How the days of writing under a pseudonym may be numbered

YOU don’t want to get caught in the crosshairs of technology and gossip.

Gossip on its own wouldn’t have blown the identity of Robert Galbraith and revealed that the real author of a detective novel that was flumping along at the bottom of the sales figures was JK Rowling. Someone at Rowling’s legal firm told his wife’s best pal who the real writer was. The wife’s best friend tweeted it, thereby proving yet again that two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead.

All of that must have been pretty annoying for the woman who invented Harry Potter, but if the writer needs anger management right now, it’s probably because of all the knowing theories that have sprung up around why she wrote the detective story under a false name in the first place. First nudge/nudge theory? That the pseudonym was just a ploy. She really, really wanted to be found out as the author, and so she chose the name Robert Galbraith so that people would go “Galbraith. Galbraith? Who was the other author with that surname? Oh, yes of course, it was that economics guy. JK Galbraith. Gosh, isn’t that a coincidence? Double initial instead of a first name — just like yer wan who wrote the Harry Potter books. Bet it’s her, in disguise.”