Behind the Book: Canaries by Alex Makepeace
Choosing a nom de plume, and THE RETURN OF ALEX MAKEPEACE: As Cornerstones alumnus Tom Benjamin launches the sixth in his Bologna-set series, he is also looking forward to the return of his alter ego.
Tom Benjamin is a long-standing Cornerstones author and is known for his thriller series, Daniel Leicester, set in Bologna. However, he also writes with another pseudonym for his speculative novels, under the name of Alex Makepeace. Here the author tells us how this works, using his pseudonyms with different publishers.
My Bologna-set debut A Quiet Death in Italy was still ‘doing the rounds’ (it would be rejected sixteen times, dear readers, before being picked up by the wonderful Krystyna Green at Constable) when I decided to self-publish a speculative fiction novel I had penned around ten years earlier, around 2008, but had never even tried to get published. (I don’t think I sent it to a single agent, and certainly no publishers.) Looking back, this may have been a mistake, especially as the theme of my other book, The Poison People, was how society breaks down during an epidemic, but I just didn’t think it was commercial enough. Plugging it through Kindle promoters, who largely send out stuff to teens, this suspicion seemed confirmed – The Poison People received some positive reactions from people prepared to put in the effort, but Hunger Games, it was not.
One thing I did know – I wasn’t going to mix my Bologna-set series with my more speculative side, so I chose the pseudonym Alex Makepeace for The Poison People. ‘Alex’ because I thought it sounded suitably gender-neutral for a gender-sensitive genre (try saying that after a few drinks) and Makepeace because, well – William Makepeace Thackeray.
During the interregnum between finding an agent and a publisher (about a year) for A Quiet Death, as well as publishing The Poison People, I wrote another speculative novel, Canaries. I was more enthusiastic about the prospects of Canaries, however. Inspired by my experience of facing the loss of my rights following the Brexit vote (I was a resident of Italy), it tells the story of a middle-class gay couple and their children who go on the run when a totalitarian government is swept to power in the UK. It is grounded in the ordinary, and how friends and institutions respond. I was convinced it was relevant and commercial, but publishers turned out to be, frankly, uninterested. My agent said he had never received such strong rejections, largely along the lines of ‘no one wants to read about this’. I don’t think anyone actually said ‘it couldn’t happen here’ but reading between the lines…
While ‘Tom’s’ Bologna-based series took off, I never gave up on Canaries, but in the meantime, I had a second Daniel Leicester book to write, a third, and so on. It was only last year that a wonderful small press, Elsewhen, offered to publish Canaries. Early reviews have confirmed my, and Elsewhen’s opinion – the novel resonates powerfully, and of course is more relevant today than ever.
But what name to publish as? I had initially been set on ‘Tom’, but regretfully came to choose ‘Alex’ because the genres are so different. I hope to continue publishing a range of Italy-orientated, literary and commercial fiction as ‘Tom Benjamin’, while The Poison People and Canaries clearly occupy the ‘speculative’ space.
The sixth instalment of Tom Benjamin’s Bologna-set detective series, The Bologna Vendetta, was published this May.
Canaries comes out in July and is available for pre-order.
