many of the features of the poetic carpe diem tradition though they can be difficult to spot through the poem’s surrealist imagery. It yokes together graves, skulls, hearses, bones, and cadavers with an erotics of arousal and seduction. Thomas seemingly makes a veiled allusion to Marvell’s poem (I believe, in fact, that his poem is a response to Marvell) in the fourth stanza: 

Chaste and the chaser, man with the cockshut eye,
I, that time’s jacket or the coat of ice
May fail to fasten with a virgin o
In the straight grave 

Marvell’s hymenal “quaint honour” (itself containing an off-color wordplay) becomes a “virgin o” coupled with a hugely phallic “tower dome.” But, characteristically, Thomas’s working-class idiom is much more frank about sex. Someone sexually “chaste” becomes a rakish “chaser;” a “boxy shift” seems both a coffin and an undergarment; “maid and head” clearly dallies with the word “maidenhead.” Beyond “love in her gear” there is knocking, hammering, hauling, and driving – in short, more sexually-charged puns than Shakespeare’s sonnets to the Dark Lady. And the repeated use of “up” and “descend” suggests male tumescence and its post-coital aftermath.  

Perhaps the most famous poem about the grave is Shakespeare’s sonnet #55 which famously begins: 

Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,

And concludes:

So, till the Judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

The boldness of Shakespeare’s poem lies in its claims that it will monumentalize the beloved better than any grandiose aristocratic tomb. It alone will withstand the ravages of time. But it is equally extraordinary as a conjuration: sonnet 55 celebrates the creation of a poem out of a grave, a dead space. Note that it ends with the beloved’s final resurrection at the Last Judgment – once again, graves imply endings and new beginnings. 

 

Arcadia Meets Yijing 

Before turning to The Running Grave, I’d like to draw on one more famous work of art, Nicolas Poussin’s enigmatically titled painting “Et in Arcadia Ego” (1637-38), which literally translates to “Even in Arcadia, there am I.” Arcadia is a Greek word referring to a pastoral utopia, but at the center of this blissful landscape, Poussin has placed a monumental tomb to Daphnis, a mythological shepherd born of a god who was said to have invented pastoral poetry. The painting would therefore seem to be saying something about the relationship of Death to artistic invention, both written and visual. Art historians have long considered the speaker of the “ego,” the “I,” to be either the dead shepherd or Death itself; consequently, the phrase “et in Arcadia ego” is understood to mean, “Even in Utopia there is Death.” Poussin’s painting is a memento mori in much the same way as the tomb inscriptions and carpe diem poems mentioned above. 

 

With its sense of “paradise lost” it may also be grouped with other Renaissance works that lament humanity’s fall from a blissful Golden Age; not only Milton’s epic poem but Shakespeare’s As You Like It and many Italian humanist paintings. But I think that to focus too exclusively on the melancholy of Poussin’s painting is to miss its most profound achievement: for me, Et in Arcadia Ego is fundamentally a bold and hopeful celebration of art as it showcases for the viewer the profound paradox which this essay has been struggling to explain: namely, that we would have no Art if it weren’t for Death. Mortality drives creativity or, in the words of the famous motto of Alchemy, Solve et coagula. This potent maxim which Rowling/Galbraith has adopted as a metaphor for writing means “to dissolve and to coagulate.” To make or reform something, you must first break it down to its essentials. You must get down to what really matters. Before the English verb “to solve” acquired its familiar modern meaning – “to explain, clear up, resolve, answer” – it meant to loosen or to break, and it was cognate with decomposing. Death brings solutions and answers. 

In other words, Poussin seems to be responding to other artists in the memento mori tradition by declaring that while mortality and death cannot be denied or avoided, that is not the end of the story. When we use our memory and when art celebrates what we cherish from the past, then art creates anew – even in the face of Death! Obsolescence is not tantamount to supersession: the Past remains Present. What is supposedly dead and gone can become an essential ingredient of growth and change, and therefore of what is new and emerging. 

And here East meets West, for the other thing we know about Galbraith’s forthcoming seventh book is that the I Ching will feature prominently. The I Ching, or Yijing, is also known as the “Book of Changes” or the “Oracle of Changes.” According to The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: 

Underlying the Yijing philosophy of change is the notion that the cosmos is an organismic process without beginning or end. As a process, the cosmos resembles a great flow in which “all of the parts of the entire cosmos belong to one organic whole” and all the parts “interact as participants in one spontaneously self-generating process” (Tu 1985: 35).

Those who are not familiar with the I Ching yet may recognize the Yin & Yang which symbolizes this cosmology. Experiencing fear and anxiety as they face important decisions in their lives, readers of the I Ching seek guidance from the hexagrams that are formed by casting yarrow stalks or coins. Whichever a diviner chooses, the hexagrams “point to the intricate networks of factors or forces—from near to far away, from simple to complicated, from visible to invisible—that shape movements and changes.” And in this way, a person may come to see and appreciate their own evolution and maturation and to accept novelty and change in order to grow. 

 

Conclusions & Possibilities 

Robert Galbraith’s title The Running Grave awakens long literary and artistic histories of funereal monuments, inscriptions, and activities. Whatever else they are, graves are not dead ends. As we’ve seen, they often live and speak. They become sites of literary fame and poetic creation. Graves evoke sexual desires. And therefore, as graves bring forth memories and ghosts from the past as well as promises of future pleasures, we may want to buckle ourselves in for a thunderous journey to hell and back that may, beginning in book seven, span the remaining books in the series. Here are a few possibilities: 

Possibility #1: Gravesites are places where the dead speak. Given that so much of The Ink Black Heart was spent in Highgate Cemetery, I cannot be entirely certain that we’ll visit yet another grave or cemetery, but I would not be surprised if we do, whether it’s Leda’s – or, quite possibly, Rokeby’s. If it is Leda, she may be resurrected and speak through: (1) the newly-surfaced memories Strike experiences through conversations with a therapist and/or with his half-sister Prudence; (2) through stories passed on by Strike’s father, uncle Ted, or others who knew her; or (3) quite possibly through a book such as a diary that may even have been found at a gravesite or deathbed. As for the possibility that Rokeby will be facing his final end, giving the book the title The Running Grave rather cleverly points readers toward the poetry of Dylan Thomas without directly naming the poem for which he is most famous. “Do not go gentle into that good night” was written for the Welsh poet’s elderly, dying father: 

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

There’s not enough space here to offer a full reading of this poem; however, I will say that it is not about conquering death, which the poem acknowledges and seems to accept as inevitable, but about how to live with the knowledge of mortality. With its repeated call to “Rage, rage…” it’s a particularly apt poem for a dying rock star. 

Possibility #2: The watchword of book seven will be growth. I began this essay by interpreting the phrase “running grave” as “living grave.” But what exactly is that? Ultimately, it is a mindfulness of mortality that frees someone (and I’m thinking here primarily of Strike but it is applicable to Robin too and indeed to all of us) to, on the one hand, accept the past with all of its pain and mistakes and, on the other hand, say Yes to the future, including death, without guilt, or fear, or conflict. If this essay has accomplished anything, I hope that I’ve demonstrated the fact that graves bring about life-changing effects on those who visit them, often for the better. And Strike will, I believe, begin to undergo such a transformation, a border crossing into a mature awareness of what his own mortality means for how he should live. Readers may possibly be reminded of chapter 21 of Troubled Blood where he witnesses the birthday party for the 80-year-old woman with lavender hair at the Trafalgar Tavern in Greenwich and, “Just for a moment, …[he] wondered where he’d be if he lived to eighty, and who’d be there with him.” But whether this transformation will move him so far as to declare his feelings for Robin in The Running Grave remains to be seen. 

Possibility #3: There will be a good deal more sexual desire and seduction than we’ve seen, but I’ll leave the details to your imaginations, dear readers. For myself, I expect that we’ll learn more about how Leda and Rokeby met and made love than, say, Strike and Robin getting together. 

Possibility #4: The theme of pregnancy and birth will be carefully – and productively – counter-woven into the book’s reflections on death and morality. The arrival of Nick and Ilsa’s first child will offer Robin and Strike the opportunity not only to stand as godparents at the Christening service, but perhaps also to reconsider their feelings about marriage and parenthood. We might also learn more from Rokeby (on his deathbed?) about Leda’s pregnancy and Strike’s birth. 

 

Priori Incantatem 

A longer version of this essay would consider the importance of graves as beginnings in the Harry Potter series. After all, for Dumbledore death is not an ending but, with the right frame of mind, the beginning of “the next great adventure.” Voldemort’s mock resurrection at the grave of his father is arguably the fulcrum or pivot point of the entire book series, and that same graveyard scene witnesses the resurrection of Harry’s parents through the priory incantatem spell. It is their reappearance that provides the means of Harry’s escape, sending him on a quest that will last for the remaining three books. And in the final book, The Deathly Hallows, we see three important graveyard scenes. Voldamort raids Dumbledore’s tomb for the Elder Wand, selfishly yet falsely thinking that it will preserve him from death. By contrast, Harry’s visit to his parents’ graves and his burial of Dobby with his own hands while surrounded by his friends, helps him in his journey to see that self-sacrifice – that is, the acceptance of the grave and mortality, even if it means one’s own death – is the only life-giving path. 

 

Finis?