Dementia, Jewelry, and a Nine Inch Cock: The Mystery of Shanker's 'Old Man,' His Given Name, and Why He's Never Killed Jeff Whittaker

Katya Slonenko's Deductions from Shanker Comments about His Dear Old Dad in 'The Hallmarked Man'

Last week Nick Jeffery and I spoke with Fiona F, a Serious Striker from Adelaide, Australia, who argued via ‘Means Before Motive’ that Shanker and the Ricci Gang in Clerkenwell had to be considered persons of interest, even suspects, in the death of Leda Strike. Fiona thought they were at least as likely as Jeff Whittaker to have done the job or known who did it, if only because Strike is so sure his step-father did it. See The Mysterious Suicides of Leda Strike and Charlotte Campbell Revisited Post Hallmarked Man for Fiona’s detective work.

As soon as we posted that, Ed Shardlow shared a url to an October 2025 post at Reddit’s r/CormoranStrike boards, Is Shanker Mucky Ricci’s son?. The author of that post, Katya Slonenko, argued Shanker was not only related to the Ricci’s through the drug deal Strike remembered in Troubled Blood (ch 27; 308-310), he was in fact one of Nico Ricci’s illegitimate children.

No doubt that seems a crazy stretch to you, an ‘out there’ theory from the Wild West fandom that posts on the reddit boards. I know Katya Slonenko, though. She’s brilliant, frankly, and I’ve posted my notes to another theory she had, that one way back in 2021, Leda Strike: Mistress of the Salmon Salt (about which pudenda tattoo, more in another post). After reading her Shanker theory, I reached out to her to ask permission to summarize and quote from her reddit notes here and to invite her to talk with me and Nick next month. She’s agreeable on both counts (and asks that I refer to her simply as ‘Katya’ in my notes below).

Allan Blackburn wrote last week about Fiona’s deductions, “I'm always staggered at the 'firepower' brought to bear on the Strike novels by really well informed individuals proposing outcomes from clues in the novels.” To which I can only say, “Same.” What follows is not my work except for my filling out the relatively telegraphic writing style of reddit posting; the research and insights in my summary and text citations are all from Katya and the redditors at r/CormoranStrike, to whom with Fiona I tip my hat for bringing Shanker and the Riccis out of the shadows.

Here is the heart of Katya’s argument:

Hear me out.

• ‘Jewellery. (...) Got that tip off me old man, before’e went senile,’ said Shanker. (...) ‘You can fuckin’ smirk, but ‘e ‘ad kids wiv abou’ ten diff’rent women. (...) Well, ‘e ‘ad a nine-inch cock as well.’

I thought, wait a moment, haven’t we already seen an old demented father of many children, who’d given his son tips on how to win a woman back, and who had a nine-inch cock somewhere in the books?..

Yes, we have. That man was Mucky Ricci.

The son was Luca, and the woman was Gloria. (A piece of jewellery - a ring - was also featured in that story.) Granted, it wasn’t explicitly stated that the nine-inch cock belonged to Ricci - Betty Fuller just says “a geezer”, - so I’ll omit it from the arguments below. :D

Here are the things about Shanker:

• He’s coming from a big clan of professional criminals in Clerkenwell, London - what are the chances that there are two such clans in the Ricci’s area?

• He deals cocaine and is good with a knife - The Riccis deal cocaine and are famous for knifing police informers (Kara Wolfson).

• His father had (has?) dementia, which we learn about in TRG, two books after demented Mucky Ricci appears. Literally every time Shanker speaks of his father, he mentions dementia (in TRG and THM), so it must be important.

• Mucky owned strip clubs; Shanker’s civil wife is a stripper.

• Shanker and Mucky Ricci have met in person.

• Shanker looks pretty informed about the details of Mucky’s life: he shares with Strike that he started a part of the Sabini gang as a kid, that he received his ring from Danny the Lion (the mobster, not the porn actor from THM), and that he’s now “in an ‘ome”, “gaga”. You can say it’s general knowledge, but there is no other criminal in London about whom Shanker shares personal details, just this one.

• According to Shanker, that’s because he had business with Mucky’s eldest, Luca. About Luca. There are similarities in Robin’s first reaction to Shanker in CoE and her reaction to Luca Ricci in TB: Compare how these descriptions are worded: “Clanging footsteps on the stairs outside made her brace herself. The door opened. Robin looked up. The man who stood there was not Strike. Primal, instinctive fear ripped through her. There was no time to analyse why the stranger had such an effect on her; she only knew that he was dangerous”.

• Vs. “The footsteps grew louder, and then the door opened to reveal a very tall man whose face was pitted with acne scars and whose knobbly bald head looked, as Barclay had said, as though something heavy had been dropped on it: Luca Ricci. She could feel the sweat on her breastbone now, where it would be visible to Luca. (...) She could feel the potential for violence coming off him like radiation.”

• Both start as distant footsteps and cause an involuntary physical reaction from Robin. Could they be described so similarly, because they are brothers?

(Also, Shanker didn’t tell everything to Strike, and from THM we know that he also has business with Mucky’s middlest, Marco. Or at least, they are both associated with Barnaby’s.)

If the Riccis were a rival gang, why wouldn’t Shanker take a chance of them being taken down by Strike and the Met? The answer is - because they are not a rival gang.

I hear you saying, the Riccis are Italians, and Shanker is pure London! But let me tell you this in Strike’s own words, albeit about Whittaker, not Shanker: He was born in Yorkshire, but now he’s pure cockney. There’s something about the capital that does it to you.

There’s more to Katya’s Shanker-Ricci theory that we’ll get to but let’s fill in the textual blanks to be sure of the evidence she cites above on the fly. First, the Hallmarked Man conversation between Shanker and Strike in which we learn that the Criminal with a Heart of Gold, Strike’s childhood friend, had a well-endowed dad who had a way of keeping his women on board and who had since “gone senile:”

He stood ready to oppose any mooted plan of revenge or intimidation against a single mother whose eldest child had been seriously ill, but Shanker responded,

‘Jewelry.’

‘Jewelry,’ repeated Strike.

‘Got that tip off me old man, before ’e went senile,’ said Shanker. ‘Women never say no to jewelry. Only useful fing ’e ever fuckin’ told me. They don’ chuck it, an’ then they fink about you every time they fuckin’ look at it.’

‘Wise counsel,’ said Strike.

‘You can fuckin’ smirk, but ’e ’ad kids wiv abou’ ten diff’rent women.’

‘By giving them all jewelry?’

‘Well, ’e ’ad a nine-inch cock as well,’ said Shanker, and Strike laughed. (Hallmarked Man, ch 21)

Shanker has used different words for his dad’s mental decline in previous works but he always brings it up:

‘Yeah,’ said Strike, slipping his phone back in his pocket. ‘Well, my uncle might have dementia, I don’t know. My mum’s brother,’ he added.

‘Yeah?’ said Shanker. ‘Sorry to ’ear that. Fuckin’ bitch, dementia. My old man ’ad it.’

‘Didn’t know that,’ said Strike. (Running Grave, ch 33)

When Strike asked him in Troubled Blood about the man wearing the ring from his memory of delivering drugs back in the day, Shanker tells him the man was Nico ‘Mucky’ Ricci and that he is “gaga” and “in an ‘ome” — but still very dangerous:

“Well, Clerkenwell, that was the old Sabini stamping ground, warn’t it? And I s’pose even gangsters need doctors sometimes.”

“It was a party,” said Strike. “Not a surgery. Why would Mucky Ricci be at a doctors’ party?”

“Dunno,” said Shanker. “Anyone need killing?”

“Funny you should ask that,” said Strike. “I’m investigating the disappearance of a woman who was there that night.”

Shanker looked sideways at him.

“Mucky Ricci’s gaga,” he said quietly. “Old man now, innit.”

“Still alive, though?”

“Yer. ’E’s in an ’ome.”

“How d’you know that?”

“Done a bit o’ business wiv ’is eldest, Luca.”

“Boys in the same line of work as their old man?”

“Well, there ain’t no Little Italy gang any more, is there? But they’re villains, yeah,” said Shanker. Then he leaned across the table and said quietly, “Listen to me, Bunsen. You do not wanna screw wiv Mucky Ricci’s boys.”

It was the first time Shanker had ever given Strike such a warning.

“You go fuckin’ wiv their old man, you try pinnin’ anyfing on ’im, the Ricci boys’ll skin ya. Understand? They don’t fuckin’ care. They’ll torch your fuckin’ office. They’ll cut up your girl.”

“Tell me about Mucky. Anything you know.”

“Did you ’ear what I just said, Bunsen?”…

“That occurred to me,” said Strike. “Hence—”

“Fuck your fucking ‘hence,’” said Shanker fiercely. “If the bint was taken out by Mucky Ricci or any of his boys, she’s past fuckin’ savin,’ in’t she? I know you like bein’ the boy scout, mate, but the last guy who pissed off Luca Ricci, his wife opened the door few days later and got acid thrown in her face. Blind in one eye, now.

“You wanna drop this, Bunsen. If Mucky Ricci’s the answer, you need to stop askin’ the question.” (Troubled Blood, ch 27; 310-311)

So, connecting the Shanker-Ricci dots, we know from Strike 5 that Shanker knows the Riccis, knows colorful stories about the clan’s Godfather, and knows his current condition and location. Note that he calls Mucky “old man,” a phrase he also uses for his father. Shanker told Strike in Running Grave that his father had dementia, something he confirms in Hallmarked Man. He also reports there that his dad had a large penis, large enough that he knew its exact legendary nine-inch length.

Katya remembers that Betty Fuller had a run-in with a “geezer” with one of those power-tools but discounts the connection with Ricci. I think she’s hasty! At the beginning of her Troubled Blood interview with both Robin and Cormoran in the room she reports why she needed a house-call from the local clinic:

Betty Fuller suddenly grinned at him, showing chipped yellow teeth.

“You ever taken it… up the shitter… with a nine-inch cock?”

Only by exercising the utmost restraint did Robin prevent herself letting out a shocked laugh. She had to hand it to Strike: he didn’t so much as grin as he said,

“Can’t say I have.”

“Well,” wheezed Betty Fuller, “you can… take it from me… fuckin’… agony… geezer went at me… like a fucking power drill… split my arsehole open.” (Troubled Blood, ch 56; 690)

Maybe “nine-inch cock” is a Clerkenwell or Cockney euphemism for “really big” rather than a precise measurement so there’s nothing to be made of both Betty and Shanker describing a Clerkenwell man with that in his pants. Must be a bunch of men like that in every London neighborhood, right?

Here’s the thing (sic); Betty opens their rest home conversation with that report — a man who hurts her so much by drilling her anally that she needs medical attention, the mark of a sadist who knew exactly what he was doing, and closes her conversation with Strike by talking about Mucky Ricci and the snuff film he made of Kara Wolfson’s death:

“I met ’er… coupla years later… visitin’ ’er mum… and she tole me a story.

“Girl at their club… gorgeous girl, Jen said… got raped… knifepoint. Cut…” said Betty Fuller, indicating her own sagging torso, “right down the ribs… by a mate… of Ricci’s…

“Some people,” said the old woman, “fink a hooker… being raped… it just means she never… got paid…’spect your Miss Stick-Up-’Er-Arse,” said Betty, glancing at the window, “finks that… but it ain’t that…

“This girl… angry… wants revenge… get back… at Ricci… so the silly bitch… turns police informer…

“And Mucky found out,” wheezed Betty Fuller, “and ’e filmed it… as they killed ’er. My mate Jen was told… by someone… what ’ad seen… the film… Ricci kept it… in the safe… show people… if they needed… scaring…

“Jen’s dead now,” said Betty Fuller. “Overdosed… firty-odd years ago… fort she’d be better… up West… and ’ere’s me… workin’ the streets… still alive.” (Troubled Blood, ch 56; 696-7)

I think Rowling-Galbraith having Betty refer to Robin as “Miss Stick-Up-’Er-Arse” while relating a story about psycho-killer Mucky Ricci, one with which she shuts down her conversation with Cormoran, is for us to make the connection with the psychopathic misogynist who she said at the start put his tree limb up her bum.

And the jewelry advice? As Katya wrote, Mucky went to the Christmas party at the Clerkenwell clinic to scare Gloria into reconciling with Luca — who soon after pops the question with the necessary hardware. As Gloria told Robin and Strike forty years later:

“After he’d calmed down, he let me go home to my grandparents” house, but he wanted to see me again later. It was always like that after he’d been really violent. He wanted extra contact.

“He hadn’t beaten me in the face. He never did, he never lost control like that, so I went back to my grandparents” and acted as though everything was fine. Went out to meet Luca that night, and he took me out for dinner, and that was the night he proposed, with a ring and everything.

“And I said yes,” said Gloria, with a strange smile and a shrug. “I put that ring on, and I looked down at it, and I didn’t even have to act happy, because I genuinely was. I thought That’ll buy some of my plane ticket. Mind you, I’d never flown before in my life. The idea of it scared me. But all the time, I could see Margot in my head. You’ve got to be brave, Gloria. (Troubled Blood, ch 66; 831)

So dementia, a jewelry trick, and a nine-inch cock are things Shanker’s dad and Mucky Ricci have in common. That’s pretty compelling linkage, even if everyone but Strike makes their marriage proposal with a ring.

Now add in all the extra connections in Katya’s reddit post:

• Shanker’s knowledge of the Ricci clan, especially Mucky,

• his Strike-witnessed working with Mucky in drug deals, and, the best catch of the theory in my opinion,

• the reaction Robin had to both Shanker and Luca at their first meeting, the fun-house mirror upside-down reflection of the attraction half-siblings feel for another intuitively. Robin is viscerally repulsed and afraid of the half-sibling Ricci boys.

This ‘Shanker is a Ricci’ idea leaves us pretty much in the same place that Fiona’s ‘Means before Motive’ exploration of Leda’s death brought us, namely, that Shanker has to go way up the ‘person of interest’ list in any investigation of Strike’s mother’s mysterious death and the Riccis must be considered suspects. Katya argues that Shanker fears Luca, not only because his half-brother is a lunatic, but because everyone with a half-sibling should be on their guard in the Strike novels:

All in all, I think, Shanker is not afraid of Mucky Ricci; he’s afraid of Luca Ricci, who’s an “absolute psycho” and another example of a jealous murderous (half-)sibling that are so populous across the series: John Bristow, Donald Laing, Freddie Chiswell, Gus Upcott, Abigail Glover.

Jealous, because he didn’t have his father’s attention like Shanker did. (Luca tells Robin in Troubled Blood that their father never had time for them before Marco was hit by a car, which happened in 1974. Which, if I’m not mistaken, is also the year of Shanker’s birth.)

Because it looks to me that Shanker had as good a relationship with his father as was possible in the context. It feels like Mucky was present in Shanker’s life because the stories like how he became a part of the Sabini gang (like a famous rock band of a criminal world, I presume), or how he got his ring, sound exactly like something a father would tell his (probably estranged) son.

Also, for what he is, Shanker tries to be as good a father as possible in his context. Somewhat repeating his family pattern.

Shanker doesn’t sound either fearful or angry when he talks about Mucky - only about Luca. At present, he is the danger.

On top of these brilliant connections, Katya then takes a stab, if you will, at solving two other Shanker mysteries.

• What is Shanker’s name?

• Why hasn’t he killed Jeff Whittaker after all these years if he’s so convinced that Leda’s second husband killed her?

The name thing is a hoot and I really wish I had spotted it. Katya explains:

I think we can agree that Shanker’s real name is somehow important. It’s not that important that Strike would remember it, but it’s important enough to be kept secret for eight books.

If I’m right and he’s Mucky Ricci’s son, we can deduce two things:

• He didn’t grow up in the same family as Luca and Marco, and most likely uses his mother’s last name. Strike would definitely make an effort and remember if Shanker’s last name were “Ricci.”

• Given that two of Mucky’s sons are named Luca and Marco, I suggest that there’s a high probability that he also has sons named the variations of “John” and “Matthew”. And if I had to choose between the two above, my money would be on John, because MFC [Matthew F’in Cunliffe] would most probably remind Strike of Shanker’s real name.

Hence, I predict Shanker’s name to be John or a derivative: Shaun, Sean, Evan, Giovanni (haha), Jack, Jan, Jon, Ian, or such….

And another one. Isn’t it sad that the “John” fish died (Travolta), and now we’re afraid that the new “John” fish (Elton) is going to gulp it sooner or later, too? Yeah. Is it a possible Shanker [death] foreshadowing?

She notes, too, that ‘Shanker’ is cockney slang for ‘wanker,’ but I suspect it is much more likely to be a reflection of the shorter word shank’s slang meaning of ‘the stabbing of a person with an improvised knife in a prison.’ A ‘shanker’ in this context would simply mean someone good with a knife or who stabs others as a reflex.

Why hasn’t Shanker shanked Whittaker after all these years? It’s the first thing he thinks Strike has in mind in Career of Evil when the detective asks his adopted brother to help him find his step-father. Katya’s theory is that it is because Shanker’s name at birth may have been ‘Giovanni Ricci’ but his secret identity is ‘Severus Snape.’

In a nutshell, Katya argues that Shanker is a police informer and not just any police force. He’s working with MI5.

Of course, Shanker can be an offspring of another, yet unknown, super-violent and very dangerous cocaine-dealing and knife-wielding clan.

But what would be the narrative value of revealing that vs the narrative value of having Shanker, Strike’s “brother”, to be a Ricci all along! A “good” Ricci, saved by the imperfect woman Strike’s mother was—a Trojan Shanker, “the agent of the Adversary” in our camp.

It also puts Shanker prominently on the list of persons of interest connected to Leda’s death, even though he was not present when she was dying. He was away on a cocaine-dealing duty, which is a convincing alibi, as we know from TCC :D

It puts the Riccis there, too. If Leda (accidentally) learned something about them from Shanker, she could be on their hit list. Albeit, their MO is very different from quietly overdosing the victims.

Shanker cried at Whittaker’s trial and yelled, “That fucker’s done it!” - Did he want to get Whittaker committed because he believed he’d done it, or because he didn’t want the investigation to go in whatever possible “Ricci” direction? Just like he didn’t want Strike to dig anywhere near the Riccis in Troubled Blood and The Hallmarked Man. “If Mucky Ricci is your answer, you need to stop asking questions.”

Actually, every time Strike starts digging close to the Riccis, Shanker becomes especially grim in his warnings. And he also sounds afraid.

From The Hallmarked Man:

• “Ooo’s grassed?’ said Shanker furiously. (...) ‘Fuck, you ain’t wiv a pig right now, are ya?’.

His range went from “cagey” to “furious”, which we haven’t seen him yet. Why is that?

(Sigh.)

My theory is that he’s a double agent working undercover to undermine the Riccis and has been doing it since (and because of) Leda’s death.

Here, I said it! And by “double agent”, I mean that he’s also a police informer.

Shanker is a police informer.

Shanker gives info to Strike, so is it really that impossible to suggest that Strike is not his only confidant?

• “’Ow do I know? Know enough o’the fuckin’ cocksuckers, dontcha?”

• “They speak hightly of you, too,” said Strike.

That little dialogue made me think: what if Strike accidentally hit the spot, and Shanker is already working with the police? Unbelievable as it might seem, I went and reread every Shanker conversation there is across the books, and I discovered a pattern.

Every time there is a suspicion that someone has “grassed” or “blabbed” (or worse - when Strike thinks in Career of Evil that Shanker has grassed on him), Shanker starts sounding dangerous, angry, or furious.

Why is he so emotional? He’s matter-of-fact about his upcoming prison sentence in The Hallmarked Man, so the police are obviously not what worries him.

No, he’s afraid of the gang uncovering him, and we know exactly what they do to police informers.

The fact that has kept worrying me since the end of Troubled Blood is that the Riccis were never brought to justice for what happened to Kara Wolfson; all the other lines in that book were tied and closed satisfyingly, but not that one. That leads me to conclude we will return to the Riccis in a later book, where they’ll be even more dangerous, but ultimately get what they deserve.

And Shanker is a Ricci by birth and part of the Ricci gang, but was “saved” by Leda’s love many years ago; therefore he’ll play a prominent part in bringing them down.

I don’t know what long project in the crime world could involve undercover work for twenty-odd years, but I’m convinced that Rowling-Galbraith is into that sort of long play, because it brings Severus Snape to my mind. Upgraded to the next level. “After all these years?” - “Always”….

Before the end of the series, [I predict] we will question [Shanker’s] alliances. If it suddenly seems that he went to the dark side completely, I’ll take it with a grain of salt, keeping Severus in mind.

And MI5?

Because I know that you take an outlandish theory kindly, I’m gonna say it: Shanker is not with the Met, he’s with MI5. I got this idea when I read a Wikipedia article about the conviction of the real-life Clerkenwell crime syndicate, which involved a long-term undercover MI5 operation.

I think he probably wouldn’t’ve been charged with obstruction of justice if he were an undercover agent of his own department. And he’s really supportive of Strike “showing it” to the Met when the occasion arises, so he’s probably from a competitive organisation. :D

I found the Wiki piece about a Clerkenwall Crime Syndicate taken down with MI5 undercover work, a “21 month bugging operation,” responsible in large part for the arrests and convictions. From 2007, ‘Britain’s Godfather Behind Bars’ and Gang boss trapped by MI5 ‘bugging:’

A leading member of a notorious crime clan was facing a long jail term last night after admitting money laundering.

Terry Adams, part of a north London gang known as the A-Team and The Firm, admitted he had spent years laundering criminal proceeds with a crooked jeweller who has since been murdered.

The conviction came after months of hearings. A jury was about to be sworn for a four-month trial and were to receive protection.

The case is a major success for police and MI5, which helped bug Adams’s home in an operation which began in the late 1990s.

The Adams gang from Islington, north London, had troubled police since the 1980s and is suspected of running an international criminal empire, ranging from protection and extortion rackets to drugs.

Calling Ralph Lawrence! We need an MI5 contact in Sleep Tight, Evangeline or Strike 10 for the Big Reveal that Shanker was the Severus Snape deep-plant whose cover could not be risked if he was to succeed in his life-long mission to get Luca Ricci for killing Leda. (Strike has mistakenly tried to find and kill him when he learns enough about Shanker’s relationship with the Riccis [through Whittaker?] to think he killed his mother, right?)

Shanker hasn’t killed Jeff Whittaker because John Ricci knows that the Satanist didn’t kill the mother of his son Switch. Giovanni’s after much bigger game, the most dangerous kind, and is on the side of the angels to avenge Leda’s death.

Three Reasons Why I Love the Shanker John Ricci Theory:

(1) It Confirms the ‘Blackburn Truth of Rowling Fandom’ Noted Above: “I’m always staggered at the ‘firepower’ brought to bear on the Strike novels by really well informed individuals proposing outcomes from clues in the novels.”

Katya Slonenko and Fiona Down Under, a tattoo artist in Amsterdam and an environmental scientist in Adelaide, independently and from opposite poles of the earth (antipodes?) and different text starting points arrive at the seeming surety that Shanker and the Riccis are somehow tied to Leda Strike’s death. We’re still a (very) long way from knowing what happened, but the fandom is so much closer to the hidden truths about which secrets Rowling-Galbraith has been setting down clues for over eight books.

Harry Potter fans figured out how ‘Stoppered Death’ Severus was responsible for Dumbledore’s survival post exposure to the cursed Horcrux ring; they did this soon after the publication of Half-Blood Prince, which is to say “years before” Rowling revealed it in Deathly Hallows. That theory, of course, resolved the mystery of Snape’s allegiance; he had to be a Dumbledore man.

I think these Serious Strikers in pointing out the Shanker-Ricci connection have done the same thing for the series-in-parallel’s very own Severus Shanker Snape and Dark Lord Luca-Lucifer. Hats off especially to Katya Slonenko who got there very soon after the publication of Hallmarked Man and whose text-based arguments make the seeming impossibly Dickensian conjunction of Shanker and the Riccis come to life.

(2) It Confirms the Hogwarts Professor Hypothesis that Hallmarked Man is What It Is to Set Up the Big Reveals of the Last Two Books in the Series.

When the Hogwarts Professor faculty and adjuncts ranked the six Strike novels best to worst after the publication of Ink Black Heart, the big winner was Troubled Blood and the very near consensus choice for worst book was Career of Evil (my score-card and the Final Tally). I noted all the failings of Career (and, sadly, I laughed at readers who thought it was brilliant; not a great look, I admit). In my defense, I allowed that if Strike 3 paralleled Strike 7 the way Prisoner of Azkaban did Deathly Hallows, its ranking in the series was sure to climb significantly.

There were a lot of Career of Evil echoes in Running Grave (read about them all here) but it didn’t raise my opinion of Strike 3 significantly. There were perhaps even more Career of Evil echoes in Hallmarked Man, and, though Strike 8 had an avalanche of echoes from each of the previous seven books, the experience of reading Hallmarked closely — as in ‘charting each ‘Part’ or chapter set — made me reconsider my dismissal of Strike 3.

Why?

I realized I had fallen into a trap when reading Career of Evil that I was watching Serious Strikers and beach readers make with Hallmarked Man. I had assumed that if I didn’t like the experience of the book, Career of Evil, then the book had failed rather than asking myself if the experience I had reading it was exactly the one the author intended that I have, making it a success. I think that is certainly the mistake being made with the greater part of Hallmarked Man criticism today. More on that in future posts with respect to the Shakespearean psychomachia and literary alchemy of Strike 8.

Here, in a piece about the reddit post by Katya Slonenko about Shanker John Ricci, I need only point out that the complicated plot line, the number of plot lines and characters, and the seeming chaos of what is actually an acutely chiastic structure successfully obscured the Shanker clues about his relationship with the Riccis from all but the most attentive readers. I sure missed them all; I’ve read that Louise Freeman Davis noticed something about Shanker in her re-read at Farting Sofa which with Katya and Fiona makes three people who figured it out — out of how many?

Which was the ‘hiding in plain sight albeit in a crowd of thousands’ genius of Hallmarked Man’s complexity. The ‘wow’ quality of the reveals that will be made in the next two books would be very much diminished if either the author had not given us sufficient clues to figure out what was in the works or if Rowling-Galbraith had made those clues too easy to spot so there was little shock at what we had missed. ‘Shanker John Ricci’ is hard to see, but once spotted it’s impossible to not see.

3. The Shanker John Ricci Theory Doesn’t Answer Any of the Big Questions

Does believing, even knowing that Shanker is somehow related to the Ricci crime family answer any of the key questions that have to be tied up before the last pages of Strike 10?

Most obviously, does it explain how and why Leda Strike died? If she killed herself or if someone else killed her?

Katya wrote at first that, though Shanker may be a Ricci and the Riccis were butchers, she still thought Jeff Whittaker killed Leda Strike:

Oh yeah, I agree with you that Whittaker killed Leda. I still think that Shanker is either connected or knows something, or is a red herring, but a one that would allow Strike to investigate the Riccis and bring them to justice for what they’ve done. (They’ve done enough horrifying things even without killing Leda - it would be underwhelming to bring them in for her death, in my opinion.)

From a meta-fictional perspective, Whittaker killing Leda makes sense in an upside-down kind of way. Harry Potter’s being convinced that Snape is a bad guy meant he had to be a good guy, so the man Strike believes killed his mother is the one person that Rowling Readers are all but certain cannot be the person that killed her. Therefore Rowling would make him the murderer as her Austenian ‘Big Twist.’ A little too ‘meta’ for me but de gustibus.

Katya’s thinking has changed about Whittaker, too, by the way:

I don’t agree that Whittaker killed Leda any longer. It would be equally underwhelming, in my opinion, to find out that Whittaker, a serial killer, is her murderer. It makes for a better plot if the murderer has personal reasons rather than just a compulsion to kill, if that makes sense. Personally, I would be disappointed if the answer to Leda’s murder is - “a maniac killed her”.

The point is that Katya’s Shanker John Find, her Set of Brilliant Deductions really, forces us all to rethink the question of Leda’s death and what could have been going on in that flat after Cormoran left for Oxford.

The way that Fiona’s ideas about Charlotte and Amelia being at Sasha Legard’s birthday party and learning the Longcaster Incest secret reshape the conversation about Milady Bizerko’s death and the motives her friends, family, and enemies might have to kill her or compel her to suicide.

The way that the possibility Ted at age 14 went full Oedipus with his mother (on Freud’s desk?) from which incestuous union his sister-daughter Peggy-Margaret-Leda was conceived blows up everything we thought we knew about why Strike’s mother left her home in Cornwall and had the bizarre relationship with Ted and Joan that she did.

If you’re going to play the game of Anticipating the Chess Master’s Knight’s Move, her signature narrative misdirection and ‘Big Twist,’ these are the theories and the kind of seemingly off-the-wall speculation you’re obliged to take seriously. And the better the theory, the more it lines up with evidence and overturns mistaken assumptions about characters and events the author has carefully fostered in her readers over thousands of pages, the more likely you are to be on track.

But it pays to remember that it’s a game we’re not going to win. The theories may make the Big Reveal at the Story Finish less surprising the way ‘Stoppered Death’ cued Potter fans that Severus was a Dumbledore Man rather than a Slytherin Stooge. They won’t make us anticipate the last book any less or dilute the experience of learning how it all plays out; just the opposite!

Let me know what you think of Katya Slonenko’s ‘Shanker John’ theory and the three reasons I love it in the comment boxes below. A big shout out and bow from the waist to Pelican_Girl, the moderator who hosts the Pinball Machine energy and brilliance of the r/Cormoran Strike boards at Reddit; thank you for all you do!