Publishing News doesn’t usually make me raise my eyebrows. But then they don’t often announce that a publisher decides to relaunch one of their longstanding authors by dropping his first name. But that’s exactly what Hodder Headline has done with comedic crime writer Colin Bateman, who first made a splash with DIVORCING JACK in 1994 and has written seventeen other books for adults and children since. Why the name thing, which includes a new look? “We think he’s wonderful,” said Headline Senior Commissioning Editor Piers Blofeld. “He’s Carl Hiaasen on speed. This is someone who we think is better than a lot of the top thriller authors, but doesn’t have anything like their profile. So we had to think long and hard about why this was so, and I think a lot of it was the package, which for various reasons could have been better.”
Problem is, this was all news to Bateman (left) until his agent emailed the news to him yesterday – though it had been mentioned as a possibility six months before, but “it was a bit of a surprise to see it reported as news,” he said to me via email earlier this morning. Never mind that it’s going to take some adjustment for everyone. “I am quite attached to Colin, but I have to admit that it’s not a very ‘action’ name,” he said. “It does rather make you think of someone sitting quietly in a library, typing, as opposed to swinging across a crocodile filled gorge on a threadbare rope. Colin the Barbarian, anyone? I suppose when I pick up the phone now it will be, ‘Hello, Bateman?’ It actually does sound more aggressive. Perhaps I’m going to have to toughen up, go to the gym. My six pack at the moment is more of a picnic hamper, but these things can change.”
There is one worry: “If this doesn’t work, the obvious next step is to drop the ‘e’ out of Bateman, and then I’ll be BATMAN, and a name like that certainly wouldn’t catch on…”