Long time reader and Backchannel Moderator correspondent Kelly Loomis wrote to me about a Troubled Blood quiz recently posted at the Robert-Galbraith.com website on the epigraphs in Strike5. I asked her to write it up as a HogwartsProfessor Guest Post and she chose to do it as a challenge rather than a tell-all piece. I haven’t taken the quiz, I confess, but I look forward to seeing if anyone else spots the mistake Kelly has before Team Rowling corrects it!
Hog Pro readers have long been aware of Rowling’s gaffes in editing. Eagle eyed readers back in the Potter era, for example, spotted that Rowling miscalculated how many likely students were at Hogwarts. More recently, re-readers of the Strike-Ellacott novels were gobsmacked to read in Troubled Blood (chapter 46) that Robin Ellacott had attended only two funerals, a count that failed to include the all important plot point of Mrs. Cunliffe’s funeral in Masham that was featured in The Silkworm.
Of all Rowling’s ‘flints,’ this was the one that I remember most vividly. During my first trip through Troubled Blood, after reading “Robin had only attended two funerals. Her maternal grandfather had died just before she dropped out of university…The only other funeral she’d attended had been four years previously, when she and Strike had attended the cremation of a murdered girl in the course of their first murder investigation,” I literally yelled out loud “What about Matthew’s mother?”
That memory came to mind last week when I received an email from Robert-Galbraith.com, in which there was a linked quiz based on Troubled Blood. I clicked on it, of course, to test my epigraph knowledge (Faerie Queene!) and immediately spotted an error in one of the questions. None of the answers offered for this question were correct.
Do Team Rowling staff members put together these quizzes? Have they actually read the books? How much input does Rowling have or does she review these pieces before they go out? How many of you Serious Strikers can spot the error? Am I mistaken about the gaffe? Let us know in the comments below!
