The first three Cormoran Strike mysteries have all been ring structures and Lethal White, the fourth and central book if it is a seven book series , echoes Cuckoo’s Calling, the first book, the way a story-turn would. (3) The chapters or story parts on the way out to the big turn are reflected by the chapters coming back, straight-up or in mirror image fashion.Ī nine part ring will have story elements and touches that reveal a A-B-C-D-E-D’-C’-B’-A’ with an A-A’ latch, E story turn pointing to the latch parts, and reflections of the parallel chapters or sets,D-D’, C-C’ and B-B.’ The fourth rule is just that there are often rings inside of the larger rings, so chapters are set up with bracketing elements and a series of books will have a chiastic relationship between the books, i.e., first and last will ‘latch,’ the middle one will be a ‘turn’ reflecting the latch parts, and the others will parallel their corresponding books on either side of the story axis set up by latch and turn.
(2) The mid-point of the novel is a clearly marked ‘turn,’ at which point the narrative shifts from exposition started at the opening and inciting incident back to the finish (it has pointers to or echoes of both beginning and end). (1) A ring-story begins and ends with the same scene, characters, or dialogue, a question being answered or a mystery resolved, and acts as a ‘latch’ to the circle. Regular readers of this weblog are more than familiar with this traditional story scaffolding but for those new to structural analysis - the turtleback tale and narrative ‘reverse echo effect’ – the shortest of introductions are these four rules. Rowling and Robert Galbraith are ‘ring writers.’ Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, her Casual Vacancy, and the first Fantastic Beasts screenplays as well as the Cormoran Strike novels written under the alternate pseudonym of ‘Robert Galbraith’ are all written in parallelist structure that anthropologist Mary Douglas called ‘ring composition.’ Lethal White is no exception.
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