Amanda saw her dark figure silhouetted against its pallid square of light for an instant. Then she was gone. Rowling reassured French readers that she had nothing against their country, as she received one of the country’s highest awards, the Legion d’honneur.

His interest aroused by the pictures sent to Meg, Leavitt follows Morrison and tries to question him about his sudden appearance masquerading as Meg’s dead husband. Morrison again refuses to talk, and tries to flee from Leavitt into an alley, but he is set upon by a group of street musicians who beat him to death, and also take Leavitt as a prisoner. Additional areas to be evacuated shall be determined based on the development in eruptive style and location of the monitored parameters. The one element that really feels out of place is Albert Campion, and it's pretty telling that while he's present for most of the investigation, he has almost no impact on its outcome. I'm guessing that Allingham wasn't brazen enough to borrow Christie's late-stage technique (where Hercule Poirot would barely cameo at the beginning and end of several novels); she felt she needed to give the public their due if the book had "A Campion mystery!" emblazoned across the front. He really doesn't add anything, though, and Allingham's disinterest is obvious; there's a wide-open invitation to involve him in the book's denouement, and she skirts straight around it. The fog/smog lends a darkness and opaqueness to many scenes in the story and permits the gang of ‘baddies’ move around unnoticed, aided by the fact that they are a motley crew ostensibly just begging loose change from the public. I don’t know,” said Avril, and struggled on, making the truth as clear as he could. “All I can tell you is that, greatly against my will, I had to. All today every small thing has conspired to bring me here. I have known something like it to happen before, and I believe that if I have not been misled by some stupidity or weakness of my own I shall see why eventually.”It is in that light that I offer for your consideration that Margery Allingham’s The Tiger in the Smoke, a book beloved by Rowling and one she read at the beginning of her writing work, includes the source material for and perhaps the most profound translation of the name “Voldemort.” I look forward to your comments and corrections. Lynda Nead: I use the term ‘atmosphere’ to refer both to the air and environment of post-war Britain (the fog and smoke, the stained and broken physical environment, and the attempts to reconstruct and clean) and to evoke the distinctive look and feel of so much post-war British visual culture. ‘Atmosphere’ refers to both the material discussed in the book and to its methodology. The real pleasure of working on the book was immersing myself in the literature and films of the period; so many of these authors, directors and actors are now forgotten and really deserve to be remembered for the work they produced. Havoc’s consumption with authenticity and with “not being soft” reminds me of three characters in Rowling’s work: Stuart “Fats” Wall in Casual Vacancy, Donald Laing of Career of Evil, and, yes, both Voldemort and his Death-Eaters because they take the Dark Lord as their role model. This is a recurring, baseline idea of human failing, sin, and evil in her work.

That’s pretty thin on the explanatory side, unfortunately. There is very little that is “exotic” about French as a language in the UK; every college graduate seems to more than capable in the language and there are more French speakers in the United Kingdom than there are in any other country in Europe outside the Low Countries (see here and here). By giving himself a French sounding name, Riddle was only putting on airs of wealth and education rather than “exoticism.”Beatrice Groves, Oxford Don and author of the just published Literary Allusion in Harry Potter, wrote something here last week, though, about Rowling’s relationship with Tiger that can be taken to the bank: