Nick Jeffery and I will be talking this week about Rowling’s Cupid and Psyche tweet to assure those in “emotional trauma” after reading Hallmarked Man that all will be well in Strike 9. One of the points we hope to make in that conversation is the importance of understanding the surface story before diving into the depths of the author’s artistry and meaning.
That’s obviously a challenge with the 900 page Hallmarked Man and its multiple lines of investigation — five corpse candidates with attendant cast of characters for each — and ever moving backdrops of Agency cases and personnel (Oranda goldfish!). Which is not to mention the kaleidoscope of Robin-Ryan, Cormoran-Bijou, and Cormoran-Robin relationship twists and turns, what many readers believe (with good reason) is the real story.
On my hurried second and third readings of the book, consequently, I not only made occasional margin notes in my old-school codex (complete with tags for each Part and the Epilogue) but also tried to write down character names as they appeared. I finished my first draft of that list late last night and began sorting the names into categories this morning. It’s not a complete list — I keep thinking of ones I neglected (Lady Spense’s first husband, Rokeby’s Jeeves, others) — but just seeing those names I have listed laid out in their respective corpse-candidate or plot point category reveals one of the primary challenges of the text.
The five missing persons who are ‘William Wright’ corpse candidates by means of their resembling the dead person found in the vault and not being able to be ID’d via a DNA test are Rupert Fleetwood, Jason Knowles, Danny De Leon, Niall Semple, and Tyler Powell. The staff of the Ramsey Silver Shop to include the Calvin Osgood story-line and William Wright pseudonymous character, the Agency, Strike, and Ellacott players, the police, media, and online names in comment threads, and the real world names, historical and current, to include Masons of note fill out the Dramatis Personae.
Rupert Peter Bernard Christian Fleetwood
Decima Longcaster Mullins
Lion Longcaster Mullins (Fleetwood?)
Peter Fleetwood
Anjelica Fleetwood Wallner
Veronica Legard Fleetwood
Ned Legard
Tara Claremont Campbell Longcaster Legard Jensen
Sasha (Alexander Simon) Legard
Charlotte Campbell-Ross
Dino Longcaster
Valentine Longcaster
Cosima ‘Mimi’ Longcaster
Albie Simpson-White
Laetitia ‘Tish’ Benton
Zacharias Lorimer
‘Dredge’
Lottie Hazelrigg
Argus Lyall
Tyler Powell of Ironbridge
Ivor Powell
Gill Powell
Dilys Powell
Faber Whitehead
Lucinda Whitehead
Harvey Whitehead
Hugo Whitehead
Anne-Marie Morgan
Ian Griffiths
Chloe Griffiths
‘Zeta’
Wynn Jones
Ed Billings
Darren Pratt
Mickey Edwards
Daniel DeLeon (‘Dangerous Dick De Lion’)
Richard DeLeon
Helen Platt
Craig Wheaton
Fiona ‘Fyola Fay’ Freeman
Oliver Branfoot
Niall Semple
Jade Semple
Ben Liddell
Rena Liddell
Ralph Lawrence
Angela Darwish
Jason Knowles
Lynden Knowles
‘Shanker’
Brian Judge
‘Barnaby’s (Rudge)
‘William Wright,’ Clerk, Ramsay Silver Shop
Kenneth Ramsay
Rachel Bullen Ramsay
Pamela Bullen-Driscoll
Geoffrey Driscoll
Victor Lambert
John Auclair
Laura
‘Jim Todd’
‘Jim Philpott’
Todd Jameson
Nancy Jameson
Daz
Mandy
Clint
Husein Mohamed
Hafsa Mohamed
Calvin Osgood (not ‘Oz’)
Gibson’s Auction House (Delivery Service)
Diana Boadu
Charlie Carter
Larry McGee
Calvin ‘Oz’ Osgood
Sofia Medina
Gretchen Schiff
Max
Sapphire Neagle
Tia Thompson
Wade King
‘Rita Linda’
Reata Lindvall
Jolanda Lindvall
Elias Maes
Metropolitan Police (New)
Daniel Gayle
Malcolm Truman
Butler
Susan Iverson
DCI Northmore
Strike-Ellacott Agency (New)
Kim Cochran
Eric Wardle
Liam Wardle (!)
Cormoran, Robin, Travolta, Elton (Oranda goldfish)
Strike’s Life
Trevik Nancarrow
Edward ‘Ted’ Nancarrow
Peggy (Margaret ‘Leda’) Nancarrow
Jonny Rokeby
Lila
Fingal
Hector
Ellacott-Ville
Carmen Ellacott
Dirk Ellacott
Barnaby Ellacott
Internet Thread Voices
Shaun Coolidge
Peter Mikkelson
Debbie Palser
Jane Burnett
Jeff Grayling
Paul Everleigh
‘Austin H’
‘Kojak’
‘Skunk’
Agency Cases
Mr. A
Mrs. A
Mrs. Culpepper
Plug
Plug, Jr.
Two Times
Mrs. Two Times
That’s over one hundred names of characters making their first onstage appearance or in different roles. Shanker and Wardle may be ‘regulars,’ two of the Nancarrows are only debuting with respect to their given names, and Jonny Rokeby feels like an old friend. Rather than take them off this list, though, I want to create a complementary list of ‘Recurring Characters,’ the old friends and bit part players who show up in Galbraith’s Strike-World:
Cameos: Ciarra Porter, Farah Navabi, Mitch Patterson, Matt Cunliffe, Sarah Shadlock, Prudence Donleavey, Marguerite (!), Ilsa Herbert, Nina Lascelles (Percy plus one), Dominic Culpepper, Graham Hardacre, George Layborn, and Fergus Robertson.
Ellacott-ville: Ryan F. Murphy, Massam Michael, Linda, Stephen, Jenny, Annabel, Jonathan, and Martin.
Agency: Cormoran Blue Strike, Robin Venetia Ellacott, Sam Barclay, Pat Chauncey, Midge Greenstreet, and Dev Shah.
Which is leaving out Lucy, Greg, Jack, and Luke, all together thirty-three more names to keep straight.
There are more — seven Masons from history and ten allusions to ‘real world’ people, past and present — which would bring us to just over one hundred and fifty characters aloft in the cloud of a reader’s imagination. Let’s say, though, that there are only half that number which are in play at any time as we struggle alongside the Agency partners as they try to figure out Whodunnit and the mess of their love lives.
That’s a lot even when they’re sorted conveniently into categories as they are above. The way they appear in the book, of course, is seemingly haphazard, introduced and tossed around in the weave of clues, discoveries, and revelations as well as red herrings and lies, not to mention the scramble inherent to the Strike-Ellacott ‘Beat the Clock’ Murphy Marriage Proposal countdown. And Serious Strikers and Rowling Readers know that nothing can be discounted or overlooked; if you ignore, say, the internet avatars and pseudonyms, of course it turns out that three of them are critical to the solution of the Silver Vault murder mystery.
So what?
I haven’t created lists like this for the other Strike novels but I’m going to guess that Hallmarked Man is unique among the first eight books in the number of characters and story-lines the reader is challenged to keep straight. If I’m right in this assumption, then the natural question is “Why did Rowling do this?”
Here are three answers off the top of my head:
(1) Her Intention is to Set Up the Last Two Books of the Ten Book Series
The conversations Nick and I plan to have about Hallmarked Man all will have a single Shed tool, Lake spring, and Golden Thread as its focus. Last week it was ‘Misdirection for Defamiliarization’ and this week we’ll be discussing ‘Mythology,’ prompted by Rowling’s Cupid and Psyche tweet the week of Strike 8’s publication. As you know if you’ve watched Hallmarked Man's Three 'Whose My Daddy?' Set-Ups to Shock Readers in Strikes 9 and 10, the premise of that challenge to Serious Strikers was that this 900 page mystery’s principal purpose was to set-up the wild finale and Big Reveals in the books to come.
If I’m right in that (and as a non-falsifiable assertion, you’ll have to bear with me), then one of the reasons for the flood of characters and diverse plot lines without obvious points of intersection is that there are things in Hallmarked Man that prepare the reader for challenges of the two remaining books. Take another look at the various character categories above. Which one’s characters do you think we might be revisiting again for which this book’s prolonged exposure will be a great help in our ‘getting’ what is going on?
I don’t think it is the Sark Brothers, the Silver Sisters, the Steely Dan Traffickers in Ironbridge, the SAS Suicide, or the Masonic Mafia in the Met.
It’s Charlotte Campbell-Ross’ extended family. Decima Mullins is the Hallmarked Man client and the Agency is obliged to search for her beloved Rupert, which requires in turn that the Serious Striker learn about the border-line incestuous relations and history of bad-blood between the Legards, Longcasters, Fleetwoods, and Campbells. I think it very likely that Strike 8 will be remembered as much for the introduction of Lady Tara Claremont Campbell Longcaster Legard Jensen and Heberley House as it will be for Strike’s overdue visit to Chez Rokeby’s.
Because, as Sasha Legard all but said to Strike in their National Theater exchange, one of them killed Charlotte Campbell, the solving of which mystery will be the subject of Strike 9 or Strike 10.
(2) The Murder in the Silver Vault is Absurd and Confusion Masks Its Silliness
As Beatrice Grove, who has forgotten more than in the last fortnight about the workings of detective fiction than I will ever know, once shared with me, Rowling’s plots can be borderline ridiculous. She offered Goblet of Fire and Lethal White as her examples, but there are others.
The fourth Harry Potter novel turns on the Tri-Wizard Tournament’s Cup being made into a Portkey that would send Harry to the Little Hangelton graveyard — which is risibly round-about when the Boy Who Lived could have been tricked into touching a Portkey in any number of simpler set-ups.
Lethal White, Goblet’s Strike parallel piece, is maybe even more unlikely in its crazy complication. Raff Chiswell wants to steal a painting no one in his family knows is valuable, so, instead of just taking it on one of his runs to the appraiser and substituting another piece, he has an affair with his step-mother and plans the murder of his biological father — a Minister of the Government! —by a staged-suicide so he can inherit the painting via his paramour.
Rowling has to know that the murder in the Silver Vault is as incredible, as in “not believable,” as the mysteries of Goblet and White. She says as much repeatedly. Strike on Sark lays out for Robin that the murder took place in the Ramsay Silver vault because it had to have been done there; no where else was it possible. When Strike figures it out, he describes it to Wardle as “too complicated by half,” “too many moving parts” (841). Wardle agrees: “It’s the most convoluted fucking murder I’ve ever heard of.” Spot on, Eric.
They solve the case by having “isolated the puzzle pieces of William Wright from those of other men,” “puzzle pieces” Strike acknowledges sober men would dismiss as “guesswork, a couple of fake Instagram accounts, and an old ad on eBay” (833). That’s true, frankly, but the two more egregious failings are that Rowling sets up a “necessity” test for the vault murder she fails to deliver on and that Whodunnit should have been obvious to the first Met officer who watched the Ramsay Silver video footage.
The “necessity” answer that Strike comes up with in his Big Reveal scene in Ironbridge beneath the dooby smoking icon of the Lord is that the vault had to be where Griffiths killed Tyler Powell because it was the only place “an undersized little cunt like you might have a chance of getting rid of him” (862).
Griffiths was clever enough to turn off the anti-brake system on Tyler’s car, a stunt resulting in the deaths of Hugo Whitehead and Anne-Marie Morgan. With a host of men willing to attack others for money and sex (cf., Wade King, Todd Jameson), however, his only way of dispatching Powell is by luring him to London, getting him a job at Ramsay’s Silver, springing on him from behind after arriving ex machina in a crate, and then mutilating his body and dressing it up with Masonic accessories.
Griffiths kills his adopted daughter and the mother of his child without any fuss and buries her under a concrete floor. Because he’s six inches shorter than Tyler, though, he has to come up with the “the most convoluted fucking murder” anyone has ever heard of.
Strike says the problem with the murder plan, overlooking the failed necessity test he himself established must be passed to solve the crime, is that it was too complicated and he shouldn’t have mixed sex with murder. The real problem with the murder plan, though, is that, as buffoonishly inept as we are supposed to believe the Metropolitan police are, there’s no way that they don’t notice the Tyler Powell who comes up the stairs from the basement is not the Tyler Powell who went down.
The Griffiths-Powell is wearing different clothes, for one thing. He leaves Tyler’s bloody clothes behind the wall with the silver. How was he supposed to have known exactly what Tyler was wearing that day to work and come up with an exact replica outfit that fit him?
Which is to raise the more obvious point. Strike describes the five foot tall pigeon toed Griffiths as a “midget-sized person,” “fucking pygmy,” and “undersized little cunt.” His diminutive stature is the reason Griffiths has to kill Powell in the vault, right? Tyler, though, is six to seven inches taller than he is — and we’re to believe that difference in height wasn’t as obvious as the change in clothes to the Met, for that matter, to Strike and Ellacott, when seeing the video footage? I know the camera wasn’t top of the line but it more than strains belief that a man half a foot shorter and in different clothes is only recognized as an imposter because his borrowed shoes don’t fit and he trips.
There’s more, alas.
Once the Met eliminates the four tourists on the CCTV footage as suspects in the murder, they are left with either an underground passage into the vault area or the man-in-the-crate solution. Strike points out this problem at the end of chapter 95. No one at Scotland Yard makes the obvious deduction from the crates going in and out, either, despite their having eliminated any other way for the murderers to get in and out, not to mention take the silver.
So.
What does this mess of a murder mystery have to do with the flood of characters and plot lines that crowd the pages of Hallmarked Man?
The effect of all those players on stage doing wildly different things is that it’s confusing and exhausting to the reader. By the time we get to the Ear-Cut-Off confrontation in Ironbridge (and, unless Strike’s near loss of that ear plays a key part in the next two books, I’m afraid it will have to be ruled as another distractor), if you’re like me on my first hurried reads, you were hoping for a quick and exciting wrap-up of this year’s mystery so the Cormoran-Robin question could at last be addressed.
There are two ideas being discussed on the Hogwarts Professor Moderator Channel about why Strike 8 is a new low for Rowling on the sloppy plotting front: either she has “jumped the Shark” and her editor isn’t equal to asking The Presence to go back to the drawing board or it is an exercise in self-parody. The reasoning behind the latter is that it explains why almost every scene in the novel echoes one in another Strike novel, not to mention the pointers to The Ickabog and to Casual Vacancy.
As much as I like the self-parody theory (straight out of Nabokov, no?), there is a better idea.
(3) The Complexity Requires Re-Readings Which is Key to Grasping Her Greater Artistry and Meaning
Rowling Readers familiar with my Perennialist approach to reading her novels know that I do not think that writing perfectly crafted Whodunnits is her aim. Nor do I believe that consummately polished and plotted novels is what her international audience celebrates in her work. If either of those things were true, the gaffes in Cuckoo’s Calling would have sunk the HMS Strike series at the port of launch.
Rowling’s seven Shed tools — psychomachia, literary alchemy, ring composition, misdirection towards defamiliarization, Christian symbolism, mythology, and inter-intratextuality (writing about reading and writing) — are all about the transformation of the human soul by cathartic experience in the imaginative heart, i.e., our spiritual reorientation. These traditional tools alone don’t do it, of course; her capacity for creating archetypal characters that we care about in profound fashion is what gives the tools their grip on the heart.
But, if a writer uses these tools in his or her Shed, the game being played and its stakes are not in question. Everything Rowling has written to date, with greater or lesser success (largely dependent on her control of the final product, cough*Warner Brothers*cough), shares this aim. Her global popularity testifies that much more often than not she hits her target to the delight of her readers.
I assume this was her aim in Hallmarked Man. It’s early days on the full exegesis of Strike8 in light of Rowling’s Shed tools, Lake springs, and Golden Threads, but there are encouraging signs. My third reading of the book included my first ‘Aha!’ moments with respect to the mythological template of the series, the Shed tool Rowling was openly urging her readers to think about in her recent Cupid and Psyche tweet.
What does this have to do with the crowded stage and three-ring circus quality of Hallmarked Man?
The answer born of my experience this week is that the flood of characters and plot lines encourages repeated readings to get a grasp of the almost bewildering set of surface stories. Yes, repeated readings will also reveal the plot holes and failings of the story as a realistic bit of detective fiction rather than an archetypal and symbolic journey.
But those readings will also begin to open up the greater artistry and meaning of the work. Please tune in to my next conversation with Nick Jeffery for the beginning of that conversation — and maybe a bit of name interpretation beyond counting them up and sorting them into taxonomic plot pigeon holes!
Honestly. . . at times I’ve wondered if this convoluted, exasperatingly fascinating book is even worth the effort to sort out. You’ve done a great job of doing the heavy lifting for us, but even your excellent analysis is going to require multiple readings! 😉
I have completed my first reading, listened to the audio, and now stated my third reading. i very much look forward to the Granger/Jeffrey postings!