Commencing Lethal White re-read: Prologue and Chapters 1-6: Swans, Skulls and Roses.

 

I've had several people ask me why Lethal White is my favorite of the Strike series to date.  I will admit I was pre-disposed to like this book when the pre-publication blurb announced the book would be set at the time of the London Olympics.  Picture it:  2014, shortly after the publication of The Silkworm. Robert Galbraith's true identity had been unmasked fairly recently. John Granger at Hogwartsprofessor.com was just floating the Parallel Series idea, based largely on the fact that a mysterious autobiographical book wreaked havoc in both The Silkworm and Chamber of Secrets. But, no one was really wanting to embrace that notion fully for fear of looking foolish. Recognizing that the first two books were set in 2010 and the third likely in 2011, I wrote in a blog post* that, if the Parallel Series Idea was workable model for  the Strike books, then it would make sense to set book 4 at the time of the 2012 London Olympics, to echo the Quidditch World Cup and the Triwizard Tournament.

Of course, as it turned out, not only were the Olympics a crucial setting, but LW turned out to be the volume that turned the Parallel Series Idea into a bona fide theory; one that could not only explain patterns seen in published books but have predictive power for future ones. Indeed, the Cliff Notes summary of both books could read:

During an international sporting event, a nasty-tempered government minister who has responsibility for pulling off a successful event is killed by his semi-estranged son, after getting the kid released from prison early, where he was serving a sentence for a serious crime. At the end, the killer holds a protagonist hostage in a locked room and threatens them, but is thwarted at the last second by a rescuer who crashes through the wooden door. 

See here for an archived post of mine showing how the Parallel Series idea related to Troubled Blood.  See here (p. 14) for Beatrice Grove's essay on connections between The Half-Blood Prince and The Ink Black Heart.  And here for Irvin Khaytman's. 

Spoiler alert:  There are a few references to the cover and publicity blurb that were released in the rest of the posts. If you are trying to avoid that content, you should not continue. 

Other reasons I liked LW were summed up in my first impressions post. I love a good cozy mystery and, while not exactly in that genre, Lethal White is the closest we have in the Strike series, with the body count and gruesome factor much reduced compared to both The Silkworm and Career of Evil, and the typical cozy country manor setting of Chiswell House. Other favorite aspects:

• The epigraphs:  This was Galbraith's first time pulling all the epigraphs from a single literary work. Ibsen is one of my favorite playwrights, so this was a special treat. 
• Rattenbury: This was before I was in the habit of googling the meanings and origins of all the names in the books, but I looked up Rattenbury because it seemed such a strange name for a dog and so different from Badger. The discovery that the dog's name was itself a clue to the murder was one of the most satisfying I ever made. 
• The green dress:  Another prediction I made on  the Potterversity (then Reading, Writing, Rowling) podcast was that Robin and Strike would attend a Yule Ball-style event and that Robin would at last get to wear the fabulous green dress. 
• All the white horses.  After seeing multiple white horse clues on Twitter, we were treated to not one but three white horses in the book, and that doesn't even count the two pubs.  We have the White Horse of Uffington overlooking Chiswell house, the dying colt in Mare Mourning and the white horse death omen in the Rosmersholm epigraphs, a role played nicely by the ghost of Freddie Chiswell.  I love the way Galbraith brought all the horses together into one cohesive story. 
• Please take note: one of the epigraph sources for THM, Maid of the Silver Sea, also has a death-associated white horse in it.  There may well be a white horse echo in the next book. 
• 
  Strike tours: In my trip to England in summer 2023, I was lucky enough to visit both the White Horse of Uffington and the eponymous pun where Robin and Strike dined. Both were just as lovely as the book made them sound. Since I never would have seen either without reading Lethal White, that trip cemented my special fondness for this volume. 

Onto the re-read, the wedding and the (drumroll.......) uncooperative swans. Did any two birds ever inspire such excitement for shippers?  Given that swans have already turned up at the neon sign museum and Temple 17 of the Masonic Lodge, it seems likely that swan symbolism will return in The Hallmarked Man. The choice to open with narration from the wedding photographer was also interesting. His musings about the other disastrous weddings he had photographed is one of several omens of doom for this marriage. 

Another is how obnoxious the entire Cunliffe family is. Matthew's dad appears to be a complete lush, and more concerned about Strike's lack of RSVP than he is about the fact that his son has just torpedoed his marriage. Auntie Sue appears to be a complete buttinsky; between trying to intrude into the top table and her decidedly unhelpful comments in the family argument. I've considered petitioning for her to be the murder victim in a future book. As if I didn't have enough reasons to hate Matthew, I noticed another example of his hypocrisy in the receiving line. Despite his conniption fit over Robin inviting Strike to the wedding, he clearly invited his own boss, Jemima. Even the cute little flower girl niece doesn't know any better than to grab Auntie Robin's injured arm. Good riddance to the lot of them. 

Interesting that Strike, when wondering about Michael Ellacott's profession, thought he looked "professorial." I bet nothing about him screamed "Professor of Sheep Reproduction," though. Strike is, in fact, remarkably insightful at the wedding, catching on to Matthew's sabotaging his efforts to contact and apologize to Robin even before she did, as he was in no place to see or hear him when Matthew admitted it. If only his judgement in the face of his disappointment at Robin's staying married were as sound. As he had with Nina and Elin, Strike copes with his frustrations with one woman by sleeping with another, 

I really like the way the first few chapters are a combinations of flashbacks into what happened during the skipped year, and the start of the new. The unfortunate appearance of the incompetent but as yet unnamed Stuart Nutley is quickly counterbalance by the introduction and backstory of Sam Barclay. We get to see Strike's compassionate side during the first meeting with Billy Knight. One thing that seemed odd to me on this re-read is his statement, "She wouldn't let me dig, but she'd let you." It seems unlikely that he would know Kinvara, since Chiswell claims he hasn't seen Billy in years, but, being close to Raff's age, he would never have met Chiswell's first wife, either. Wouldn't most his memories of Chiswell House be of Jasper Chiswell as the head honcho? I would expect him to say "He wouldn't let me dig."

At the same time we learn that Strike and Robin's friendship has been strained during the skipped year, and that Robin is having post-traumatic mental health issues. Robin's sacking her therapist and her subsequent flashback to the end of her wedding reception and the disaster of a honeymoon catch us up on her situation, and the crossed signals between Strike and Robin become obvious.  When she reaches Coco on the call from the Maldives, she concludes that 

If Strike could have taken somebody to bed soon after their hug...then he wasn't sitting in London torturing himself about his true feelings for Robin Ellacott. 

Never having considered what Ilsa would call a "displacement f*ck" herself, Robin can't understand that that is exactly what Strike would do if he's torturing himself about his feelings for Robin. 

Just as we saw in The Silkworm with the many statues that echo the tone of the storyline, Robin's stroll through her new neighborhood gives us some imagery that helps set the scene. 

A pair of gigantic crumbling stone skulls sat on top of carved bones on gateposts, beyond which a tall square tower rose. The finials would have looked at home, Robin thought, moving closer the examine the empty black eye sockets, garnishing the front of a pirate's mansion in some fantasy film. 

This morbid image comes with the scent of a "rose garden in full bloom" which makes Robin remember her wedding day. The juxtaposition of the death symbols with scent of the "blood-red bouquet of roses" that "had witnessed the aftermath of her abandonment of Matthew on the dance floor" foreshadows the demise of the marriage... and indeed, Robin's memory shows the marriage off to a very rocky start, with Robin trapped not only because of the crossed signals with Strike but also because of her care for Matthew during his serious illness. This gives Robin something in common with another Ibsen leading lady, Nora Helmer of A Doll's House, who also gets trapped in a marriage because her husband became ill. 

Happily, Strike calls with good news that he has hired Sam Barclay, and also to tell her the story of Billy's visit to the office. Interestingly, both Sam's history and Strike's reaction to Billy showcase the detective's compassion for the underdog. Robin "forgot to worry about Strike's coolness. Indeed, he sounded like the Strike of a year ago." We are seeing the same Strike who championed Leonora Quine in The Silkworm. Robin perks up remarkably with the conversation with Strike, but after the call, the scene is bookended by another combined image of the death symbols and her wedding. 

As she headed back past the giant skulls to her new home... for the first time all week, Robin forgot to glance up at the White Swan pub as she passed it. High above the street, on the corner of the building, was a single carved swan, which reminded Robin, every time she passed it, of her calamitous wedding day. 

The attention shifts back to Strike for the next three chapters, as he begins his search for Billy, first searching the street Billy said he lived on, then attending the CORE meeting, and finally approaching Jimmy at the White Horse pub. The most interesting aspect of this is the introduction of several key characters: Jimmy Knight, Flick Perdue, and even our first glimpse of Aamir Malik. 

*It's always interesting, and sometimes embarrassing to read one's old writings. Notice that at this time I was hoping the Strike/Robin relationship would remain platonic. 

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