Pen Names, Pseudonyms and The Biggest Thriller of the Year

One book that is causing quite a buzz in the Better Reading office this week is The Whisper Man by Alex North. It’s a gripping, moving and absolutely terrifying new psychological thriller. It’s being touted as the biggest thriller of 2019… a book that was bought after a 5-way auction by Michael Joseph, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK. The film rights have been optioned – the book is on track to be on everyone’s radar. So, we were interested to see who this debut author, Alex North was.

Well… we don’t know. Alex North is a pseudonym, and the author remains anonymous.

Authors have often used pen names or pseudonyms. Historically, it has been common for female writers to publish under a different or altered name to suggest to readers that they might be male. George Eliot, author of Middlemarch, was a pen name for Mary Ann Evans, who wasn’t going to let her gender get in the way of being published. Even Joanne Rowling’s name was Shortened to J.K Rowling, hoping that boys might be tricked into reading her first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. (They were!)

Others used pen names when they were publishing in a different genre to the one readers were familiar with. Agatha Christie wrote 66 detective novels and over a dozen short story collections under her own name, but she also wrote six romance novels under the name Mary Westmacott. J.D Robb is widely known to be the pen name romance megastar Nora Roberts uses for her suspense and thriller novels. The “J” and “D” are a reference to her sons, Jason and Dan.

Stephen King has always been a prolific writer, so in an effort to not over saturate the Stephen King name in his early years, he published numerous books under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.

More recently, J.K. Rowling published The Cuckoo’s Calling, her first post Harry Potter book under the name Robert Galbraith. She said once she was outed, “I had hoped to keep this secret a little longer, because being Robert Galbraith has been such a liberating experience. It has been wonderful to publish without hype or expectation, and pure pleasure to get feedback under a different name.”

Some authors really do need to protect their identity. John le Carré was actually working for MI6 in Hamburg, Germany when he wrote his first spy story, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. His real name is David John Moore Cornwell, but he published as John le Carré because MI6 officers are not allowed to publish books under their own names.

So, who is Alex North? Time will probably tell, but in the meantime, the biggest thriller of 2019 has been written by the Whisper Man himself.