The new issue of The Rowling Library magazine is out and it’s another winner. Download it here.
I’ll write about my favorite pieces tomorrow. Tonight, though, I want to focus on one paragraph in Oliver Horton’s ‘Ghost Plots,’ his survey of the various plot directions, names, and characters that Rowling chose not to include (or to change into an unrecognizable version of the original) in the Hogwarts Saga. It’s a frustrating article, however interesting all of Horton’s points are (very!), because not once, anywhere, does he mention the source of these ‘Ghost Plots,’ even where Rowling called them that.
The paragraph in question is about Draco Malfoy’s original surname and its probable source.
Harry’s rival Draco Malfoy was at first called Draco Spungen, presumably because of Nancy Spungen, the blonde mentally ill teenage girlfriend of Sid Vicious, bass player in iconic 1970s punk band [the] Sex Pistols. This is a curious choice: the late Ms Spungen is a much maligned figure in rock history. Yet it makes you wonder if other musical notes have been embedded in the story. Are there references to The Beatles and The Smiths, favourite bands of the author, hidden as if under a Cloak of Invisibility? (13)
Again, I don’t know where Horton found this jewel tidbit but, if I ever knew it (as I did many of the Ghost Plots), I’d long ago forgotten it and I’m sure I’d never heard of Nancy Spungen before. So I did the quick online search — the Wikipedia bio, the Rowling Stone ‘Who Killed Nancy Spungen?‘ archive profile, the CrimeAndInvestigation.co.UK piece ‘Sid and Nancy: A Punk Rock Murder Mystery,’ and a piercing film review of Sid and Nancy (‘Requiem for a Blonde: A Tribute to the Most Hated Half of Sid and Nancy‘ — cameo from Sirius Black!).
Check those out if you have a minute. It is painful reading of a wasted life involving mental illness, drugs, and misery in the fast lane of the 70s high-flying punk rock scene. With names like ‘Johnny Rotten’ and ‘Sid Vicious’ — and ‘Nancy Spungen’! — it reads like a Medieval morality play or Victorian allegory of sin and consequences.
Why should we care, though, about Rowling’s one-time long ago fascination with a super-groupie attached to a 70s punk-rock band with drug issues, one who died a mysterious death that many consider a suicide but others are as sure it was murder?
It’s intriguing, to me at least, that Rowling originally named the Malfoys the “Spungens.” She clearly was very familiar with the groupie nutcase attached to Punk royalty who died horribly and mysteriously. The Malfoys are central figures in the Hogwarts drama; Draco plays the part of Harry’s Flashman patrician foil throughout the series so giving him that name had to have been as meaningful (or almost as, at least to the author) as the Malfoy moniker is.
I don’t get the connection of Nancy Spungen with the patrician wizard family, frankly, but, unlike Horton, I think most Rowling readers would connect the super-groupie with Leda Strike. In a flash.
The question that popped into my mind was “Did Rowling-Galbraith’s fascination with Nancy Spungen take flower years later with Leda Strike, Cormoran’s mother, whose death is shrouded in mystery?” There are some interesting parallels.
Points of Correspondence between the Lives and Deaths of Nancy and Leda:
I came up with seven after reading the four articles mentioned above.
- A Groupie to a popular band attached to a rockstar dies a mysterious death some believe was a suicide;
- Her live-in lover was accused of the crime but “got off;”
- A heroin overdose is involved, but in Nancy’s case that was the lover’s death, one many believe was his end of a suicide pact;
- The Groupie lives on one side of the Atlantic but makes her fame on the other side (Leda in NYC bar, Nancy in London with the Sex Pistols);
- The rock groups involved were notorious drug abusers and the women their enablers and sex toys;
- The police let the murder mystery go cold once their lead suspect escaped prosecution; and
- The Groupie was not the suicidal type so the suspicion she was murdered haunts her survivors.
I’m sure there are more but that’s sufficient to merit some discussion, I think. There are, of course, not ‘as many’ but ‘many more’ points that do not align in their lives and deaths.
Points of Difference:
Where to begin?
Spungen was a drug addled, overweight, criminal, open-prostitute, whose name was an apt participle for her line of business (“Sponging,” see Medieval Morality Play note above; unlike ‘Vicious’ and ‘Rotten,’ Spungen was Nancy’s given surname).
Moreover “Nauseating Nancy,” an in-your-face American bitch, was despised by everyone who knew her — except for her rock star lover, to whom she was his first and only true love. She died young and childless.
Leda Strike, as she has been described thus far in the Strikle-Ellacott series? None of those things are true of her.
Perhaps the biggest difference is that the curtain drops on the Sid and Nancy tragedy a la Romeo and Juliet after Vicious’ death by heroin overdose. None of the principals survive or leave progeny to solve the mystery of their relationship and death.
Leda died, of course, but Jonny Rokeby survived as did her Sherlock Holmes of an illegitimate son, a real bastard of an investigator.
A Possible Connection
Perhaps, though, one or two of those things that are said about Nancy Spungen were also true of the fictional Leda Strike? Were there parallels in the death of the two groupies that we’ll learn about in Hallmarked Man?
I think that’s a definite “maybe.” Whence this post to start the conversation.
For example, it’s credible that there was a significant relationship between Rokeby and Leda, as Nick and I discussed in our latest podcast (that Cormoran’s conception was not a “pregnancy trap” per se but the fruit of a love affair of significant length and meaning to both, whence the Rokeby divorce from a wife years after the fact of the NYC bar tryst). Rokeby might have left her because of “all her fucking men,” i.e., because she would not be exclusively his lover as Nancy had been to Sid (“they were a package deal”).
And there is the theory that Nancy was killed in a drug deal gone wrong. Rockets Redglare (his name, I kid you not) supposedly brought opioids to Nancy the night of her death and found Sid unconscious on barbituate-overload and Nancy unconscious. The theory sans evidence is that she woke up to see Rockets stealing from Sid’s bankroll — from his gold record version of Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ (you can’t make this stuff up) — and he stabbed her in the abdomen, from which wound she bled out before Sid came out of his stupor.
There are plenty of third party killer theories for ‘Who Killed Leda Strike?,’ right? I doubt Rowling can top ‘Rockets Redglare,’ but I look forward to the cryptonym.
Has anyone in Strike fandom explored the Spungen-Leda connection?
And what do you think, beyond, “Wow, John, that’s quite the stretch”?
