The Case of the Author Who Wasn’t Jane Urquhart
It was a little over a year ago that former GalleyCat co-editor Sarah Weinman and I tried to uncover the identity of Lucy Jackson, the pseudonymous author of Posh… with absolutely no success. But that hasn’t kept Sarah from continuing her efforts to chip away at pen names to find the author underneath—last week, she had a feature in Canada’s Macleans about the speculation surrounding Inger Wolfe, who’s penned “an unusual mystery novel that throws together a serial killer stalking terminally ill victims in remote Canadian towns” titled The Calling. Knowing that “Inger Wolfe” is “the pseudonym for a well-known and highly regarded North American literary novelist,” Sarah pretty much laid her theory out on the line, stating that “in all likelihood [Wolfe] is the pen name of Jane Urquhart, Governor General’s Award-winning author… and most certainly one of Canada’s most prominent literary novelists.”
Granted, nobody would confirm or deny Sarah’s guess, but “the circumstantial evidence makes these two halves converge more than [Wolfe] might realize.” Wolfe and Urquhart share an agent—Ellen Levine of Trident Media Group—the setting of The Calling matches Uruqhart’s hometown, a character in The Calling shares a name with Urquhart’s daughter, and so on. Enough to build a hypothesis on? Perhaps. But now Levine has come forward, informing Michael Cader (after he ran a mention of Sarah’s article in Publishers Lunch) that the Wolfe/Urqhart supposition is “completely wrong.” Levine adds, “I have written a detailed letter to Maclean’s about this, and they plan to publish it in the issue which will appear on the stands on January 17.” Back to square one, then… and, hey, these things happen. It’s not like I’ve ever been right about my Oprah Book Club theories. (At least, not without your help.)
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