Time Out Chicago Translates It into (Pig) Latin

I was too busy the day of the signing to post this -- and too pooped immediately afterward, but Time Out Chicago ("Eirkay Affgray," by Jonathan Messinger) ran a nice Q&A:

Keir Graff started writing his novel Cold Lessons (Five Star, $29.95) 14 years ago, and now that it’s finally being published, some guy named Michael McCulloch is taking all the credit.

Graff, senior editor for Booklist Online, chose to publish his crime novel under a pseudonym, in part because of his job as a book critic, and partly because the publishing industry eats its young. He certainly isn’t the first to do it: Joyce Carol Oates has famously written under various names, and this spring John Banville—2005’s Booker Prize winner—will publish a novel under the name Benjamin Black.

Why the pseudonym?
I’ve had some other friends publish books, where they come in with their first book and it’s a work of genre fiction, and then they get pigeonholed as doing that. And this is a fairly modest first effort; it’s not a big publishing deal or anything like that. I hope to write a lot of books, and I hope to do a lot of different things: genre fiction, nonfiction, general fiction.

How did you pick the name?
Michael is my middle name, and McCulloch’s my mother’s maiden name. And I just like pseudonyms even more when there’s some sort of connection or clue, not that anybody’s going to be searching the archives too carefully for the clues.

Was your mother psyched that you used her name?
It’s funny. I think she’s pleased, but I think that had I written a work of historical fiction set in Montana or something, she’d be more pleased than with a very hard-boiled crime novel.

Newcity Offers the 411

The new Newcity ("Lesson Learned") blurbs the reading/signing tomorrow:

Explains McCulloch, "I think 'Cold Lessons' will appeal to people who like dark but darkly funny takes on the detective story and stories that don't necessarily guarantee triumph at the end."

I forgot to add that it will also appeal to everyone who enjoys the act of reading.

You'd Think I Would Remember Not Writing a Book

So, apparently, there's some guy named Keir Graff who says HE wrote Cold Lessons:

Michael McCulloch is not just another talented first novelist. Yes, his debut crime novel, Cold Lessons (Five Star), is a hard-hitting roman noir, but McCulloch is more than he seems. Lurking behind the pseudonym is our own Keir Graff, Booklist Online’s Senior Editor.

You can read the whole story on Booklist Online. But who's to say that "Keir Graff" isn't a pseudonym for Michael McCulloch?