Reading 'Running Grave' as the End of the Strike Series (C)

Asterisk Possibilities before My Conclusions about the Strike Series Being a Seven Book Closed Set

I no sooner finished writing and sending the Lethal White-Running Grave part of this three-part post when I thought of three more parallels for the Turn. When writing them up in a comment boxes beneath that post, a Cuckoo’s Calling-Running Grave connection came to mind (so I put it on the first part’s comment thread). I suspect this amendment by addition process could be endless. I’m hopeful that my effort to make the connections, though, will pretty much end today with this Part (C) concluding post, in which I hope to explain why the last eight weeks of charting the rings within Running Grave and its play in the series-ring has been important work. The seventh Strike novel is a landmark event, I think, because it makes plausible the idea that the series is closed, which in turn opens the door to a new day in Rowling studies, the fourth and last generation of criticism.

Before that conversation, though, I need to close out the ring reading of Running Grave with a review of the relationship between Career of Evil and Strike7.

The Asterisk ‘Ring’

Each of the seven books in the Strike series we have in hand today has been a ring composition, Rowling’s signature structure and story scaffolding. These novels as they relate and refer to one another take the shape of a seven book turtle-back structure; see the opening of the second part of this three part discussion for all the proofs for that.

Those who have been following discussion of Rowling-Galbraith’s formal artistry in her second series of books know that there are two leading candidates for the shape of the seven book cycle. The first is the archetypal ring per Mary Douglas with its story-latch of opening and closing books, the story-turn at the fourth entry which echoes number one and foreshadows number seven, and cross-axis correspondences linking novels two and six and three and five (see above). In the first two parts of this post, I explored all the parallels between Running Grave and Cuckoo’s Calling, the series Latch, and those between it and Lethal White, the series Turn.

We have also, though, been tracking the possibility that the Strike series is not a classic turtle-back but an asterisk ring a la the Harry Potter septology cycle. Joyce Odell, Potter Pundit extraordinaire, pointed out in her comprehensive ‘Red Hen’ posts back in the run-up to the publication of Deathly Hallows and the deconstruction after its appearance that books one and five in the Potter series as well novels three and seven were near mirror images. Those correspondences explode a turtleback structure, frankly, making a different formal model necessary to explain these undeniable echoes between books.

That model is an asterisk with book four at the center of the circle, which shape allows books one and five as well as three and seven to be in close proximity and their relationship closing the two gaps in the circle. This remarkable re-invention of a chiastic structure is explained at length in my Harry Potter as Ring Composition and Ring Cycle and in my contribution to the first Harry Potter for Nerds.

For this second series shape, the asterisk, to be the form Rowling-Galbraith is giving the Strike books on the model of the Hogwarts Saga, which the Parallel Series Idea (PSI) suggests must be considered as a strong possibility, the first and fifth books would have to share strong connections in plot and content. It was to explore that possibility that Louise Freeman posted a thread at the publication of Troubled Blood, book five, on which readers could note parallels connecting it with Cuckoo’s Calling. Check out that post for Prof Freeman’s observations and those of many other Serious Strikers. The correspondences go well beyond the two books just being about ‘cold cases.’

Because there are significant Cuckoo’s Calling-Troubled Blood correspondences, what remains for the asterisk model is to see if there are equally strong echoes of Career of Evil and Running Grave, books three and seven. See the illustration above for the necessity of that relationship for the structure to work or just to parallel the Prisoner of Azkaban-Deathly Hallows pairing.

Before getting to the ‘So What?’ conclusions to this three part Running Grave ring reading that focuses on the seventh book’s relationships with the other six, then, I’m obliged to discuss the Career-Grave correspondences. I will not be doing the deep dive I did for the Latch and Turn, the latter of which I closed out after detailing well over fifty echoes, but I hope to hit the high spots.

Echoes of Career of Evil in Running Grave

The Epigraphs: I’ll start with the obvious. Of the seven books in the series, five have epigraphs drawn from high brow literary sources: the Classics in Cuckoo, the Jacobean Revenge Dramas in Silkworm, Rosmersholm in Lethal White, Faerie Queene in Troubled Blood, and Victorian Women poets in Ink Black Heart. Two of the seven have epigraphs that are not high brow literature — you guessed it: Career of Evil’s lyrics from the 70’s rock n’ roll band Blue Oyster Cult and the I Ching epigraphs of Running Grave. There was an opening epigraph from Dylan Thomas in Grave that we all thought was the source of the title (it may or may not have been; the poem quoted in the novel was from a much more obscure poet who also used the phrase) but that one-off hardly makes it the equivalent of the other five.

I don’t know of any relationship between Far Eastern divinatory writings and Blue Oyster Cult, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was one. The link here is in the two being unlike the other five as noted and, of course, the ‘Cult’ epigraphs of Career link up neatly with Running Grave, which Rowling called her “cult book” on the Acknowledgement page of Strike7. At last, an explanation for the Cult lyrics!

An Avalanche of Violence Against Women: One of the reasons I’m not doing a deep dive on these two books is I just cannot bring myself to re-read Career right now. It was the consensus pick of HogwartsProfessor staff and adjuncts as the worst of the first six Strike novels and I’m pretty sure it earned that rock-bottom status because of what Rowling claimed she feared she had written, namely “violence porn.” Women are butchered, raped, raped with a knife, beaten, hunted, abused verbally, drained financially, and, when children, the girls are sexually violated by their dads or guardians. It’s a mind numbing read, frankly, in this regard; my youngest son said, in something like shock after his first trip through Strike3, “I get it already; men are evil.”

Running Grave has at least as much violence against women, I think, but the book is almost exactly twice as long as Career so the battering isn’t as crushing. So much of the violence against women in Strike7, too, is carried out by women as well so that the effect is oddly different. Still, though…

The descriptions of Lin’s self-induced miscarriage, which is to say ‘feticide,’ Robin’s time in the box, the agonies of Louise Pirbright, the “rusty forceps” used in the breech baby delivery, the death of Daiyu, the delusions and decades long self-destruction of Flora Brewster, the memories of Sheila Kennett, Lucy’s experience as a child being abused by a doctor, the fears and death by hanging of Cherie Woods, even the cries for help and slit wrists of Charlotte Campbell, are just starters; it’s an avalanche.

Robin In Danger: I mentioned Robin’s being tortured at Chapman Farm and that was an agony, no? But, really, only in Career of Evil and Running Grave do we spend all or most of the book wondering if Strike’s Girl Friday is going to survive. Strike2 opens with the delivery of a severed leg to her and readers are treated to chapters narrated by the psychopathic killer, chapters which reveal that he is hunting Ms Ellacott in hopes of butchering her to revenge himself on Strike. Sure enough, near the finish, Laing gets the drop on Robin, and, though she lives to tell the tale because of her professional self-defense, she escapes with scars on her arm and her mind that she’ll have forever. Having survived that, she chooses to go to Noel Brockbank’s home and is beaten up by his girlfriend Alyssa Vincent for taking that great risk. And then Strike fires her brutally for insubordination!

The differences between these dangers and injuries and those Robin endures in Running Grave are that she chooses to go undercover at the UHC’s Norfolk property and, though she is half-drowned, stuffed into a small trunk, and more than once threatened with sexual assault, the violence she experiences is more psychological than physical. The bodily struggle — food and sleep deprivation, for instance — is to set up the more profound mind-control techniques the cult deploys. In Strike7, Robin fears for her life much less than she does losing her mind and her self-identity. beyond that description, Robin’s life seemed to hang by a thread in Grave the way it only did in Career.

Robin Catharsis: In Career of Evil, Robin learns that, after she had been raped and dropped out of university, her then boyfriend now fiancée Matt Cunliffe slept with his friend Sarah Shadlock. Robin breaks up with him but they eventually reconcile. Matt is not so secretly thrilled and relieved when Strike fires Robin from the Agency. The most poignant scene in the book is the day after Robin learns about Matt’s infidelity when she breaks down over drinks with Strike, tells him about that issue, and is obliged to reveal the backdrop to it, namely, the rape that drove her from school.

There is no exact correspondent in Running Grave to this scene but the resolution of Robin’s relationship with Matt Cunliffe that began in Career reaches its equally cathartic conclusion in the UHC Temple struggle session, the exercise in ‘Primal Response Therapy’ the cultists call “Revelation” (404-410). During this public confession and abuse time under a spotlight, Robin-Rowena is “forced to come up with a story on the spot” that, per Strike’s instructions, does not have “any points of resemblance between [her] own life and Rowena’s” (407).

“Stupefied [!] by tiredness and fear,” she assumes the persona of her ex-husband Matt Cunliffe and voices his criticisms of and fears about her during their engagement and marriage. she “embellished scenes from her marriage, reversing her and Matthew’s positions” (408). When pressed after a supposed Daiyu apparition about “what made your fiancee end the relationship,” Robin drops the mask, not being able to lie about her cheating on him even as ‘Rowena,’ and confesses something that had really happened, her almost missing Matt’s mother’s funeral because of her desire to interview a suspect with Strike (Silkworm, 270-275). And she breaks down at last.

Hot tears burst from Robin’s eyes. She doubled over, feigning nothing. Her shame was real: she really had lied to Matthew as she’d described, and she’d felt guilty about it for months afterwards. The cacophony of insults and taunts of the group continued until Robin heard, with a thrill of terror, a high-pitched childish voice joining in, louder than all of the others. (409)

She has exteriorized at last her grief and anger about and responsibility for her failed marriage. To complete the visible metaphor for what is happening within her, “the stage tilted” and almost dropped her into the Temple’s black-water pool-sized baptismal font, a representation of the unconscious mind. The cathartic liberation of her attachment to Matt, achieved by taking on his perspective, feeling his pain but also hearing others condemn her for what she had thought of him during the marriage, and at last weeping about her failings, ends the work begun in Career. Her comments to Strike about her willing self-blindness and acceptance of “Higher Truths” about Matt in Grave’s stage-tilting conversation in the last chapter (943) is the fruit of that transference role-playing with Mazu as her unwitting therapist.

Robin as Artemis: Cult leader Jonathan Wace tags Robin-Rowena as ‘Artemis’ in Running Grave:

‘I’m told you’re a very hard worker. You never complain of tiredness. You show resourcefulness and courage – the labour was long, I hear, and you forwent sleep to help. You also found our Emily in Norwich when she was taken ill, didn’t you? And I believe you previously rushed to her defence when Jiang was giving her instructions. Then, tonight, you were the first to go to Lin’s aid. I think I’ll have to call you Artemis. You know who Artemis is?’…

‘There are many contradictions in Artemis, as in so many human representations of the divine. She’s a huntress, but also protector of the hunted, of girls up to marriageable age, the goddess of childbirth and… strangely… of chastity.’ (551-552)

The first time the reader sees Robin as Artemis as a “protector of girls up to marriageable age” is in the decision she made in Career of Evil, contra Strike’s explicit instruction, to go to the Brockbank apartment in Bow and do whatever she could to protect the children there from the pedophile. She winds up in a no-holds-barred battle with the brain-washed mother and is only rescued by the ex machina appearance of Shanker. Noel Brockbank appears in, of course, an “all black track suit” (435-440).

The end of Running Grave is a reprise of this scene with Ellacott in her Artemis role. She is in the UHC Rupert Court Temple on her own, contra Strike’s explicit instruction, confronts another brain-washed ‘Mama,’ super defensive about her track record as a mother, who is hell bent on killing the intrusive, truth-telling detective in defense of her baby. They wind up in a no-holds-barred fight over a gun, and, just as Robin shouts out for “SHANKER!” at Brockbank’s appearance, so she yells for Midge in her fight at the Temple. Instead of firing Robin for insubordination here, Strike tells her boyfriend that the take-down of the UHC was mostly Robin’s work and tells her privately and not quite directly that he loves her. Tisiphone the Avenger and Artemis the defender of young women are at last a match.

Speaking of Shanker: He enters Alyssa Vincent’s life at the end of Career of Evil in the scene described above. His first words there are to Angel, the daughter that Brockbank had been molesting:

“You’re all right, babes,” Shanker said to Angel, his free hand shielding her, his gold tooth glinting in the sun falling slowly behind the houses opposite. “’E ain’t gonna do that no more. You fuckin’ nonce,” he breathed into Brockbank’s face. “I’d like to skin ya.” (439)

Shanker is still Angel’s guardian in Running Grave and hunting down another “cunt” of a father. He calls Strike in the book’s third chapter:

‘Need some ’elp,’ said Shanker.

‘Go on,’ said Strike.

‘Need to find a geezer.’

‘What for?’ said Strike.

‘Nah, it ain’t what you fink,’ said Shanker. ‘I ain’ gonna mess wiv ’im.’

‘Good,’ said Strike, taking a drag on the vape pen that continued to supply him with nicotine. ‘Who is he?’

‘Angel’s farver.’

‘Whose father?’

‘Angel,’ said Shanker, ‘me stepdaughter.’

‘Oh,’ said Strike, surprised. ‘You got married?’

‘No,’ said Shanker impatiently, ‘but I’m living wiv ’er mum, in’ I?’

‘What is it, child support?’

‘Nah,’ said Shanker. ‘We’ve just found out Angel’s got leukaemia.’

‘Shit,’ said Strike, startled. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘An’ she wants to see ’er real dad an’ we ain’ got no idea where ’e is. ’E’s a cunt,’ said Shanker, ‘just not my kind o’ cunt.’

Strike understood this, because Shanker’s contacts throughout the criminal world of London were extensive, and could have found a professional con with ease.

‘All right, give me a name and date of birth,’ said Strike, reaching for a pen and notebook. Shanker did so, then asked,

‘’Ow much?’

‘You can owe me one,’ said Strike.

‘Serious?’ said Shanker, sounding surprised. ‘Awright, then. Cheers, Bunsen.’ (32-33)

Compare and contrast with the Career scene. Shanker the knife-wielding servant of Artemis protects Angel from her ‘step-father’ in the one; now he is the live-in daddy in search of her biological father, whom she has never met (?). He is asking the Agency for help here, a reverse echo of Robin’s hiring him to help her in that effort in Strike3. Strike, instead of being enraged by all this, cheerfully agrees to help him for free in that search, closing the circle on the transformation begun in his initial firing of Robin in Career followed by her promotion to partner status in White.

I’d note, too, that the long-suffering child Jacob Pirbright in Running Grave whose living death in a UHC attic brings out the full Artemis in Robin was first presented as ‘Jacob Messenger.’ The Greek word for ‘messenger’ is aggelos, pronounced angelos, from which we get the word ‘angel.’

Foundation Event, Climax Confrontation: As discussed in the second part of this three part post, everything Rowling writes has its surface plot-mystery and a foundation event, the “stuff” about which she was inspired to write out of the Lake of her unconscious issues. The event that sets everything in motion in Career of Evil (sort of!) is Strike’s arrest of Donny Laing in Crete when both were in the British Army there. The arrest was consequent to Strike’s having heard a baby cry inside Laing’s house, breaking into it, and saving the soon to die baby from the brain-washed mother upstairs.

Robin’s breaking into the Temple in Grave, hearing the baby crying upstairs, rescuing her from the mad Mama Mazu, and the eventual arrest of the father is almost a direct re-telling of Strike’s SIB work on Crete.

And, yes, the real foundation event of Career is Laing’s illegitimate conception, his ‘coercive’ birth, and his consequent psychopathology. More on that soon, trust me.

Strike Sex: He is with Elin Toft in Career of Evil and Belinda Watkins, Esq., in Running Graves; it’s all about the sex and only the sex in both cases, both women serve as painful foils to Robin Ellacott in Strike’s mind. I’m guessing you’re familiar with Bijou-Bougie. Here are Strike’s thoughts about the prospect of having dinner with the beautiful, cultured, and celebrity Toft in Career:

On the plus side, there would be excellent food, which was an enticing prospect given the fact that he was skint and had last night dined on baked beans on toast. He supposed that there would be sex too, in the pristine whiteness of Elin’s flat, the soon-to-be-vacated home of her disintegrating family. On the minus side—he found himself staring the bald fact in the face as he had never done before—he would have to talk to her, and talking to Elin, he had finally admitted to himself, was far from one of his favorite pastimes. He always found the conversation especially effortful when it came to his own work. Elin was interested, yet strangely unimaginative. She had none of the innate interest in and easy empathy for other people that Robin displayed. His would-be humorous word portraits of the likes of Two-Times left her perplexed rather than amused.

“Unimaginative” is a death sentence for a character in a book by Rowling-Galbraith; note Robin’s first realization of Matt’s disregard for her in The Silkworm’s roadway McDonald’s conversation with Strike:

The words [that Matt didn’t worry about her safety] were out of her mouth before Robin could consider them. In her blanket desire to refute everything that Strike was saying she had let an unpalatable truth escape her. The fact was that Matthew had very little imagination. He had not seen Strike covered in blood after the killer of Lula Landry had stabbed him. Even her description of Owen Quine lying trussed and disembowelled seemed to have been blurred for him by the thick miasma of jealousy through which he heard everything connected to Strike. His antipathy for her job owed nothing to protectiveness and she had never admitted as much to herself before. (268)

Yes, I get that Elin and Bijou are not the only women that Strike has sex with and with whom he does not desire in any way a long-term relationship. They are, though, the only two with whom he really understands he doesn’t care to converse (I’m giving Carrot Top Coco in White a pass on this; I don’t think Strike remembers his night with her in any detail due to drunkenness).

North Country Agency Road Trip! No Boyfriend or Girlfriend!

In both Career and Grave, Robin and Cormoran travel north on Agency business: to Barrow-in-Furness in search of Brockbank in Career and to Norfolk’s ‘Chapman Farm’ in Grave. Robin goes undercover in each, as Venetia Hall in Cumbria and Rowena Ellis in Aylmerton. She is interviewed by police because of being where she should not be or have been in both cases (remember the submarine base cops?). But the big thing is that the two are alone together, out of contact with her fiancée Matt and wannabe fiancée Ryan. Neither of them is especially comfortable with the idea of the woman they love being so far away, especially when the trip involves proximity to or dependence on Strike.

There’s a little ‘reverse echo’ in these trips. In Career, Strike takes care not to be part of Robin-Matt’s seeming break-up thinking they will probably work out their problems and she will recall his unkind comments about her fiancée. In Grave, Strike is careful not to be seen or to seem to be blowing up the ever-more-ardent Ellacott-Murphy relationship but on the sly doing everything possible that he can to undermine it, to include separating them by sending her undercover into the UHC (he makes her convince him she is the best person for the job, over his feigned concerns and objections, but he’s all in for the assignment, which contributes to his guilt after her escape and he learns what she had endured).

That makes seven plus one Career of Evil echoes in Running Grave, which total will have to do for this cursory check. I will leave a more in-depth look for the Serious Striker who one day takes it upon herself to really give my structural ideas a test in her PhD thesis researches, a student I hope with a heart sufficiently hard and a stomach strong enough to endure a willing return to and a long stay within Career of Evil. I think with the Strike 1-5 connections these Strike 3-7 parallels make the asterisk ‘ring’ more fitting than the straight turtle-back with an important reservation I’ll discuss below.

Conclusions

I want to review the ring reading work I have done since the Reading Grave publication eight weeks ago, assess its weak spots as well as its strengths, and then review the ‘So What?’ aspect of the findings, the point of my efforts.

What I Have Done

Beginning on 26 September, the day I received my copy of Running Grave, I resolved to chart each of the novel’s nine Parts or chapter sets to see if they were ring compositions themselves, one Part at a time, before even reading the next chapter set. I closed that ring reading of Grave’s individual parts with a reading of the book taken as a whole, how the nine Parts, prologue and epilogue, worked as a ring composition, too. The all-in-one-spot collection of those twelve posts is at ‘Running Grave Ring Reading Index.’

Having charted the chapter sets individually and Running Grave itself, how the nine Parts relate to each other, I turned to the series as a whole. As I explained in the introduction to the first part of this three part thread, there wasn’t that much left to do at the publication of Strike 7 because so much of the work had been done already. Half the latch and turn work was done and all the turtle-back lines were drawn.

I’d already detailed the connections between Cuckoo’s Calling and Lethal White; see the three posts on that here, here, and here and the two posts here and here on the ‘Missing Page Mystery,’ Rowling-Galbraith’s signal in the center of Lethal White that book four was the series turn that would end in book seven.

The Turtle-back lines connecting Career of Evil and Troubled Blood were spelled out in detail by Louise Freeman here (check out the comment thread for the majority of her finds). Those connecting The Silkworm and Ink Black Heart are here; again, Louise Freeman made her best connections in the comment thread, I made three — about the epigraph-link, the ‘nice bloke’ Strike dismissal of Robin’s dates, and Strike’s facility with Latin — and Kelly, Amelia, EE, Laura, Robyn, Beatrice Groves, and Sandy joined in with great finds. That was a real team effort.

Having already made the Books 1-4 connection and drawn the 2-6 and 3-5 Turtle-back Lines, I had to check to see if Running Grave closes the Latch on the series and to detail the echoes in it from Cuckoo’s Calling for that start-to-finish conjunction. I did that Latch check in the first part of this current series. (A)

There were a lot of strong connections there so I moved on to see if there were echoes of the Story-Turn in Lethal White with Strike7 to complete the 1-4-7 ring-cycle axis. That took me much longer than I thought because I found more than fifty; Running Grave had as many Lethal White shadows in it as White did of Cuckoo. You can read or review that in the second part of this three part post. (B)

Just to touch every base — and because Louise Freeman and the HogwartsProfessor Irregulars found so many connections between Cuckoo’s Calling and Troubled Blood — I had to look for the Career of Evil reflections in Running Grave to see, if, as in the Hogwarts Saga, the series is best pictured as a Chi-Rho asterisk rather than an archetypal ring.

I opened the third part of this series with that look, the most cursory, forgive me, of all the charting I have done in the last eight weeks.

What if Anything have I Proven?

If I say so myself, I think I have made a compelling case that the author deliberately structured the series, the individual books, and, at least with respect to Troubled Blood and Running Grave (the only books for which I have charted the interior chapter sets), and the Parts of those books as well as chiastic circles, what anthropologist Mary Douglas called ‘ring composition.’ I highlight ‘compelling case’ because I’m not oblivious to how invested I am at this point in this conjecture being accepted as true; my personal bias no doubt has skewed my findings. Until some relatively disinterested person, even a hostile reader, repeats my work — without of course knowing what I have claimed are correspondences — and finds much the same thing, pretty much everything I’ve written has to be taken with a grain of salt.

If I were to take the time to attack the edifice of turtle-back circles and asterisks that I have found in Rowling’s Strike series and built into a tower of specific findings, I would go at it from these angles:

• There are correspondences between books in the series that do not work in either the turtle-back or asterisk ring models. Louise Freeman, for example, checked out Cuckoo’s Calling and Ink Black Heart for echoes as support for her 5-6 Flip idea, a hypothesis I think has legs but which Rowling has flat out denied. Those 1-6 echoes Dr Freeman and other readers found, though, if substantive, call into question other ring and asterisk relationships. A real researcher would look at every book in the series with every other book in the series to see if cleverness creates the parallels as much their actual existence does.

• The asterisk model, as diagrammed above at least, only works for the Strike series if almost every relationship between novels runs through Lethal White. There are a lot of fun 1-4-7 links, if many more 1-4 and 4-7; there are not many 3-4-5 or 2-4-6, or, at least, not many have been written up. As interesting as the asterisk ring model is for the Harry Potter and Strike-Ellacott series, then, I think it needs a lot more work or to be re-imagined as a conic pyramid with a ring base and the fourth book as an apex.

• There is remnant evidence that the series was originally structured or envisaged a different way. In addition to Dr Freeman’s ‘5-6 Flip’ idea, there is the more credible hypothesis — if only because Rowling was the one who pointed it out! — that The Silkworm was meant to be Strike1 because it was the first book she fully imagined. Think of its several links to Running Grave: a murderess, Sylvia Plath echoes (Strike 2’s foundation death is Elspeth Fancourt’s suicide with her head in an oven and Grave features a ‘Bell Jar’ in a critical scene, the Drowning Prophet manifestation), Strike as Tisiphone the Avenger in Silkworm and Robin as Artemis the Avenger and Protector of children in Grave, Strike the god-father in both Silkworm and Grave, first to Anstis’ son post Afghanistan, then to Ilsa’s son at the close. A historical approach to the series conception and composition might undermine the evidence I’ve collected or it might explain away correspondence that do not fit current models.

• John W. Welsh, the LSDS chiasmus authority, laid out rigorous and exclusive criteria in the introduction to his Chiasmus in Antiquity for judging what is real ring writing from what is imaginary or fanciful. I use the much ‘softer’ and pliable criteria of Mary Douglas and reduced her seven measures to four. If I wanted to knock down my sand castles, I’d definitely use methodology as my first wave assault.

I will leave, though, the work of tearing down or verifying the work I have done to others. I am interested, of course, to see if other Serious Strikers believe the argument I have made in this exhausting if not quite exhaustive compendium of correspondences is cogent or not. Until my house of cards has collapsed or been knocked down, however, I am going to move forward with the working if tentative proviso that my hypotheses about (1) the chiastic structures of Rowling’s chapter sets in Running Grave, (2) of the Strike7 nine Parts taken together, and (3) the Strike-Ellacott series of books have been shown to be true.

The work of this three part post has been gathering evidence about the relationship of the seven books in the series, work that could only be finished when the seventh book in the set had been published. I have argued that book numbers 1-7, 1-4-7 (1-4, 4-7), 2-6, and 3-5 create a turtle-back ring and that 1-5 and 3-7 with the other relationships above describe an asterisk, with ‘Part Two’ in Lethal White marking Strike4 as the center-origin, defining middle of the Strike novels.

So What?

If the reader accepts the quality and quantity of the evidence I have put together in Parts (A), (B), and (C) of this series reading, he or she is necessarily in a bind.

On the one hand, the closing of the seven book cycle latch means the Strike series is definitively a closed set:

• The beginning chapter and end chapter ‘hook’ as in latch-up, signaling Finis;

• The Charlotte-Matt (and Ryan) dramas are effectively over, Robin and Strike are as good as conjoined; and

• The seven book series is a satisfying structural chiasmus, a ring with a clear Latch, Turn, and turtle-back lines.

The problem is that, obviously and not so obviously, the Strike series is not closed. For the obvious reasons:

• There are three more books in queue according to author and publisher;

• The romance drama has to play out, if the ending is clear;

• The Leda Strike death and Rokeby relationship are stray threads needing wrap-up;

• Uncle Ted dementia story-line is unfinished: what hasn’t he shared about his sister, wife, and Dave? — and;

• The Mystic Bob behavior just before the IED blast that almost killed Strike is still a mystery.

I think every Strike fan, from casual BBC subscriber to border-line obsessed re-reader, feels the series is not closed for these reasons, whatever the structural evidence. The not so obvious reasons for confirming this thinking we’re not at the end include:

• There are pointers to the possibility that Robin is sterile and that ‘Bijou’ is pregnant with Strike’s child (yes, that post is in queue for publication here);

• Nick Jeffery has written a brief that Charlotte was murdered and Strike duped both by his own desire to move on with his life and by Amelia and the supposed long-form suicide note (an argument that will be in Substack subscriber inboxes tomorrow);

• The Literary Alchemy really doesn’t work for Running Grave to be the series finish, at least not as the Parallel Series Idea suggests it would (again, a post in preparation, one turning on the heavy albedo and nigredo qualities within Running Grave and the few, if admittedly powerful rubedo images in it);

• The mythic elements in the series are incomplete as well (cf., Castor-Pollux, Artemis-Tisiphon, and Cupid-Psyche); and, last but perhaps most important,

• Evan Willis’ Tetractys Theory (see his review of Running Grave for his perspective on where Strike7 leaves us in terms of his ten-book structural idea).

Which leaves us in a bit of a knot. The series is closed at seven, but obviously and not so obviously it really isn’t over. There a few ways out of this seeming ‘A’/Not ‘A’ coincidence impossibility. I think of Evan Willis’ work immediately and his suggestion that the next three books will be in parallel with Rowling’s three ‘solo’ novels as the first seven were with Harry Potter. There is as simple, if not quite as elegant, a solution in positing that the next three books will be a ring built on the Cuckoo-Grave latch of the first seven book’s chiastic cycle.

Only Strike8, of course, will resolve what can only be speculation now, however well informed. Which brings me to the subject of problems inherent in the state of Rowling criticism today.

My position as ‘Dean of Harry Potter Scholars’ has exactly zero authority, but it does give me something I feel like a kind of responsibility to reflect on the direction and quality of critical work being done now and to suggest a better way if necessary.

My reflection on this subject post Running Grave has brought me to the conclusion that there are significant advantages for critical readers who choose to act and think as if the Strike-Ellacott series is indeed closed, over, done, full stop.

The first advantage would be to break the mental habit repeated endlessly, alas, from the first generation of critics during the Potter inter-librum years of obsessing over the latest book, speculating about the next Rowling title, scoring one’s speculations (hits and misses!) at the publication of that next book, and repeating that cycle. This made sense when we knew very little about Rowling herself and had very little work in hand to make any serious critical judgement of what her work was really about.

It doesn’t make sense today. As the person perhaps most responsible for creating and perpetuating this first generation model, I am also perhaps the most qualified to say it’s time to try another, better way.

By putting off thinking just about Running Grave and making guesses about the next book in the series (Twitter Headers, ahoy!), we can think about Rowling’s work as a whole as if Strike7 were indeed the last thing she will ever write and publish, making Strike8 her Mystery of Edwin Drood.

What I am suggesting, in brief, is that it is time to read Rowling the way literary critics read every other author who has written and published a significant body of work and about whom more or less biographical data is known.

I intend to write about this, as I’m sure you have already guessed, in future posts: the four generations of Rowling criticism, foundation crimes, and other related points. For now, though, to close this three part post about the seven book cycle structure of the Strike novels, I want to say the best thing about the evidence pointing to the ‘closed’ aspect of the series, the latch of its beginning and end shutting at Running Grave, is that it creates an opening for us to look back and outward rather than ever downward at the most recent book and onward to the one on the horizon.

Choosing that option, if only as a mental exercise, not forgetting that there will be more Strike books, means we can begin to focus on story elements in her Opera Omnia that run like threads through the whole series, the twenty one texts we have in hand, seventeen hers exclusively.

We can track how these common points correspond or don’t with what we know are Rowling’s ‘Lake’ issues, and by inductive deduction speculate about issues she has that inform her stories’ foundation events.

We can then look for how the ‘Lake’ issues have been transformed in her ‘Shed’ artistry — the literary alchemy, the traditional symbolism, the literary allusion, the Quadrigal depths, the psychomachian allegories, yes, the ring writing — into stories of universal and perennial meaning with transformative power.

We can read Rowling the way critics read the Greats, in other words, rather than as Swifties fan-girl the rock diva or soap opera faithful follow their favorite programs and characters.

What does that mean for what we’ll talking about at Hogwarts Professor in the near future?

For starters, forget what I just said, we’ll be writing a lot more about Running Grave and what it suggests about the coming books in the Strike second series or Tetractys top. First generation stuff!

As promised above, that means taking a long look at the two points that probably interest readers the most right now: Nick Jeffery’s discovery that Charlotte Campbell was murdered and my informed-guess that Robin is sterile and Bijou is carrying Strike’s baby. Professor Beatrice Groves has written a piece about Cormoran’s reflections in the Aylmerton parish church that will be going out this week and after that I’ll write a post about the alchemical question of the series now (or Evan will!) and another on the mythic content in light of Robin’s possible sterility, her being Artemis indeed.

Then, though, I hope to be writing about the Fourth Generation material and what that means for Rowling Readers. Most important will be an introduction to a renowned feminist and literary critic whose radically contrarian views parallel Rowling’s own and whose thoughts on rape, transgenderism, and abortion-feticide are reflected in Rowling’s work.

Following that, I’ll be working on a comprehensive survey of Rowling’s work in connection with a dredging of her “Lake’ to pick the low-hanging fruit of life-fiction correspondences. Much of that is connect the dots labor, biographical event and depiction in fiction, but, especially in light of the feminist literary critic’s views I’ll be sharing, one that will change the way we understand Rowling’s work forever.

I hope you’ll join me and the merry band of Serious Strikers and Potter Pundits here at Hogwarts Professor as we help steer the skiff of Rowling Studies into deeper waters and a greater appreciation of her inspiration, artistry, and meaning. Thank you for reading to the end of this mammoth three part post about the Strike series as a closed seven part ring — and for sharing your thoughts about the ring writing at the series level and my unconventional take-away from the study.

Tomorrow, Nick Jeffery on the murder of Charlotte Campbell!