The Boy Who Lived stands over the charred corpse, the lightning scar on his forehead and the police badge on his hip glistening in the Miami sun. The medical examiner, a curly-haired Muggle, explains how an accelerant was used to burn the murder victim. "Well," Harry Potter says, pausing to don his sunglasses in the seconds before the CSI theme music starts. "You should always expecto petroleum."
Okay, so it's safe to say the J.K. Rowling crime novel The Cuckoo's Calling is not about wizard detectives (although that would be cool; publishers, give me a call), but with the week-old shock revelation that the Harry Potter author has had a new book on the shelves for months we got thinking about literary scandals and the use of pseudonyms. And while it might be easy for someone who has sold 450 million books to quietly slip a manuscript to publishers under another name and see what happens, not many others have that luxury.
J.K. Rowling pulled off a stunt by publishing The Cuckoo’s Calling as Robert Galbraith, but she’s hardly the first author to use a pen name.
Rowling said on her website that taking on the name Robert Galbraith gave her freedom from expectation, something she would not have enjoyed since the mid-1990s when the Potter series became a phenomenon. A Casual Vacancy got an undeserved walloping in reviews - it was good without being great and went on too long, much like Potters four through seven. With The Cuckoo's Calling, Rowling received feedback that wasn't influenced by her name, was passed up by at least one publisher, won a high degree of praise and went on to sell hundreds of copies in the US and UK combined.
Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, known to most as Joseph Conrad.
This might seem depressing but many authors would still look at that result with jealousy. Now it's the most in-demand book on the planet.
This is hardly the first time an author has tried to keep their name a secret, but it's still a pretty ballsy move from one so prominent, even if she can afford to have a novel disappear without being noticed.
Occasionally authors get unwanted exposure. Nikki Gemmell was disappointed to get outed as the scribe behind the sensationally sexy and occasionally horrific The Bride Stripped Bare, although that didn't stop her churning out two sequels and putting her name on the reprints. Joe Klein repeatedly lied about being responsible for Primary Colors, the roman a clef about Bill Clinton's political rise in 1992, before eventually admitting the truth.
Robert Galbraith joins George Eliot and hundreds of other false names on book covers across the world. But this case is clearly different from most: there is demand for Rowling's name whereas George Orwell, Mark Twain and Lewis Carroll would sell better than Eric Arthur Blair, Samuel Clemens or Charles Dodgson.
Mary Anne Evans was a novelist, journalist and translator who feared her work would never be taken seriously. That’s why the world knows her as George Eliot.
Nora Roberts aka Eleanor Marie Robertson churns out so many novels (209 the last time someone on Wikipedia counted) she was persuaded to use J.D. Robb for her Whatever In Death series, Anne Rice (Howard Allen Frances O'Brien, no wonder she changed it) has also been known as Anne Rampling and A.N. Roquelaure, and Joseph Conrad takes up less space on a book cover than Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski.
But the Rowling case makes you wonder what other major authors out there have been writing in disguise. What if everything you thought you knew about your favourite writers was wrong? Here are seven hypothetical scandals we'd love to see the wizard detectives from CSI: Hogwarts get to the bottom of.
Stephen King is a man who knows how Rowling feels, having assumed the identity Richard Bachman for several novels early in his career only to be outed.
The man who gave the world Carrie, The Shining and, you know, It, is famously prolific and is reputed to be able to sit down and write stories without planning where they are going to end up. But it turns out he has secretly been composing postmodern analyses of the oeuvre of Pablo Picasso in his downtime.
Howard Allen Frances O’Brien prefers to be known as Anne Rice.
The giveaway was that, as far as anyone else can tell, Picasso was never a death row inmate with healing powers. Seems King mixed up the details of Nude, Green Leaves And Bust with The Green Mile.
Harper Lee famously retired after the success of her only novel, 1960's To Kill A Mockingbird. Or did she? The truth is she's been contributing the odd bodice-ripper to Mills and Boon ever since. The plot twist is always the same and comes when a damsel in distress falls off a tower or a staircase or a bed and the hunky hero catches her with his left arm.
Dan Brown may cop criticism for historical inaccuracies (The Da Vinci Code is fiction, people) but in between penning adventures for Tom Hanks he gets his facts straight.
He has to. You know those countless instruction manuals that come with electrical appliances that no one ever reads? Brown has been surreptitiously writing every single one since 1998.
Hilary Mantel can't seem write a sentence without winning an award. Except under the pen name Laminar Ethyl, which she came up with thanks to an internet anagram maker. Her Star Wars inspired fan fiction is mostly in the vein of the Fifty Shades series, but she was caught out when she turned Princess Leia into a figure who keeps divorcing and beheading husbands a la Henry VIII.
Stephen King, aka Richard Bachman, similarly had his pseudonym exposed.
Haruki Murakami's use of felines and offbeat, surrealist style means we were suspicious about whether he was the author of Crafting With Cat Hair. Rigorous analysis from our top forensic team instead revealed the would-be Nobel laureate has a book of make-up tips on the shelves.
Danielle Steel has sold more books than anyone else alive, her 800 million copies leaving Rowling in the dust. Part of the reason is because she has written so many, usually juggling multiple projects. After waving the blue light there was no scandal involving hidden identities to be found, but she is a robot.
William Shakespeare has long been rumoured to be a fake, a patsy for a nobleman or a team of writers, with some arguing the Bard from Stratford-upon-Avon never wrote a word, much less compared anyone to a summer's day. Conspiracy theories have come full circle in over 200 years, and are generally considered to be crackpot. We can now exclusively reveal that it's totally rubbish. Shakespeare not only wrote everything with his name on it, but also gave us the 1611 version of the King James Bible.
