The Wizardly Editor Who Caught the Golden Snitch

And it was just the beginning of Rowling's appeal.

"I remember loving the humor, thinking she is so funny," Levine continues, "and thinking that here's a rare range of talents in a writer: somebody who can engage me emotionally and yet who can make me laugh. And whose plot is really driving me forward."

Levine makes the point that it was a tremendous advantage for Rowling to have lived with her characters for so long between the time she conceived of Harry (1990) and the time the first book was published in England (June 1997).

"She was building the rest of the story, figuring out the whole arc of Harry's experience," he says. It was only after Levine himself finished the final book that he fully understood "how carefully and deliberately and subtly all the clues and pieces of information have been placed and built from one book to the next."

Rowling's characters, too, benefited from the extra-long development time.

"She didn't just meet these people," Levine says. And all of them -- minor characters as well as major -- get steadily more complex as they mature.

Harry, Ron and Hermione, for example, reach the disorienting peak of adolescence in different books and experience it in distinctive ways. Harry hits it in the fifth book, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," morphing into an angry, self-centered teen prone to lashing out at the unfair hand life has dealt him.

"I loved that!" Levine exclaims, clasping both hands to his heart, when the subject comes up.

He was as surprised as any ordinary fan, he says, by plot and character developments as they arose. Which is exactly how he and Rowling wanted it.

"I'm not her collaborator. I'm just the stand-in for the reader," he explains. She doesn't need him to shape her story. His job -- along with Rowling's British editor, Bloomsbury's Emma Matthewson -- is to say, "This is how I reacted."

Sometimes, he would say, "I do not know what's going on here," and Rowling would say, "I didn't want you to have that reaction at this point, so I think I'm going to move some information."

At other times, when he asked about something in one of the earlier volumes, she would say, "That's a good question. I'm okay with your wondering that here. I will answer that in Book 5."