Authors' names and personalities loom large when we think about detective stories.

It's enough to say, I'm reading an Agatha Christie. You don't need to give the title

or summarize the plot for someone to know what kind of book you're enjoying. Just saying

the name is enough. Of course, writers don't always use their actual names

when they're publishing books. For a whole lot of different reasons, some of them personal, some of them professional, they might choose

a pseudonym to go on the cover with the title.

And that's the name that readers will get to know them by, perhaps never realizing that it's a name invented only for this purpose.

Pseudonyms have always been a feature of genre writing, with crime and detective fiction in particular overflowing with them.

Some writers even maintain multiple professional names, publishing as two or three or even more personas.

But why go to all of this trouble?

And what makes a good pseudonym anyway.

Welcome to She Dunnet. I'm Caroline Crampton.

Before we get into today's episode properly, I have two very exciting bits of news to share.

The first is that She Dunnet has been nominated at this year's British Podcast Awards in the smartest podcast category, which is a really lovely

thing to happen and not something at all that I expected.

It's also something that I owe very much to you listeners, literally since I use the money that

listeners have been donating to pay for the entry, so thank you very much for that.

The other nominees are all really impressive and excellent podcasts.

So do go to British Podcast Awards.com and check them out if you're looking for something else to

listen to in between episodes of this show.

The second bit of news is that I've made some decisions about how I'm going to keep making She Done it,

mostly based on what listeners told me they wanted in the recent survey about the podcast's future.

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