Even Harry Potter’s author couldn’t keep her secret: how J. K. Rowling was outed by science

In my recent thriller, White Thaw: The Helheim Conspiracy, I establish a fictitious federal agency whose job it is to scour just about everything there is to scour to isolate signals that might indicate terrorism afoot or some other activity detrimental to our country.

My Federal Center for Data Examination (FCDE) was established after 9/11. Rather than use “boots on the ground” human spies to ferret out bad-guy secrets, the FCDE uses bank of computers with data mining programs to search through data. These data include about everything you can imagine, including every newspaper printed on the planet, satellite-derived imagery and data, UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles)-observed imagery, as well as reams (digital, of course) of telephone and internet traffic, with the latter being scrutinized much more closely than the metadata searches that have made news recently with the National Security Agency. And with this concept, I put together an interesting deductive sequence (I think) where the bad guys are located and neutralized.

It is this kind of technology, clever programs trained to search out patterns, that suggested that Robert Galbraith, the author of The Cuckoo’s Calling, was, in fact, Rowling. According to the 29 July Time magazine issue, suspicious that Galbraith’s book was too good to be the first-time piece of a new author, Times of London editor, Richard Brooks, sent the book to two experts for computer analysis. According to Time, the logic behind such analysis is that every author has a signature pattern when it comes to short words like articles and prepositions. And so, the analysis suggested a correlation between Galbraith’s book and Rowling’s previous tomes.

Another interesting point that came from Rowling’s experiment was that even the best book in the world has difficulty gaining traction unless there is a big name or outstanding publicity behind it. The Time article stated that, although reviews called it “stellar,” “absorbing,” and “totally engrossing,” only 500 copies had been sold in the U.S. through mid-July. I guess when you think about it, this is the way things have to be. There are only so many readers in the world, and unless you can draw attention to yourself, it’s easy to get passed by. I think about this as I market my own books.

Oh!  I almost forgot to mention something really important. My latest thriller, White Thaw: The Helheim Conspiracy, was, in fact, partially written by J. K. Rowling. Now that everyone knows the story behind The Cuckoo’s Calling, it seems wise for me to make this announcement to avoid the embarrassment should pattern recognition software bring my secret to light.

Categorised in: White Thaw

This post was written by paulmarktag01