Is The Cuckoo's Calling Distracting Us From Other Books Rowling May Have Written Under A Pen Name?

by Anne-Marie Scully

Author of infertility memoir, Motherhoodwinked and founder of digital publishing company Orchard Wall Publishing

    

Posted: 31/07/2013 HuffPost                                                       

 

Since July 14th, when the news broke that she was the true author of the crime fiction novel The Cuckoo's Calling, all eyes in the world of publishing have been firmly focused on J.K. Rowling. Journalists have rushed to review the novel and to analyse why she used a pseudonym, moreover, why she used a male pseudonym. However, in the same way that magic, which was so much a part of her Harry Potter books, relies on misdirection to cover up how the trick was done, we as an audience are now so distracted by The Cuckoo's Calling that we are not looking for other books that could be out there by Rowling or other well known authors under anonymous pen names.

My sister and I often swop books or share recommendations. About two months ago she offered to lend me a book she had just read and really enjoyed. As she handed it to me she casually said, 'I think it might actually be written by J.K. Rowling under a pseudonym'. The book was called Mountains of the Moon by an author using the pen name I.J. Kay. It was the similarity between this author initials and those of the Harry Potter author that piqued her curiosity.

I immediately dismissed her theory due to the fact Rowling had just released her first adult fiction novel, The Casual Vacancy and therefore assumed any book she wrote for adults would be under her real name.

I didn't think about it again until July 14th when I learned, along with the rest of the world, that Rowling had been unmasked as the author of The Cuckoo's Calling. So, like Cormoran Strike, the private investigator at the centre of Rowling's crime fiction novel, I decided to do some detective work of my own into my sister's theory on Mountains of the Moon.
Once the rumour mill started, the first clue journalists had that Rowling might really be Galbraith is that the two authors shared the same publisher and agent. In the case of Mountains of the Moon there is no such substantial link as the same publisher but there are lots of other 'clues' besides the perhaps too-obvious pseudonym.
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