prolific. Stephen King was churning out so many books that his publishers didn't think the public could take the pace. So some were published under the name Richard Bachman (the surname taken from Bachman-Turner Overdrive, the 1970s band beloved of Smashie and Nicey, and indeed Stephen King). I've yet to discover the reason for one of my favourite pseudonyms -- Colin Dale, the 1920s Spectator book reviewer who was actually T.E. Lawrence. When I say 'reason' I mean the reason he used a pseudonym at all. The actual thinking behind the name is known, and is beautiful: while stationed at RAF Hendon Lawrence used the nearby Tube station called Colindale. But another category of name-change -- the one I fall into -- is that of genre. There's no attempt to conceal identity, you just want to signal to potential readers that if they're expecting chalk, they may be disappointed to get cheese. Iain Banks, for instance, inserts his middle initial M (standing for Menzies) when he publishes science fiction, and drops it for his 'normal' novels. (He'd originally wanted to use the 'M' on his first novel, The Wasp Factory -- if that can be called 'normal' -- but his publisher thought it too 'fussy'.) And so it was that when I had a loo book coming out at about the same time as one of my novels, my agent suggested a nom de plume. Good idea, I said. Which nom, though? Eventually I settled on Charlie Croker for the