Agatha Christie is not the only one from her ilk to have affected this subterfuge. Ruth Rendell, perhaps the greatest living practitioner of detective fiction, writes complex psychological thrillers under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. Even before this change happened, Rendell had written crime novels without any policemen in them. But as she has revealed in an interview, 20 years after she had started being published, she had an idea for another sort of book that was very different from anything she had written before. The book, A Dark Adapted Eye, was published to critical acclaim under the new name.

Rendell’s pseudonym was created using the maiden name of one of her grandmothers and her own second Christian name. She writes a lengthy foreword in her first novel with the new name where she analyses the roots of her two first names as an author and finds they are related. What is not clearly stated is her longing to be taken more seriously as a literary figure. Barbara Vine has written 10 novels and, in the last two or three, a clear formulaic pattern can be discerned that belies the early promise. The Vine novels inevitably have a young innocent protagonist thrown into an amoral context of upper class British snobbery.

Purely commercial

No such esoteric consideration forced Erle Stanley Gardner to adapt a set of different pseudonyms, the most popular of which was A.A. Fair. The creator of the ubiquitous Perry Mason was driven by purely commercial considerations when he used these names to contribute to pulp magazines during the Depression era. The different identities were necessary so as not to swamp the market with the same name and get short-changed on the works.

Gardner wrote prolifically to earn money. While the country was reeling under the deprivations imposed by the hard times, he pocketed a cool $20,000 in a single year from his crime stories. Legend has it that one of his editors teased him for always having a hero who was an inept “shot” and usually had to resort to the final bullet in the gun to fell the villain. Gardner’s retort would do any compilation of quotable quotes proud: “At three cents a word, every time I say ‘Bang’ in the story I get three cents. If you think I’m going to finish the gun battle while my hero still has 15 cents worth of unexploded ammunition in his gun, you’re nuts.”

Gardner wasn’t the only one to have such fun with pseudonyms. The wealthiest of them all, Stephen King had written few unpublished works before his controversial novel, Carrie, brought him name and fame. Having tasted unpreced ented success, the maverick writer wanted to find out whether his works would sell without his famous surname attached to them. He brought out a few titles with the pseudonym Richard Bachman. He went to the extent of devising an elaborate biography for the fictional name. Many loyal readers smelt a rat. The writing style was too similar to fool anyone for long.

Complex issues of gender and sexuality seems to have driven Patricia Highsmith to adopt the pseudonym Claire Morgan. Her publishers turned down The Price of Salt, a lesbian love story between a married woman and a shop girl. The cre ator of The Talented Mr. Ripley discovered her mainstream anti-hero with an ambiguous sexuality did not pave the way for a work that was so revolutionary. However despite the change in identity of the author, the book sold almost a mil lion copies.

Time and again the quaint and subversive Reginald Hill has let his displeasure known to the media. He is miffed because he is identified primarily with his fictional detectives Dalziel and Pascoe. Hill has repeatedly told his interviewers that the two sleuths feature only in one third of the works written by him. But the charismatic duo has left such an overriding stamp of immortality on the readers that the author seems to have resorted to another name, Patrick Ruell, to write other thrillers.

H.R.F Keating has had his novels published by numerous publishers including Gollancz, Collins Crime Club, Hutchinson and Macmillan. However in the 1980s, in his most prolific phase, Weidenefeld published three of his novels with the pseudonym Evelyn Hervey. All the three works have the governess sleuth Miss Harriet Unwin. His other works of detective fiction usually feature Inspector Ganesh Ghote or DCI Harriet Martens. It does not take a great leap of faith to understand the new name as well as the new sleuth came about because of a new contract with a new publisher.

Not all writers of detective fiction fall into the trap of a pseudonym to ensure a less biased approach to their more “weighty” works. P.D. James wrote and published the literary gem Innocent Blood, that dealt with issue s of identity, guilt and redemption under the same name the jackets of her previous books featured. It is difficult to know whether the work would have been taken more seriously and probably featured in the list of Booker nominees if she had marketed it under a different name.

Bangalore-based Shashi Deshpande is a self-proclaimed lover of the cozies. Early in her career she even wrote a couple of them. One of them alluringly titled Come Up and Be Dead, was re-launched a couple of years by a Bangalore-base d publisher to commemorate 30 years of her writing. It is matter of conjecture whether, if Deshpande decides to adopt a pseudonym to adorn the covers of these little known gems, they would find themselves drawing the same attention as her other works do.

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