Late last month, John shared two theories about the Cormoran Strike series of novels, both from Katya Slonenko, a member of the Reddit r/CormoranStrike online fandom: 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 and Katya Slonenko: Leda Strike's 'Mistress of the Salmon Salts' Pudenda Tattoo. John corresponded with Katya while preparing those posts and invited her to join him and Nick for a discussion of her ideas, of life as a Redditor, and her thoughts about Rowling’s artistry and meaning. She accepted the invitation but said she wouldn’t be free until July to talk.
Hence the wait! As expected, though, speaking with her about her own journey to expertise in Rowling Studies, her ideas about the clues Rowling has embedded so carefully within the first eight books and especially in Hallmarked Man, and the Reddit posts of which she thinks Hogwarts Professor readers need to be aware was well worth the wait.
You’ll want to read those posts from June before listening to get the most out of this conversation, but, regardless of your preparation, John and Nick believe that every Serious Striker and Rowling Reader will be charmed and challenged by Katya’s remarkable insights, generous spirit, and winsome personality. The conversation includes three other Reddit community posts — about Leda’s ‘Carnival’ dress (Arachulia), about the real name of her first husband, and about the Harry Potter tattoo Rowling-Galbraith hid on a Strike novel character’s shoulder — which took the discussion above and beyond the two Katya theories in the June posts.
Nick and John close the conversation by inviting her back and they hope readers here will share the questions they want us to be sure to ask her on her return visit in the comment thread below. Or just ask her yourself! As she demonstrated on the threads beneath the June posts, she is generous with her time in responding to other Strike fans.
Can’t wait for more Katya Slonenko? Follow her at r/CormoranStrike, on Instagram (Tattoos!), on FaceBook, and check our her older, longer posts on Medium…
1. Welcome, Katya, and thank you for joining us! The serious readers at Hogwarts Professor have been buzzing about your Shanker and Leda r/Cormoran Strike Reddit posts and we’re thrilled to be able to talk with you about those ideas. First, though, tell us about your first Rowling reading experiences and how you started posting on Reddit about the Strike series.
2. I’m guessing that Reddit Strike fandom may be as unfamiliar to Hogwarts Professor readers as it was to me. What is it about the Pelican_Girl and TopRequirement670 moderated posts and that international community that you love the most?
3. Shanker! I confess -- I hadn’t given him a thought really beyond a doppelganger twin for Strike before Fiona from Adelaide introduced me to the ideas that he had to be involved in the death of Leda Strike and that the Riccis were also somehow party to it. Ed Shardlow shared your Reddit post on the subject and my mind was blown; you made a compelling case soon after the publication of Hallmarked Man last year that Shanker is a Ricci, the illegitimate son of Nico ‘Muccy’ Ricci, but to avenge Leda Strike’s death he has become a Met or MI5 informer.
Let’s start with the four pointers that Shanker gave Strike in one conversation that he is a Ricci-by-blood and what made you think of that connection:
Shanker’s statement that his father had dementia or was senile;
Shanker’s report that his dad taught that jewelry was the way to a woman’s heart;
Shanker’s claim that his ‘old man’ was said to have a “nine inch cock;” and
Shanker’s saying that his begetter “‘ad kids wiv abou’ ten diff’rent women.”
4. I see the trigger now that you’ve detailed it but you dug and made four more connections that were buried in the texts of the series’ other books:
Shanker’s knowledge of the Ricci clan, especially Mucky,
his Strike-witnessed working with Mucky in drug deals,
“he deals cocaine and is good with a knife;” and, best of all,
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.
We cannot not see these connections after you point them out, but they’re nigh on invisible until they’re pointed out! Why do you think you saw them when we missed them -- and why do you think Rowling has taken such care to make them invisible in plain sight?
5. And Shanker is an MI5 informant? Where does that come from?
5.5 Let’s not forget that you also make an intelligent guess, the first one I’ve heard, about what Shanker’s given name really is, one based on the names of Nico Ricci’s two children out of ten for whom we have names.
Katya shared not only her reasoning about why Shanker’s name is John or an Italian variant of the Evangelist’s name but also her theory about the parentage and name of the other remaining character in the series who also remains nameless: the mysterious ‘Strike’ with whom Leda ran away from Cornwall! (Be sure to read the comment thread for Redditor conversation about other possible Ricci children…)
6. Your thoughts about Shanker all feed into theories about Leda Strike and her mysterious death in the end, which brings us to another aspect of her life and death about which you’ve brought an important and unique perspective. I’m talking about the Mistress of the Salmon Salt tattoo. Did you know anything about tattoos, Katya, before writing this piece?
7. As a tattoo artist yourself, what do you make of Leda’s tattoo placement?
8. Tattoos are meaningful, powerful reflections or revelations of the person’s interior life or self-understanding (see the post about Katya’s ‘Salmon Salt Tattoo’ theory for much more on this). What do you think this tattoo communicates about Leda? Is it another example of Rowling’s text-within-the-text or a variant of her using cryptonyms to signal important information about a character’s inner life?
What Tattoos Mean in Cormoran Strike and a Catalog of Examples
From Katya’s 2023 ‘Mistress of the Salmon Salt Revisited:’
I hear you asking - why can’t Leda’s be just a tattoo, without any deeper meaning to it? That’s because all the other tattoos in the Strike books have meaning and provide a clue to their wearers’ characters.
Here are some examples:
Kelsey Pratt’s One Direction tattoo is an obvious link to her being a One Direction fan. (How Leda’s tattoo is different? She chose the name of the particular song, not the more generic name of the band, to be tattooed on her)
Laing’s rose pierced with a dagger bluntly means violence to women. Rose is a woman in the language of symbols, while the dagger is… well, a dagger.
Polworth’s St Piran’s cross means he’s a Cornish patriot. I’ll be surprised if it also doesn’t mark him as The Hanged Man (a symbolic bearer of a cross)
Portia Bayliss’s trident refers to her Caribbean roots
Edie had a small black heart on the knuckles because she was the creator of ‘The Ink Black Heart’ cartoon.
Zoe’s tattoos are of ‘The Ink Black Heart’ characters she identifies with.
Pez Pierce has The Beatles quote around his neck - Strawberry Fields was (is?) a place in Liverpool.
Union Jack, a skull, and a Nordic “Chaos” rune give a good impression of what the Turisaz character will be about (all tattooed on visible spots like head or neck - he wears them proudly!);
Same with Algiz and Uruz, sans the Union Jack and the skull.
Noli Seymour’s tattoo stands for “Golden Prophet”. It denotes her connection to the Universal Humanitarian Church and her status there as the current Golden Prophet.
An ace of spades was inked onto his left cheek, and a tattooed tiger covered his throat. - Jordan Reaney’s tattoos are pretty telling, too.
Not a character, but still - JK herself has a tattoo, “Solve et Coagula”, which means - “I’m a writer of an alchemical detective series!” :D
So you see, all these tattoos are chosen to reflect their owners’ personal histories. That’s generally a feature of Rowling’s writing: if she describes a character, every little detail works for the portrait she wants to paint. There are no details put there “just because” - everything is important. How the characters dress and speak, what they eat and drink, what music they listen to, and what tattoos they have tell us something about the character.
What does Leda’s tattoo contribute to her portrait?
Nothing!
In Career of Evil, when we learn of its existence, the tattoo adds literally nothing to Leda’s portrait. Why is it mentioned in the story to which it makes zero contribution, except for serving as a plot device enabling the killer’s obsession?
Because it will be important later.
Katya shared in her answer her theory from experience that Rowling-Galbraith had secretly marked a character as a Harry Potter fan by giving her a shoulder tattoo that Potter-heads would recognize!
9. Rowling’s Solve et Coagula tattoo: what do you think she is telling the world about herself? Is there a correspondence or tie between the author’s tattoo and its placement and Leda’s?
10. Whittaker quotes a line from the Salmon Salt song by the Blue Oyster Cult — “She was the Quicklime Girl” — while testifying at his trial on murder charges; what do you think that tells us about her death? Does it suggest it was suicide or murder? Do you think Whittaker did it?
11. And another one to make eleven! You thought at one point because of the meaning of ‘Mistress of the Salmon Salt’ that we had to take seriously the possibility that Leda herself was a serial killer. But you’ve changed your mind. Why is that?
In addition to her own thinking on this subject, Katya shared yet another Redditor theory, this one from Arachulia about The New Dress that Aunt Joan said was the real reason that Leda had left her Nancarrow home in Cornwall with the mysterious ‘Strike.’ Enjoy!
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