Next week sees the second anniversary of the revelation that JK Rowling had written a crime novel as “Robert Galbraith”, a chap with a “background in the army”. But such pseudonyms look to be fast becoming a thing of the past.

While posh writers are more drawn to pop genres than ever, literature’s class system is becoming less rigid, and they no longer behave as if they’re shiftily slumming undercover in the various underworlds of crime fiction, SF, fantasy, graphic novels and formulaic TV dramas.

The Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland, for example, recently explained why his latest thriller appears under his own name, after five previous books as Sam Bourne; and former Costa book of the year winner AL Kennedy sees no need for a nom de plume in publishing Doctor Who: The Drosten’s Curse, a Whovian romp set at a golf spa hotel (it opens enticingly with a man being “eaten alive by a bunker”) that comes out on Thursday. Sophie Hannah, Helen Dunmore, Julie Myerson and Jeanette Winterson didn’t adopt more intimidating identities when recently producing horror novellas for Hammer; and the likes of Michael Chabon and Dave Eggers in the US don’t hide behind pen names when writing for comics.

If this is the dying fall of the literary pseudonym, it brings to an end a long tradition that has freed up satirists, political journalists and knowers of secrets (Swift, Voltaire, Orwell, Le Carré) to tell the truth without fear, and allowed female writers from the Brontës to Harper Lee to publish under male or ambiguous names.

For others, it has been “liberating”rather than self-protective (as Rowling said of her three months as Galbraith before being outed); she was continuing a line of novelists who take on a second life as crime writers, from Cecil Day-Lewis (Nicholas Blake) to Julian Barnes (Dan Kavanagh) and John Banville (Benjamin Black). The poet and reigning TS Eliot prize winner David Harsent is also David Lawrence, stalwart scriptwriter for The Bill and Midsomer Murders.

The crumbling of the pseudonym convention arguably began with children’s fiction, where moonlighting literary novelists such as Salman Rushdie are often found but fake selves are remarkably rare. Grown-up genres have since fallen into line, as epitomised by the poet Sophie Hannah sticking with her own name, unlike Harsent, in a successful sideline in psychological thrillers.

Erotica could prove to be pseudonymity’s last holdout. But even here, disguises of late – Erika Leonard becoming EL James – have tended to be half-hearted, as if asking to be stripped away.

