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The Mysterious Case of the Bestselling Author and Her Crime-writing Pseudonym is one that has had London’s publishing industry agog for the past two days.

Forget the plot of The Cuckoo’s Calling, the “debut” crime novel by JK Rowling — under the name Robert Galbraith — the real whodunnit questions are now centring on just how she pulled off such a remarkable stunt — and who knew about it beforehand.

Inevitably, there has also been speculation about whether, as with many a crime novel, this was all a case of smoke and mirrors in the first place, and cynicism about how she was unmasked to such massive effect at the weekend.

“It’s pretty good timing, isn’t it?” sniffed one literary agent who didn’t want to be named. “The news comes out just in time for the start of the summer holidays, just before The Casual Vacancy [Rowling’s first adult novel] comes out in paperback.

“It couldn’t have been better for her.”

It’s certainly done wonders for sales of The Cuckoo’s Calling. Until the weekend the novel, published in May, had sold around 500 hardback copies, with total sales rising to 1,500 when ebooks, exports and library copies were counted.

By today, orders on Amazon had rocketed by 4,000 per cent to number one on its list, with Waterstones saying it had sold out and signed copies attracting bids of £400 on eBay.

But in an industry known for its cynicism and backstabbing, there seems largely to be a belief that Rowling’s outing was not organised — although it does retain a degree of mystery.

Philip Jones, editor of The Bookseller, said: “It may have increased sales but I don’t think this would have been how the publishers would have wanted it to happen as they now have to wait for a new print run to come through and that takes time.

“I think they may have wanted to wait until another book had come out under the Robert Galbraith name before letting the secret out.”

So just how was Rowling unmasked as Robert Galbraith — and who were her partners in crime?

As befitting a very modern mystery, it all started with a tweet.

Sunday Times journalist and novelist India Knight tweeted on July 9 about reading The Cuckoo’s Calling and how good it was for a debut novel.

Among the 97,000 people who follow her, one called Jude Callegari, a mother of two from Claygate, replied to her just after midnight saying it wasn’t a debut novel but by an existing author.

When Knight asked “Who?” she got the scintillating answer of Rowling. Fascinated, Knight then replied: “EH?” but with that, her literary Deep Throat went offline, deleted all his or her tweets and has been seen and heard of no more.

Her interest piqued, Knight tipped off Richard Brooks, arts editor of The Sunday Times, who began his own investigation. He discovered that “Robert Galbraith” shared the same agent — Neil Blair — and the same editor at publisher Little, Brown as Rowling. The Cuckoo’s Calling was published under the Sphere arm of the company.

And when he sent The Casual Vacancy, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and The Cuckoo’s Calling for textual analysis by two linguistic experts, they both came back with the verdict that all three had been written by the same person.

In his new role as Poirot to the arts world, Brooks told National Public Radio in the US that he then played a “cat-and-mouse game” with Little, Brown. “I went to them and said I’d been reading this Cuckoo’s Calling and didn’t think it was actually written by this guy.

“I said ‘Who is he? Can I interview him?’ and they came back and said, sorry, no. So I put a very direct question: ‘Is it Rowling?’”

At that point Little, Brown and Rowling did come clean.

But what of the mysterious Ms Callegari? Brooks says: “Of course I’m aware of it [being a possible publicity stunt].

“The original tweet, perhaps, might have been Rowling herself who wanted to be outed. Who knows?”

The other mystery surrounding Robert Galbraith is exactly who in the publishing industry knew his real identity.

Rowling credited David Shelley, her editor at Little, Brown, with being the perfect accomplice when it came to preserving the mystery.

Shelley, 37, scored a massive coup when Rowling jumped ship to Little, Brown in 2011 and published The Casual Vacancy under its imprint last year.

At the same time, she ditched her previous agent, Christopher Little, and took on Blair, a former film industry executive who had left Little to set up his own agency, The Blair Partnership.

Blair became infamous for his ferocious control over the release of the much-hyped The Casual Vacancy, creating a “super-embargo” on advance copies that had arts editors gobsmacked by its legal threats.

Despite his pugnacious business style, Blair is well-liked within the publishing industry, as is Shelley.

Jonny Geller, a literary agent with Curtis Brown, says: “They’re both nice guys, very approachable, nice to talk to. I think this is an interesting move on their part. The question now is whether Blair is going to expand beyond focusing just on JK and into representing crime writers, and what he’ll do next.”

While The Casual Vacancy, perhaps inevitably, became an instant bestseller, it garnered lukewarm reviews from critics. Industry chatter is that Little Brown has taken a big financial loss on The Casual Vacancy (much to the glee of Rowling’s former publishers, Bloomsbury) but that The Cuckoo’s Calling was the Plan B for her foray into the adult market.

Forbes estimated that she had received as much as £4 million in advance for her first effort and publishing sources say there is no way senior executives would have authorised such a sum if they didn’t know about the crime novel beforehand.

So when exactly did the debut crime novel land on the desks of London publishers? And was the decision to adopt a pseudonym made before or afterwards?

“I think that’s the interesting question now,” said Bookseller editor Jones.

“It does seem this book did the rounds of other publishers but it is interesting that it was Sphere, part of Little, Brown that took it on.

“What we really want to know, and what hasn’t been answered fully, is whether this book was doing the rounds before The Casual Vacancy came out.”

Blair and Shelley have insisted that no one at Sphere knew who the author was and the novel was taken on entirely on its own merits.

Jones added: “I really don’t think anyone else knew — this is a very leaky industry and there wasn’t a hint of this until now.

“We were invited to a presentation at Little, Brown where The Cuckoo’s Calling was one of the books featured and there was no one giving us the wink or making us think this was anything other than a debut novel.”

At least one editor — Kate Mills of Orion Books — has admitted she turned the novel down, although other, perhaps red-faced executives have been more reticent in coming forward.

But for a first-time author, the book attracted some big-hitting credit blurbs, including from Scottish crime writers Alex Bray and Val McDermid (McDermid is also part of the Little, Brown stable). Both are on Rowling’s circuit of literati.

Rowling, who has a house in Edinburgh, also lives just around the corner from crime novelist Ian Rankin and author Alexander McCall-Smith.

Way back in 2007, Rankin was talking about how Rowling had told him she wanted to write a crime novel. So was he on in the act?

Rankin and McDermid came back with an emphatic “no” when asked yesterday if they knew Rowling was Galbraith

Of course, the benefit of hindsight is bringing out all kinds of claims of inside knowledge or prescience; Knight said last night that there were “clues everywhere” in the writing to the fact that Galbraith was a woman and that the book was not all it seemed. And what of the name “Robert Galbraith”? The words, if taken back to their Germanic and Gaelic origins, loosely translate as “famous stranger.”

Galbraith may no longer be a stranger but he’s certainly famous. And, along with Rowling, he will be laughing all the way to the bank with the proceeds of his literary heist.