Rebecca (folding up her work): They cling to their dead a long time at Rosmersholm. One particularly successful epigraph is that to chapter 27: “They cling to their dead a long time at Rosmersholm.” The quotation comes from the opening scene of Ibsen’s play and marks the first description of the white horses that form the play’s dominant motif: It has no longer any hold on you” – is a promise of a redemptive new beginning for both Robin and Billy.

The final epigraph, likewise – “Your past is dead, Rebecca. For example, the epigraph to chapter 18 – “So matters have got as far as that already, have they!” – appears to be a wry reflection on Barclay’s successful infiltration of Jimmy’s group but is really about the ease with which Robin is now lying to her husband. Many of the novel’s epigraphs successfully reflect both of these strands simultaneously. Lethal White, like all the Strike novels, marries the overarching storyline of Robin and Strike’s partnership with a self-contained murder mystery. Indeed, both the secrets of Rebecca’s past (incest and incitement to suicide) resonate with the murder in Lethal White (in which both incest and incitement to suicide have a part to play). Just as with a detective story, the audience can start piecing things together, and the secrets they discover would sit naturally within the murder mystery genre.

Its claims to greatness (and some critics do consider it to be Ibsen’s greatest work) rest above all on its structure and the expert pacing with which its secrets are revealed. 1 Although Rosmersholm is a 19th-century play, it does, in fact, function rather like a detective story. And it means that Rowling has not created the usual intertextual framework with a number of other works but rather paired her novel with one previous text. This is an extraordinary and – I believe – unique depth of epigraphical indebtedness. But Rowling does something very unusual in Lethal White by using 71 epigraphs drawn from one single other text: Henrik Ibsen’s play Rosmersholm (1886). Rowling does, for example, in The Silkworm when she uses many different plays to supply the epigraphs for each chapter. Epigraphs usually bring a number of texts into relation with the new work – as J.K.

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