I received a pretty involved question this morning from long time reader and correspondent Wayne Stauffer, one of the original ‘HogPro All-Pros.’ While attempting to answer it, I was compelled to reconsider one of the leading suspects in any line-up of likely Leda Strike murderers, namely, Peter Gillespie. I’ve been relatively dismissive of this fandom theory — see Who Killed Leda Strike? Peter Gillespie for my thoughts way back in 2021 — but Wayne’s question and the latest iteration of the S&E podcast crew theory has me thinking I was wrong not to argue Gillespie is the most likely character to have killed Cormoran’s mom, one readers should think of immediately as the killer.
Here is Wayne’s question, one that isn’t about Leda or Peter per se but Rowling’s ‘Daddy Issues’ and how it plays out in her fiction:
I’m wondering what the Hogwarts Professoriate thinks about an aspect of JKR’s works so far.
More than once the topic of her “strained” relationship with her father has been mentioned, yet in her writings so far we don’t see much of her vicariously working through any lingering “daddy issues” in her fiction (that is, characters with those issues).
We have Luna and Xeno Lovegood, Ginny and Arthur Weasley, and a bit of Hermione and Mr. Granger in the Harry Potter books, but those are all positive relationships.
I’m not as knowledgeable in her Strike novels, though I haven’t seen much discussed on your website. Robin seems to have other issues, but not those.
Casual Vacancy characters have a variety of dysfunctions, but Ickabog and Christmas Pig seem to be free of these.
Since 4th gen Rowling Studies is digging into biographical and psychological influences, I’m wondering how much this Daughter/Father dynamic plays in the writing.
My answer to Wayne was to send him two long posts I’d written, neither of which addressed this subject the way he framed it, but both of which laid out Rowling’s fictional depictions of her relationship with ‘Peter John Rowling,’ her father, via characters named “Peter” or “Simon” and those named “John” or “James.” In the first post, ‘Christmas Pig 1: Jack Jones, Peter, and John,’ you get the Rowling family history and its reflection in the Bad Dads of her work; in the second, ‘Exceptions to the Peter-John Rule: John Bristow, Dolores Umbridge, Matt Cunliffe,’ I answered objections to the theory, namely (!), those characters named ‘John’ who were jerks (or much worse).
It wasn’t a direct answer to Wayne’s question, but it did share in a fairly cohesive way my thinking about “how much this Daughter/Father dynamic plays in the writing” of Rowling-Galbraith. I’m hoping that Prof Stauffer will consider writing up his notes on the actual Daddy-Daughter relationships in all Rowling’s work, a step beyond anything I have done.
He hinted at such an expository exercise in his answer to my response, in which he wrote, “So, Rowling has her characters embody the bad dad qualities more than she has them working through issues?” I think that’s about right, but I haven’t done the necessary survey of the work. My initial reservation would be ‘Jack Jones’ in Christmas Pig whose name is in essence ‘John squared’ and can be assumed to be the equivalent of ‘Joanne;’ the whole mythic Dante-esque alchemical transfiguration of this character in the Land of the Lost is his “working through” his Bad Dad “issues.” The money paragraph of the Christmas Pig post above:
Rowling dedicates the book to David and has explained that the story toys, the cuddly pig favorite and its replacement, reflect two such cuddly pigs that her son adored. Jack Jones, however, is a name, front and back, that is a form of the name John; he is Joanne Rowling more than David Murray, her name also derived from Johannes, the Greek word for John (Rowling has given her daughter Mackenzie the middle name Jean, the more obvious feminine form of John). To put all my allegorical and sublime symbolism cards on the table at the start, what Jack has lost in the story is his father, what Holly fears losing to her step-brother is her father, the Pig is the exteriorized ‘heart’ or love he has as token or “transitional object” of maternal, unconditional love, and the story of the Loser is the sublimated agony of separation from Dad experienced as a child-hero must in the world of things and language. The Christmas Pig, though, in addition to this psychological allegory or dream-journey is an anagogical tale of seeking communion with the Father in Heaven through the light in one’s heart, the Johannine theology of logos-love that permeates Rowling’s work.
I went on to detail the ‘Peter-John’ names as touchstones in Rowling’s work:
The attentive reader of Rowling’s work knows that any character or place named ‘Peter’ or one of that name’s derivations is a bad guy or suspect locale. We have Peter Pettigrew the person most responsible besides Voldemort for the murder of James and Lily Potter, Simon Price, the wife and child beating husband and father of Casual Vacancy [the apostle Peter’s given name was ‘Simon bar Jonah’ so Simon is another name for Peter], Peter Gillespie in the Strike novels, the lawyer who did everything possible to make Cormoran’s already significant daddy issues much worse, and the St Peter’s Nursing Home and Symonds House in Troubled Blood are dangerous even Satanic places (‘Symound’ is the spelling for ‘Simon Peter’ used by Wyecliffe according to the Oxford Dictionary of English Surnames that Rowling uses as her reference text, cf. Reaney 410).
In parallel, characters named ‘John’ or ‘James’ are the story white hats. James Potter, Remus John Lupin, Harry James Potter, Hermione Jean Granger, and Strike’s favorite nephew Jack like the Jack Jones or ‘John-squared’ hero of The Christmas Pig have names derived like Rowling’s own first name and the middle name of her second daughter from John or James, a pattern that suggests very strongly that Jonny Rokeby is anything but the bad guy of the Strike series. Rowling told Val Mcdermid that one of her favorite authors always tipped her cards to the reader about whodunnit in the quality of hands her characters were given; Rowling’s marker is in the names Peter and John.
Why she does this is no great mystery. Her father’s name is Peter John Rowling and the name he wanted to give his first child, one he very much wanted to be a boy, was ‘Simon John.’ As Rowling explained in her ‘Year in the Life’ interviews with Runcie in 2007, the father never really got over this disappointment and her childhood was something of a nightmare consequently. See ‘Troubled Blood: Rowling Father Echoes’ for the complete history of that relationship — and its final end in 2012, again, the date of Pig’s conception. Rowling was given the name Joanne instead of Simon John, perhaps as a concession to mother Anne (her sister is named Dianne after all), but as likely because of its roots in Johannes.
Whether Rowling’s fascination with cratylic names and literary cryptonyms springs from her reflection on the meaning of her own names or the interest led her to that reflection is no matter. What matters is that an opposition between Peter and John is not something of her own invention but a Christian topos or cliche.
There is a tradition of unknown origin that concerns the existence of two churches within the faith that correspond to the exterior faith and its interior sanctifying substance or heart. Based loosely on scriptural depictions of the relationships between Christ and St Peter, the ‘Prince of Apostles’ and the Lord and His ‘beloved disciple,’ St John (and to a lesser degree St James, the brother of John), these inner and outer ‘churches’ are called the faiths respectively of Peter, the ‘rock of faith’ to whom the keys to heaven were given, and of John, to whom the Virgin Mother was entrusted at the Cross and the only one of the disciples not to have died a martyr’s death. Peter, of course, is identified with the Roman Catholic Church and its hierarchy, especially the papacy and its ‘Petrine claims’ to primacy, and their rituals, theology, dogma, and exclusivist claims to truth, what anti-papists call “Church-ianity.” The esoteric faith of St John and its invisible church has a less obvious worldly referent but has been variously attributed to Catholic mystics, Protestant sectarians of the Radical Reformation, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and to theosophists and New Age syncretists of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Rowling’s name artistry is to tag authorities and institutions such as media, government, and care facilities or boot-licking servants of power as ‘Peters’ (and, yes, no doubt the playground use of that name as a euphemism for penis is in play here), which is to say, the bad guys whom the good resist. The Peters are the exterior and superficial in contrast with the Johns and James of her fiction, the inner essence reflected in the middle or hidden name of the character as often as not, who are on a esoteric journey to spiritual perfection. As one correspondent wrote me about the ‘Father Echoes’ post, the tragedy of Peter John Rowling seems to be, from Joanne’s view at least, that the Peter ego identity killed John, his heart, and tried to do the same to his eldest daughter with that name. Rowling told deRek that she leads an “intensely spiritual life” but, as she has said repeatedly and consistently, she struggles with formal religious belief and worship if she does attend “more than christenings and weddings (cf. Fraser 30-31); she identifies with John, her esoteric Christian faith, much more than with Peter, the institutional church.
I do hope you will read the whole post; if I say so myself, it is one of the more important pieces I’ve written on this weblog. I bring it up here because it explains why Peter Gillespie has to be considered a leading suspect in the death of Leda Strike. His name is a strong pointer to his being a wicked, wicked man; the given name because of its association with ‘Peter,’ the exoteric church of dogma and rules in opposition to the spiritual or Johannine faith of the heart, not to mention ‘Bad Dad’ Peter Rowling, and ‘Gillespie,’ which, per Rowling’s go-to book of names The Oxford Dictionary of English Surnames by Reaney & Wilson, means “the bishop’s servant” (p 191), a force multiplier for the exterior ‘church lady’ force of ‘Peter.’
For whatever reason, I didn’t connect those dots in my 2021 piece reviewing the evidence for and against Peter Gillespie as Leda’s murderer or in my 2023 essay on Christmas Pig. What brought it to mind last week was conversation with Nick Jeffery, who listens to Potter and Strike fandom podcasts on his morning constitutional, in which I learned that the S&E podcast team believe Gillespie killed Leda because she had learned that he was embezzling the money Rokeby had been giving her to take care of Cormoran. If she spilled the beans on that, the bishop Zeus would fire his servant Peter, maybe even send him to jail.
I laid out, per Louise Freeman’s 3Ms of ‘Who Killed Leda?’ speculation, means, motive, and metaliterary reasons, why Peter Gillespie was not a great or even a likely suspect. He may have known enough about heroin to kill Leda but could he have gotten in and out of her flat successfully? I didn’t think so.
I also didn’t think he had a creditable motive; the idea in 2021 was that he did it to keep her from revealing Rokeby’s drug crimes or relationships with the Harringay drug syndicate. The S&E podcast idea that Peter’s motive was protecting himself is much, much more compelling.
And on the metaliterary level, I thought that Pettigrew as Leda-killer wouldn’t have the jarring world-turned-upside-down effect or meaning that, say, Dave Polworth being revealed as the murderer would have on Strike (and the reader!). Really Dave Polworth as the neglected older brother of Cormoran by adoption in the Nancarrow household — who turns out to be the man who murders a brother and a female relation — makes him a wonderful ring closer with John and Charlie Bristow as well as Lula Landry in Cuckoo’s Calling.
Only in thinking today about Peter Gillespie in light of his name, now with a creditable, cogent motive for murder, is it that it seems to me that Rokeby’s right hand, “the bishop’s secretary,” checks the metaliterary box. Rowling’s golden thread touchstone in Potter, Pig, and in the Strike novels is the authentic REAL of unconditional, sacrificial, and selfless love whose near enemy is the unreal life found in exteriorized piety, social position, and self-love, the ‘Petrine Church’ of Christian esoteric tradition.
