One of the problems with having a runaway success with a side project is that it tends to cast a shadow over the rest of an author’s work. You feel that John Banville may sometimes resent the way that people have rushed to embrace Benjamin Black (although I’m sure his bank manager isn’t complaining). Joyce Carol Oates’s mysteries written under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith outsold all but a handful of the (many) books published under her own name. Stephanie Merritt (also an Observer critic) has written a series of superior literary thrillers, from her excellent debut, Gaveston, in 2002, to While You Sleep (2018). Her novels are about circles of friends trapped in literal or metaphorical crucibles, about privilege and failure, obsession and revenge. That Merritt’s output has been rather thin is down to the fact that her alter ego, SJ Parris, has become one of the most successful writers of historical fiction in the country, selling more than 1m copies of her Giordano Bruno series of mysteries.
