How Linguistic Analysis Helped Unmask Robert Galbraith as J.K. Rowling QUOTE
How Linguistic Analysis Helped Unmask Robert Galbraith as J.K. Rowling
By Maia Brown-Jackson ( ) Comments
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Over the weekend, we learned that novelist Robert Galbraith, who made a splash with his critically acclaimed debut novel The Cuckoo’s Calling, was not actually making his debut as an author. Nor was he a him. Robert Galbraith was in fact megasuperfamous J.K. Rowling, attempting to do what she loves (write) without the wildly high expectations placed on her as the billionaire-author of Harry Potter. An anonymous tweet from an already-discontinued account first made the claim, and after it was supported with an analytic linguistic program, Rowling confirmed the story.
Computer science professor Patrick Juola helped analyze the text and explained to Time how the Java Graphical Authorship Attribution Program was used to determine authorship. A student of forensic linguistics, Juola uses the program, among others, to determine if authorship between works is consistent based on word usage, a technique generally applied in legal matters. While it might seem obvious to change word usage or sentence length it you’re a writer trying to disguise your identity, certain shorter words, such as prepositions and articles, tend to be more ingrained in an author’s subconscious, so that they would never think to change their usage.
Juola was asked by the Sunday Times to compare The Cuckoo’s Calling against Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy, Ruth Rendell’s The St. Zita Society, P.D. James’ The Private Patient, and Val McDermid’s The Wire in the Blood. Juola said that, counterintuitively, the limited choices made it harder to determine for certain — not that this type of work is ever 100% conclusive — but the evidence he produced was apparently enough for the Times to approach the publisher, Mullholland Books, for confirmation that Galbraith and Rowling were one and the same.
So if you’re a wildly famous author trying to get some unbiased reviews, and have thus far escaped notice despite using the same agent, publisher, and editor as your other wildly famous works, you might still be shit out of luck. That said, when everyone realizes what happened your book sales might go up by, oh, more than 500,000%, so some would call it a draw.
As to who set up the Twitter account that put the Sunday Times on the trail in the first place? Well, like we said, the account is deleted, so we may never know. But if you were working at a publishing house that had a critically lauded detective novel by J.K. Rowling languishing on shelves… well, we can imagine that would be a little frustrating. Not that we would accuse anyone of anything. Just making an observation, is all.
The guardian's ReviewQUOTE
The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith – review
JK Rowling's authorship revelation has transformed the fortunes of this enjoyable crime novel – but her formidable storytelling talents were on display all along
Mark Lawson
The Guardian, Thursday 18 July 2013 07.42 EDT
The clues were there … writing as Robert Galbraith, JK Rowling continues her exploration of the extr
The clues were there … writing as Galbraith, Rowling continues her exploration of journalism and celebrity. Photograph: Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP/Getty Images
Published in April as the debut novel by Robert Galbraith, The Cuckoo's Calling was revealed last weekend to be the ninth full-length work of fiction by JK Rowling – after the seven Harry Potter books and last year's adult novel The Casual Vacancy – and so immediately changed status from a first edition at risk of remaindering to a No 1 and rapidly reprinting bestseller.
The Cuckoo's Calling (Cormoran Strike)
by Robert Galbraith
Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this book
As a result, reading the book now is rather like watching a Derren Brown trick on freeze-frame replay, wondering if there are clues to how the wool was being pulled. The easy familiarity that "Galbraith" shows with film sets, for example, is now explained by the fact that eight major movies were made from "his" first seven novels. Rowling also chose to hide herself behind a surname shared with a literary and public figure who had the same initials as her: the economist JK Galbraith.
Whether or not that was deliberate, it's also notable that this is, in effect, the second time the author has used a concealing identity intended to disguise gender: her "JK" was famously calculated to hoodwink boy readers thought to be drawn to authors with male first names.
To their great credit, some of those who reviewed the book blind spotted that "Robert Galbraith" was unusually attuned to female fashion. To the undeceived reader, there are other hints of fictional cross-dressing. The first character we meet, Robin, sent as a temp to work for London private eye Corcoran Strike, is intensely aware of both the sensitivity of her breasts and the tendency for men to stare at them. While a male writer might also have had these insights, it seems odder that Strike, when he goes into the gents in a pub, is struck by the stink of piss, a fact that soon becomes unremarkable to urinal users.
But the strongest retrospective evidence that the book was written not just by a woman masquerading as a man but by Joanne Rowling specifically is its sharp concern with journalism and celebrity. Although belonging to very different genres, the Potter books, The Casual Vacancy and now The Cuckoo's Calling all feature tabloid hacks and paparazzi.
The "Galbraith" novel even begins with a pack of snappers outside the house where a supermodel has plunged to her death in an apparent drug-fuelled suicide. Lula Landry – another hidden wink, perhaps, as Rowling's Potter books are full of alliterative names – is "one of the most photographed women in the world" and may, Diana-like, have been hounded to death by the pressure of celebrity and attention.
How fascinating to read these scenes now, knowing that they were written by a witness at the Leveson inquiry. Rowling's animus against the press, which began with the hateful hack Rita Skeeter of the Daily Prophet in the Potter stories, vividly continues, while Landry, who was an adopted mixed-race child, carries on the sympathy for the troubled or excluded that has been one of Rowling's most attractive qualities as a writer.
The central character also bears the mark of Rowling's predilection for physical distinctiveness. The Casual Vacancy included a number of massively fat men – Hagridian, as Potter readers might have thought of them – and private eye Cormoran Strike, a former military policeman, is another very big chap, with the added distinction of a prosthetic leg.
The brutal question is what merit the book would have if it were not by JK Rowling. And here, again, compliments are due to the unknowing early critics who commented on the unusual confidence and professionalism of what was presented as a debut. Rowling is a formidable storyteller – as shown by the sheer imaginative detail and narrative organisation of the world of Harry Potter – and, as Strike and Robin set out to prove that Lula Landry's death was not a suicide, the plot is tightly moulded and told, with the reader's interest ignited by tantalising references to the detective's lost leg or a file of death threats that he has received.
And, while never a firecracker stylist, Rowling almost always writes clean, clear prose, although her marked liking for adjectives and adverbs may have been one of the things that gave her away. Few actions or items are left unqualified: the newly engaged Robin wonders, thinking of those less fortunate than herself, "if desperate pity could describe the exquisite pleasure she actually felt at the thought of her own comparative paradise". Typically, each key noun and verb in that sentence has brought a modifying friend along.
Rowling's books have always had a high body-count. The Potter novels dispatched major characters at a rate remarkable in children's fiction and The Casual Vacancy, though structurally a social comedy about a parish council, began with a shocking death and included several more. It was partly this deep concern with death that led Ian Rankin to predict that Rowling might make a crime writer, and he is proved correct in a book that extends her reflections on mortality in a literary context where the pileup of bodies is less conspicuous.
There will now be considerable pressure for the Strike series to become at least as long as Potter, but even a writer as skilful as Rowling will struggle to overcome the reason that the private detective genre has struggled to flourish in modern English crime fiction, with the majority of series now based around cops. The era of Poirot and Marple is long past; nowadays, once a murder or other very serious crime is suspected, the police take over the investigation and close it down to outsiders. So the gumshoe is left – as in The Cuckoo's Calling – with the re-investigation of deaths ruled suicides or, otherwise, with non-suspicious missing-person cases.
Still more ominously for the prospect of a long Strike series, the adoption of the pseudonym was presumably motivated psychologically – an escape from celebrity, expectation and JK-baiters on the books pages – and so you wonder, with the mask ripped off, what further use it will have for her. Any subsequent Galbraith books (and another is promised next year) will effectively be published as Rowlings, with all the mania that entails.
Her solution might be to assume new noms de plume. For the next few years, the book business could become something like the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition during the years when the press believed that the Prince of Wales was exhibiting under alibis. Just as clumps of reporters would gather around innocuous watercolours that turned out genuinely to be the work of Wiltshire vicars, so there will be sudden runs on debut books that an online buzz attributes to the creator of Harry Potter.
For the moment, we are left with an enjoyable, highly professional crime novel that has escaped from the aim its author had for it but taken on a massive new significance for readers. Many pseudonymous novels are intended to make a point: Doris Lessing, in 1984, submitted a manuscript under the name Jane Somers, its rejection by her regular publishers proving to her that the literary business defers to famous names.
While Rowling does not seem to have tested her publishers by sending in a book under cover – now there would be a tense and interesting experiment – her experience with The Cuckoo's Calling does seem to show that unknown first-time novelists are likely to get nice reviews but zero publicity and low sales: the novel was pottering along selling mere hundreds of copies until it started Pottering along.
Already one of the most fascinating figures in the history of popular fiction, JK Rowling has become even more intriguing with this brief but neat vanishing trick. Lucky, though, are those few who read it in the purity of obscurity rather than the distracting glare of hindsight.
JKR's New Books
McGonagall's Cat JKR's New Books Feb 23 2012, 09:51 PM
Feb 23 2012, 09:51 PM
