What is bestselling author J.K. Rowling up to these days? You might know she’s creating more content for the Harry Potter universe or drawing ire for her Twitter posts. But if you said “writing kinda-controversial 900-page crime epics as Robert Galbraith” then you must have heard of Troubled Blood, the fifth in her Cormoran Strike detective series. Troubled Blood is an indulgent, meandering, sentimental elephant of a novel. It’s also the best book on epistemics– the art of knowing things– I’ve read in years.
How does a detective novel beat out nonfiction bestsellers like The Signal and the Noise and The Drunkard’s Walk? For one thing, I’ve always had a soft spot for mysteries as a source of clarity. Doing epistemics in real life feels more like a mystery plot– uncertain by design, full of red herrings, burying clues right at the threshold of perception– than like the neatly-laid out facts and arguments of a nonfiction book. A good mystery plot, like a good realization, is obvious only in hindsight. If the solution is too contrived, it’s easy to tell– it won’t make sense even after reading. On the other hand, hiding clues well enough to keep things interesting takes a deep understanding of how life (or at least our perception of it) works.
Mystery writers have found different ways of walking the tightrope between “too obvious” and “too unlikely”. They’ll introduce one false premise that completely distorts the rest of the evidence, or drag out a shaggy-dog red herring that’s too fascinating to ignore. They’ll hide relevant facts in details so mundane or implicit that readers will overlook them. Rowling has done all of that and more in past books. In Troubled Blood, though, she relies on a new strategy: playing with our biases.
The premise of Troubled Blood: Cormoran and his apprentice/partner Robin have been hired to look into an unsolved cold case. The original detective on the case botched it by going insane and turning his investigation into an astrology-based conspiracy theory. This is inconvenient for Robin and Cormoran, who have to rely on his cryptic notes or on surviving witnesses' forty-year-old memories. It's extremely convenient for Rowling, who can get all the symbolism and atmosphere and commentary she wants out of the astrological connections while keeping coy about how, or whether, they're practically connected to the solution.
The whole thing is, of course, a joke at the expense of the misplaced moral panic over the Harry Potter books. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if that was the primary motivation. Rowling was accused of being Satanic over books that were, if anything, more Christian than the average. Now with Troubled Blood she's published a book filled with whole pages of blasphemous occult scribbling. The Strike books have always been Rowling's gleefully gritty escape from the expectations of YA fantasy, but this feels like settling a score.
I'd like to think that the book's other big plot gimmick– the race to get a confession out of a long-imprisoned serial killer, who's known among other things for dressing as a woman to lure his victims– is similar nose-thumbing at a more recent moral panic: the spate of online accusations that Rowling is anti-transgender. I'm guessing it isn't, though. Instead it's part of Rowling's broader theme for the book: the ways in which our categories lead and mislead, define and divide us.
The book begins with a discussion of the Cornish independence movement– Rowling's way of hinting, in 2013 book-time, that she has things to say about Brexit. It's bracketed by a winking reference to romantic norms in Anna Karenina. The book's central set-piece is a dinner party that goes disastrously off the rails thanks to a culture-war clash between Robin's millennial peers and the ex-military Cormoran. Nationality, age, gender, class– it's all here in bunches. But Rowling's concern in Troubled Blood isn't to take sides. It's to show what happens when the sides themselves go awry.
Men and women; friend and foe; science and superstition; young and old; sacred and profane; foreign and local; truth and fiction; strangers and family; virtue and vice; crazy and sane– these are all useful distinctions to make. But where do they break down, and how will we notice when they do? The problem will be familiar to many readers of Scott’s blog. Words are categories that we use to encode inferences about the world– facts that usually cluster together. Under ordinary circumstances this is useful. Under extraordinary circumstances we risk mistaking the inferences for the facts themselves unless we think carefully about what we’re describing and why. The same is true of Rowling’s detectives: seeing the evidence for what it actually means requires not just their hard work but also open-mindedness and lateral thinking.
The occult stuff in Troubled Blood is both the prime example of this and the perfect metaphor for it. It's a medium where identities and connections are flexible. The astrological symbols aren't real things in themselves, but they're flexible enough and expressive enough that the insane police detective can use them to express his trained intuition. That intuition eventually yields crucial clues to the killer's identity where approaching the problem analytically wouldn't– it would have let the unexpected signal get buried under the noise of presuppositions. Categories are part of both the problem and the solution.
The same could be said to some extent of almost any good mystery story, though. Where Rowling in particular really shines is the awareness that we create categories not just around things, but also around people. (This too is a recurring theme of Scott’s writing– though his answers aren’t always convincing.) Trust, friendship, loyalty, love– how and where do we draw the lines that bind us to others? Which distinctions are vital to that, and which aren't? How do we reconcile our categories when they differ? How much can and should they be shared? The nerve-wracking stakes of such questions come front and center when Cormoran and Robin are working to tease clues out of reluctant witnesses. Rowling’s mysteries are second to none in using such scenes– not to mention pulling them off with skill, sensitivity, and humor.
The real center of Rowling’s interpersonal writing, though, isn’t the mystery plot but the rest of it. Troubled Blood owes much of its length to the proliferation of subplots about relationships: Cormoran’s with his dying aunt, his distant biological father, his deranged ex-fiancee; Robin’s with her estranged husband and a lascivious co-worker; and above all the strong but oh-so-fraught rapport between the two. They’ve both been hurt in the past in various ways and are reluctant to open up, not to mention prone to misinterpret each other's behavior. Watching their misunderstandings from both sides is one of the great delights of the Strike books.
The other great delight, to me, is that Rowling is in on it. She's not just a distant observer of her characters; she actually cares about what's going on with them. And she too shows that she can change and open up. It's hard not to read the working-class, grumbly-stoic, unprepossessing Cormoran, a bumbler in most ways except when it really matters, as Rowling’s apology to Ron Weasley for writing him off as a potential match for Hermione Granger until it was almost too late. For that matter it’s hard not to read Robin as Rowling’s apology to Hermoine for loading her with unrealistic expectations of coolheadedness, effortless skill, and conventional success. Rowling feels a real obligation to do right by them and her other creations, and mostly succeeds. Her heart is visible on her sleeve even when– especially when– she’s up to the elbows in grime.
Rowling doesn’t disdain categories. She recognizes the need for circles of friendship, of loyalty, of trust; otherwise she wouldn’t be in the business of portraying murderers. But the broader lesson I take from Troubled Blood is that Rowling wants those lines drawn as wide as possible. She sees great danger in the power of words and preconceptions to exclude, and likes it when people find ways to open up and bring others in. Her opposition to Brexit and her men-are-pigs feminism are partly expressions of this way of thinking, partly obstacles to it. Rowling herself seems to understand that ambiguity between smashing categories and creating them. It adds nuance to her writing. The way forward, for her, is to give categories their due as far as they will go, but also to peer fearlessly at the seams and cracks they fail to describe. In other words, to do the hard work of finding truth, like Robin and Cormoran.
Rationalists sometimes turn up their noses at "fictional evidence", and it's true that fiction follows different patterns than everyday reality. But good fiction preserves reality's crucial epistemic properties: the ability to make sense, and the ability to surprise. (In fact, these exactly parallel the contrasting qualities of detective stories I mentioned earlier– understandable, but not too understandable.) In fiction, too, we see categories in their natural habitat– the stories, factual and otherwise, that we tell each other. There are few better ways to update your categories– or someone else's!– than to engage with them as they're found in a story. They may be all in your head, but that doesn't make them unreal.
Detective stories in particular deal constantly with realities of this kind. The central truth of a murder isn’t that a human body ceased to operate, but that a human mind willed it to. The clues to understanding this circumstance will be facts about what people thought– facts, that is about categories– as often as they’re facts about direct physical reality. The key to understanding those facts is empathy– openness, that is, to the idea that another person might have different categories than you do. And that’s where Rowling shines. You might even say that empathy is what Troubled Blood is about.
I realize that my argument is frustratingly short of solid evidence. In part that’s because Troubled Blood is a mystery and I don’t want to spoil it. More importantly, though, it’s because tangible evidence is necessarily a poor way to communicate ideas of this kind. What affected me most about the book was the feeling of living with these characters day-in and day-out (the book takes place over more than a year) for 900-some pages. I know, with the intuition of an occultist detective, that I have at least a partial handle on what Rowling wanted to communicate with this story. But like the solution to her mystery it’s not governed by a single fact. Rather it’s a series of patterns and small details that build up over the long haul into something more like a coherent understanding.
But in case you think I’m reading things into Troubled Blood that just aren’t there, let me give you a sample of what I mean. Since the investigation is a cold case, there are a lot of details in Troubled Blood about things that have changed over a generation. In fact this change is one of the main ways Rowling sets up interesting differences between, or problems with, categories. In one case the generation gap affects the plot directly– Cormoran is able to trick a suspect into revealing information that he thinks is unhelpful, but turns out to be very helpful because of how things have changed. In another case the opposite happens. Robin and Cormoran employ an aging secretary whose old-fashioned attitudes frustrate both of them, but once they start to open up to her about the investigation, she recognizes the significance of a forty-year-old detail they’d missed. Her character isn’t exclusively a positive one– like I said, there’s plenty of nuance in Rowling’s portrayals– but including her, and being able to appreciate her categories, turns out to be crucial to solving the mystery.
The conclusion of Troubled Blood isn’t perfectly satisfying– the solution to the mystery is implausible in some ways– but this is one detective novel where finding the answer, knowing the facts isn’t the whole point. The point is the process, the messiness and uncertainty and vulnerability that are all too plausible from our experience. It’s easy to have all the facts– I should say, all the facts as they fit into one particular paradigm– laid out in hindsight. It’s harder to understand the paradigms themselves and engage with them as they come to us personified. That’s the skill that I learned a little better– and certainly learned to appreciate more– by reading Troubled Blood. The real mystery, it turns out, was the friends we made along the way.