From Ryan Murphy, Secret Halvening to Unpacking Tannhäuser: Check out the Strike and Ellacott files blog

Originally published: February 11, 2023 by Louise Freeman 1 Comment

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I am a loyal fan of the Strike and Ellacott Files podcast, and look forward to new episodes every couple of weeks.  But, if you peruse their website, you’ll find they also have a blog:  a hidden gem that is easily overlooked if you, like me, usually jump straight to Spotify to hear the broadcast. I want to give a shout-out to a couple of recent posts there, because I think they present ideas our Serious Striker readers would enjoy discussing.

The first, by “Amber” hypothesizes that Robin’s new suitor, Ryan Murphy, is secretly a member of the Halvening. I scoffed at the notion at first, but Amber points out evidence that is impossible to unsee.  Like the pregnant Madeline hypothesis, I really *hope* this idea doesn’t come to pass—  poor Robin deserves a few dates with a decent guy after the series of disasters that were Matthew “Flobberworm” Cunliffe, Saul “Dickhead DeMorris Umbridge” and Hugh Jacks (no nickname needed, as his given name is embarrassing enough), and I’d like her experience a fun, casual relationship before her and Strike’s inevitable coupling.

The second, is a series of three posts (Parts I, II and III) on the Tannhäuser opera, the one the “portly Russian” is talking about at Annabels.   Opera is far from my area of expertise, but this Wagnerian work apparently starts with Leda and the Swan and “centres on the struggle between sacred and profane love, as well as redemption through love.”  The plot of the opera?  A young knight struggling to free himself of the sexual hold Venus has over him, and prove himself worthy of the love of a virtuous woman.”  “Marty Ellacott” takes us through all three acts, connecting the opera’s plot to Strike’s spiritual journey in The Ink Black Heart and the entire series. Anyone with an interest in mythic, Christian and spiritual themes in the Cormoran Strike series should read these posts. I left the first post convinced Tannhäuser is the Rattenbury of The Ink Black Heart; a minor mention that unlocks a lot about the story.

Please check out these remarkable posts!

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike, Louise Freeman

Flips, Pentagrams and Expanded Playlists: Why did the tone we expected in Book 5 wind up in Book 6?

 Originally published: September 5, 2022 by Louise Freeman 16 Comments

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We have a lot of hypotheses about why we got such a nigredo-laden book in Strike 6.  They are:

• 5-6 flip: which supposes that Troubled Blood was originally planned as Book 6, and The Ink Black Heart as Book 5.
• The Pentagram model: which has the first five books completing the alchemical cycle and the start of a new one in Book 6.
• The Extended Playlist model: Proposed recently by Kathleen, it suggests Galbraith is splitting the last 2, or possibly 3,  books of the 7-part series into two parts. Under this model, The Ink Black Heart would be either part 6a or 5b.

I’m going to outline some of the evidence I see for 5-6 Flip based on one audiobook listen of IBH. As a refresher, recall that this model predicts 1) Career of Evil parallels, instead of or alongside parallels to The Silkworm 2) Order of the Phoenix parallels, instead or alongside those to Half-Blood Prince and 3) nigredo elements, instead or alongside albedo. Interestingly, though, one of the strongest pieces of evidence is none of these, but rather timeline- and calendar-based.

One thing has always puzzled me.  Lethal White ended in mid-September 2012.  Troubled Blood began in August 2013, almost a full year later. This was the second year-long time jump in the series. There were two good reasons for the year-long jump in the middle of LW:  1) Book 4 absolutely had to be set in the 2012 Olympics and 2) no one wanted to read about a full year of Robin trying to make herself love the Flobberworm, develop panic attacks and feel emotionally distant from Strike.

But why jump a full year between LW and TB? It would have been awesome to see Robin’s early days with Max (and Wolfgang! Sniff!), the curry nights with Nick and Ilsa, Robin’s friendship with them developing (and the dirt they dished on Charlotte), the start of the match-making attempts and the series of incompetent temps that culminated in the the decision to hire Pat. OK, we’d have to see the Flobberworm be a jerk for a year, but the rest would be worth that. Instead, that is all explained after the fact. Obviously, the historical floods of 2014 were important to the story, but as has been stated multiple times, you expect lots of rain in albedo, not nigredo books. Why not tell the nigredo story in that missing year and save the floods for albedo?

That may well have been the original plan. The Ink Black Heart started in October (2014) and finished in June (2015).  Roll the dates back 2 years (Oct 2012-June 2013) and you have a story that fits quite neatly into that missing year.  This, I think, is good evidence that the IBH story was originally meant to be told in that time period.

Second, I can definitely see the Ink Black Heart cartoon as a “text-within-a-text” as stated in Beatrice Grove’s excellent prediction post. But, to me, it doesn’t fit as well as Talbot’s True Book as an analog to either Bombyx Mori, or the Prince’s doctored text. First, those were all actual books. Second, our heroes didn’t wind up actually reading scripts or viewing the cartoon in search of clues to the killer; they instead had to search Twitter and chat rooms for what the fans were saying about the show. That gave it a very different feel to me, and had them examining many different people’s words and the social interactions embedded within the conversations, not the solo narrative of the text. The only person to seriously watch the cartoon was Robin, when she was studying for her moderator’s test, and she didn’t even get to take that.

So, if The Ink Black Heart fits into that missing year, and the main mystery element is a less satisfactory match to the books of The Silkworm and the Half-Blood Prince, are there the decaying skeletons of Career, Order and nigredo buried in the text?  More after the jump!

First Flip of the Tarot Cards: Louise’s Predictions for Strike 6.

 Originally Published: November 6, 2021 by Louise Freeman 8 Comments

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I went into my first predictions for Troubled Blood a bit overconfident, after my bulls-eyes in Lethal White, where I successfully predicted a connection to the London Olympics, a Yule Ball analog where Robin would get to wear her fabulous Green Dress, and that the title referred to the horse disease, not heroin, and that a killer would be an equestrian. For Troubled Blood, I can really only give myself one of six points, as I nailed the rather easy targets of Matthew and Robin fighting over the proceeds from their flat sale, and Charlotte attempting to get Bluey to rescue her (albeit from the misery of her marriage and a suicide attempt, not, as far as we know, from Jago’s physical violence). Maybe I will give myself a bit of partial credit for the “cooling” of the Strike-Robin potential for romance and Robin dating someone new. Granted, the detective partners are clearly more attracted to each other than ever, with thoughts of beds and clean sheets in the aftermath of whiskey and black eyes, but their relationship, for now, has landed squarely in the realm of “best mates.”

The closest thing to a “new short-term relationship for Robin” was her very brief pairing with Saul Morris, which existed largely in Morris’s dreams, Pat’s hopes, and Linda’s speculations. Robin spent Boxing Day texting DeMorris Dickhead* for the express purpose of making her family think she was dating someone new. It was interesting to see a little of that fakery unintentionally seep over to Strike, and and arouse his jealousy as he pondered making new rules against partners and contractors dating. But my other speculations: an education-themed mystery, Whittaker v. Strike, the return of Switch LeVay Bloom Whittaker or Brittany Brockbank, came to naught. As much as I’ll miss Aunt Joan, I am most grateful that neither Shanker or Vanessa filled in for Sirius Black and crossed the veil.

Still, I want to take a stab at putting some ideas down as we start to ponder, and the process of scanning Rowling’s Twitter Headers for clues begins anew. More after the jump.

Family Ties: Guessing the Ages of the Ellacott Brothers

 Originally posted: February 23, 2022 by Louise Freeman 4 Comments

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Timeline mistakes are par for the course in the Cormoran Strike series, but Career of Evil seems to have more than its fair share. Donald Laing alone would make your head spin, but on my latest re-read I realized there is also some minor inconsistency in the lifelines of Robin’s brothers.

We know she has three:  Stephen, the eldest, and Martin and Jonathan, who are younger. The question is, is it possible to deduce anything about their ages, relative (pardon the pun) to Robin?

Stephen is perhaps the easiest.  Robin remembers racing him to choose the preferred donkey in Skegness as a child,  which suggests he isn’t too much older than her;  I would estimate one to three years at the most. The biggest inconsistency in his story that I have found, so far, is his marital status circa 2011. In early April, on Robin’s trip to Masham for a wedding dress fitting, Robin reflects that her parents would be paying for half of Steven’s wedding in “six months time.” Yet, less than three months later, at Robin’s Lethal White wedding reception, Jenny introduces herself as “Stephen’s wife.” If they moved up the wedding, Robin clearly did not go to it. Maybe they caught a glimpse of the bills for Robin’s nuptials, and decided to elope.

What about the younger two? Both are old enough to go out drinking after Mrs. Cunliffe’s funeral in The Silkworm, meaning they are at least 18 in January 2011. In Career of Evil, Martin, the second-to- youngest, is old enough to bet on horses. We are also told that he is the only Ellacott sibling not to attend university and to still live at home, and is considered a bit of an “underachiever” because of this. This suggests he is at least in his early 20’s, so my best guess is that he is somewhere between 1-5 years younger than Robin, who was 26 at that time.

This leaves Jonathan, the youngest. He is enrolled in university in spring 2011, which means, assuming he is in his first year and started right after secondary school, that he is about 19, seven years younger than Robin. He has to be early in his college career at this point, because, by the disastrous Valentine’s Day 2014 of Troubled Blood, he is in his final year. However, most degree programs in the UK are three years in length, meaning, if Jonathan was a freshman in 2010-2011, he should have graduated in 2013. This suggests he is either in a longer-than-typical degree program, that he flunked a semester or two’s worth of classes, or that his own university career was interrupted. It also means he was only about 12 when his older sister was raped; perhaps that is why he was clueless enough to blab about it to his friends.

So, the Ellacott brothers have a timeline that mostly makes sense, but there are still a couple of head-scratchers.

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike, Louise Freeman

Error corrections in The Ink Black Heart Kindle: Can anyone verify if any of our “gaffes” are fixed?

 Originally published: October 12, 2022 by Louise Freeman 12 Comments

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I just saw a Facebook posting where someone shared a recent communication from Amazon:

Dear Customer,

We recently learned that due to circumstances out of our control, the version of The Ink Black Heart: The Number One international bestseller (Strike 6) that you purchased had some quality issues. The content has been reviewed by our quality team and the errors have been corrected.

You can download the new version of the ebook file by going to the “Manage your content and devices” page: https://www.amazon.co.uk/…/contentlist/booksAll/dateDsc/. Find the file in your Kindle Library and click on “Update available” next to the title. To finalize the download, make sure your device is charged and that your wi-fi connection is active.  We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you and thank you for your patience.

Sincerely,

Customer Service Department

Amazon.co.uk

I know some people have noticed typos, and that there have been complaints from some e-readers that the online chat print was too small to read comfortably. However, I am mainly curious to see if any of the gaffes Hogpro readers and writers have noted have been fixed already. As the case of the mysterious Mia Thompson shows, sometimes a correction can mean major new material.

Have any of our Kindle readers (specifically from the UK) gotten this communication?  If so, please share what is fixed.