[1]So can anyone explain to me why Jim would have Evil Bob name drop McCoy? What purpose does it serve in the scene and the greater story?
[2]Often Jim puts things in scene's which Harry completely ignores or misses. A perfect example is in Chapter 2 where McCoy hints at the true meaning of curse phrase "Stars and Stones" and Harry just snarks back and doesn't bother to uncover it. He is extraordinarily short-sighted still sometimes. [3]But the series is full of them.
1. Other than your theory of McCoy worked with Evil Bob as Evil Bob, something along the lines of Kurtin's reasoning, and Arjan's thoughts about a larger world and laying the ground work for a confrontation with Eb*, my best guess is it could just be a misdirect. I doubt that because I can't think of any misdirects like that. Most of our misdirects are from characters wrongly explaining how the world works, drawing conclusions when we know their reasoning is inductive rather than deductive, or someone just outright lying to Harry.
3 does something to explain 2. There are so many things Harry doesn't know. The Doylist reason he doesn't chase them all down to there conclusion is that he's going to learn the answer "on screen." The Watsonian answer could be that he chases most of them down to a dead end. Others he doesn't chase down because of time constraints. Some he doesn't chase down because he fears the answers. And some he doesn't chase down because he forgets because there are so many. I'd appreciate some in text explanation for a few more of examples of any of these Watsonian answers for these mysteries he should obviously looking into if for no other reason than we can good reason to believe that Harry isn't just being an idiot.
It's the humans who often get the best of Harry, because they understand what monsters and the non-humans can't: people are who they are and you have to work with that if you want to change them.
Humans are probably the most malleable creatures in the DF. I'd say it's that they don't understand (some) human motivations. It's kind of like Harry says about demons in GP. The demons understand lust, greed, anger, etc. They don't understand "good" emotions, so they don't know how to appeal to our "better angels."
There is a lot we don't know about Bob.
Does anyone else get the impression that Bob's been around a lot longer than the time frame we've been told/led to believe? From the timeline:
c 1400: Bob seduces shepherdesses! Neurovore notes that Bob claims to have “about six hundred years worth of memories to sort through in here” [BR 219], which suggests his origin is somewhere in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century.
...
~1920: Kemmler acquires a certain spirit of air and intellect, bound to a human skull. Bob works for Kemmler about 40 years before. [DB ch 3–thanks to neurovore]
Bob talks like he's been through a lot of wizards. Could this just be that there's a high turnover rate for possession of Bob? Kemmler had him for 40 to a 100 (150?) years. Justin had him for 20 to 30 by my guess. Harry had him 20 years at most.
[1]According to Bob, he was responsible for WW1 and put about 150 years of engineering into it which puts him operating at 1765 ish. ...
[2]APGrey - he at least had Bob for 150 years. Which might contradict something, but that's the Dresden Files for you.
...[3]Luccio may have heard of or read about Bob. She doesn't act like she encountered him. ...
[4]And why wouldn't regular Bob mention [working with McCoy]?
1. Which would have put Kemmler on the outs with the Council for meddling with politics if he was a member in good standing at that point.
2. How do you get 150 years? Was it 150 years of memories? I remember it as 100, but I haven't looked it up.
3. From what Luccio said, she knows about thing Bob
did. I think the quote is something about the horrible or terrifying things the spirit was capable of.
4. Because regular Bob doesn't remember. ... Dun dun dun!
I keep thinking about the way Ebenezer referred to Justin in Blood Rites. He called him "that bastard Du Morne." That level of hatred implies there may have once been a relationship; an alliance, a way of thinking about the world or even a friendship, that existed at one time between Ebenezer and Justin, but was destroyed, most likely by Justin.
It just could be that DuMorne abused his grandson.
*From Peace Talks
With Butters having Bob and the confrontation with Eb we got, I doubt that part of the reasoning now.