JK Rowling, has secretly written a crime novel under the guise of male debut writer Robert Galbraith.
The Harry Potter author was acclaimed for “The Cuckoo’s Calling,” about a war veteran turned private investigator called Cormoran Strike.
The book had sold 1,500 copies before the secret emerged in the Sunday Times. Within hours, it rose more than 5,000 places to top Amazon’s sales list.
Rowling said she had “hoped to keep this secret a little longer.”
The author described “being Robert Galbraith” as a “such a liberating experience.” “It has been wonderful to publish without hype or expectation, and pure pleasure to get feedback under a different name,” she said in a statement.
Rowling said her editor, David Shelley, had been “a true partner in crime.”
While the book has zoomed up the bestseller charts of online outlets, Rowling enthusiasts keen to get their hands on a paper copy immediately might struggle.
High Street booksellers appear to have been caught completely unaware by the announcement, and are finding their meagre stocks are unable to match demand.
“We had one copy, but we sold it last week,” says lead bookseller Holly Popple of Waterstones in Piccadilly, central London.
The few other copies scattered around sister branches have now also been sold or reserved, she reports.
Hatchard’s too, a nearby bookshop dating back to 1797, is bereft of copies: the few they had trickled off the shelves in recent weeks.
One reviewer described “The Cuckoo’s Calling” as a “scintillating debut,” while another praised the male author’s ability to describe women’s clothes.
A clue that Rowling was behind the novel was that she and “Galbraith” shared an agent and editor.
The book was published by Sphere, part of Little, Brown Book Group which published her foray into writing novels for adults, “The Casual Vacancy.”