Literary Detection

One of the pleasures of reading widely is that now & then you stumble upon the scene of a crime: you find yourself reading a particularly felicitous paragraph & realise that someone has been here before - and has found the goodies on display just too enticing to be able to resist a quick smash & grab raid. Sometimes this has been executed with the grace, subtlety and sophistication of the experienced cat-burglar. On other occasions the villains have ram-raided the text with an SUV up on the pavement & just helped themselves to whatever they could reach. An example: the Voice Of Saruman passage in Tolkien's The Two Towers has been lifted, lock stock & two smoking paragraphs, from the sequence in Hugh Walpole's Rogue Herries where Herries listens, transfixed, to a celebrity Methodist preacher in Keswick market square. The other night I found myself at the scene of another act of grand larceny while reading The Mayor Of Casterbridge. In chapter 20, Elizabeth-Jane Henchard abandons her habitual use of Wessex dialect, terrified that she will be thought common and uneducated. In short order she considers the dialect words for bumblebee ('Dumbledore') and for an obscurely sleepless night ('Hag-rid').
Well Sarge, we've no motive as yet, but this job's got Jo Rowling's fingerprints all over it . . .
Hogwart's must be located in the west country.