For those who don’t want to read the new ‘Robert Galbraith’ serial killer tale
By: Tucker Lieberman
Tags: Reading, Books, LGBTQ, Robert Galbraith, Jk Rowling

For those who don’t want to read the new ‘Robert Galbraith’ serial killer tale

Why are people complaining about J. K. Rowling’s new book?

J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, has recently made a series of anti-transgender statements. I won’t repeat them here, but you can look them up if you like. They are on her website and her Twitter account.

As a result, a large number of transgender people and their allies have expressed a collective desire to stop consuming her work (or at least to avoid paying for it or otherwise to refrain from amplifying or encouraging her as an author). Many people have fond memories of Harry Potter, and they do not wish to give up this fantasy world that meant a great deal to them. I won’t start a fight about that; I was never a Harry Potter fan, so I cannot “give up” something that I never had, and I don’t feel I can tell others exactly how to part with something they care about. That process might be personal, and it might play out differently for different people. Nonetheless, I can make a general statement that readers should feel warmly and gently invited to avoid supporting a billionaire author who has recently chosen to use her enormous platform to denigrate transgender people.

While I never had much interest in J. K. Rowling’s work and have even less now, I had a reason to pick up her latest book, and I have a reason to tell you about it.

Troubled Blood was released yesterday (September 15, 2020) under J. K. Rowling’s pen name, Robert Galbraith. It’s the fifth novel in a series featuring the fictional detective Cormoran Strike. This instalment is 944 pages. The LGBT+ publication Pink News announced it as “a cis male serial killer who dresses as a woman to kill his cis female victims.” (“Cis” is an abbreviation for “cisgender,” meaning “not transgender.”)

Here’s why I care. In 2018, I published Painting Dragons, an examination of the “eunuch villain” trope. A eunuch villain is not the same as a cross-dressing villain, but there may be some overlap in the Venn diagram; to put it another way, at least in the fantasy-land of metaphors, the concepts are adjacent. There is a broader problem of “queer villains,” and, here, I’m talking about the sort of queerness that has to do more with gender than with sexuality. Since I’ve positioned myself as a person who is knowledgable about this literary trope, I feel it is my responsibility to weigh in on Troubled Blood.

I read the 944 pages on the day it came out. Because, as a transgender person myself, I have no motivation to preserve or heighten the suspense of this particular author’s book, this essay includes some detail from the end of the book. I don’t think of it as a spoiler. How can I spoil something that the transgender community has made a collective decision not to enjoy? It is, rather, simply information. I am informing.

If you don’t want to read it, but you’re curious what’s in it, let me tell you about it.

What happens in ‘Troubled Blood’

A serial killer, Dennis Creed, began his murder career in England in 1968 when he was in his early thirties. He rented a permanent room in a boarding house on Liverpool Road near Paradise Park. This is where he kept the women he abducted. Now 77 — the novel is set in 2014 — he has been in jails and psychiatric facilities for decades. Some unsolved crimes seem to point to him.

The detective finds photographs of Creed “at various ages, from pretty, curly-haired blond toddler all the way through to the police mugshot of a slender man with a weak, sensual mouth and large, square glasses.” In Chapter 53, we are told:

“Dennis Creed had been a meticulous planner, a genius of misdirection in his neat little white van, dressed in the pink coat he’d stolen from Vi Cooper, and sometimes wearing a wig that, from a distance, to a drunk victim, gave his hazy form a feminine appearance just long enough for his large hands to close over a gasping mouth.”

Having confused his victims — by drugging them or by appearing from a distance to be a trustworthy female — Creed drove them to the boarding house, chained them to the radiator in the basement, physically tortured them for months in especially sadistic ways, and eventually killed and dismembered them. He did this multiple times. Police knew there was an “Essex Butcher” but didn’t identify Dennis Creed until 1976.

Relying heavily on information in a 1985 true-crime book The Demon of Paradise Park devoted to Creed’s crimes (which of course exists only within this novel), detectives reopen the 1974 disappearance of Dr. Margot Bamborough. No one had ever found her body nor convincingly tied her murder to Creed. The detective goes to the psychiatric facility to interview Creed, who has a “working-class, East London accent” and, by then, a “triple chin.” He provides information about one of his prior victims. (At the end of the nearly thousand-page book: Yes, they find Bamborough’s body. No, her killer wasn’t Creed.)

Within the Dr. Bamborough case, there’s another theme of gender confusion: A mysterious patient at the clinic the day the doctor disappeared. The patient’s name had been written in the receptionist’s log simply as “Theo question mark.” One of the doctors remembered seeing this person and assumed Theo was a man. The receptionist insisted otherwise: “She was broad-shouldered, I noticed that when she came to the desk, but she was definitely a woman.” The detectives are interested in finding and questioning Theo, whoever he or she is, so they repeatedly bring up the mystery of Theo’s gender.

Oddly — remember, this case is reopened forty years later, in 2014 in the novel’s fictional world, and the novel is being published in 2020— no character ever floats the idea that Theo might have been a transgender woman. In fact, the prefix “trans-”, applied to gender (as in “transgender,” “transsexual,” “transvestite,” or simply “trans”), appears nowhere in this book. Theo’s possible gender is never discussed in this light.

Nor is Creed’s crossdressing as part of his misogynistic violence ever analyzed psychologically.

So those are the relevant parts of the plot in J. K. Rowling’s new book.

Is it original?

No.

In 1937 in New York City, amid public panic about murderous rapists, the magazine Inside Detective warned that one killer on the run “MAY BE MASQUERADING IN FEMALE ATTIRE!” Place the emphasis on the “may be,” please, because he was not. (You can read more about this true case in Harold Schechter’s book The Mad Sculptor.)

Within fiction, you can find the “crossdressing killer” motif in Psycho (a 1959 novel, then a film), Dressed to Kill (a 1980 film), and Silence of the Lambs (a 1988 novel, then a film).

If you’d like more information on these cinematic tropes, I highly recommend the Netflix documentary Disclosure, released earlier this year.

Is it weird?

…that a woman author who claims to worry that transgender women threaten cisgender women’s safety should devote her career to (a) writing explicit scenes in which a man tortures women, not to inform readers but to entertain them, and that she should do so (b) under a masculine pen name?

Yes. That is very, very weird.

Is it transphobic?

Yes.

Considering the book’s sins in isolation — that is, if I had read the text without knowing who wrote it — I’d say its sins are relatively mild. Regarding the serial killer, Dennis Creed, the crossdressing element could have been explained better to make it more than just a replay of old horror movies. His crossdressing was just a deliberate ruse to lure his victims; nothing more is ever done with that information. Regarding the mysterious visitor to the doctor’s office, Theo, the detectives make themselves look foolish in failing to consider the possibility that Theo is transgender. There’s no reason to exclude the word “transgender” from the novel. The author was not struggling to fit a word limit. The topic could have been better addressed: distinguish concepts of clothing and identity, acknowledge that transgender people generally aren’t violent, and exculpate queer people at the end. Add another page or ten and deal with it. If I didn’t know who the author was, I’d say these were sins of omission and of ignorance.

But the book can’t be considered in isolation from its author. This is a billionaire author, famous for writing Harry Potter, who has, just within the past year, assumed the mantle of anti-transgender rants. She absolutely knew what she was doing in this novel. Her framing is intentional. She wants to scare people about transgender women, not only in fiction, but also in real life. We know from life context that this book is serving a larger agenda.

Nick Cohen, a columnist for the Spectator who read an early review copy of Troubled Blood, wrote on the book’s release day that “transvestism barely features. When it does, nothing is made of the fact that the killer wears a wig and a woman’s coat…” But that’s exactly the problem. Why does Rowling mention it at all, if she intends to make “nothing” of it? Especially when she’s been criticized all year for expressing her anti-transgender viewpoints? If she cared how this was received and interpreted, she could have made a bigger effort. If anything, I imagine she is happy to leverage this novel to deliberately capitalize on the publicity she gets from repeatedly offending transgender people.

Readers are taught to consider a work as a whole and not complain excessively about a relatively tiny detail. Teachers want us demonstrate that we’ve actually read the entire book; meanwhile, living authors and marketers generally plead with readers to “be fair” (and, ideally, generous) to their personality and product. But I am not in school anymore, nor do I have a motivation to be generous to a billionaire whose new brand is slandering my community.

I wonder if J. K. Rowling wrote 944 pages with the intention of minimizing the passage about crossdressing so that her defenders can object that her book, as a whole, isn’t about that.

They would be correct; the book, as a whole, is not about the villain putting on a wig.

But part of the book is about that.

The transphobic part.