Julian Barnes has written 14 novels. Or has he? What about the novels not written by him but by his alter ego Dan Kavanagh? In the 1980s, Barnes published four comic crime novels under this pseudonym, about the bisexual private detective Nick Duffy. The first, the cheerfully nasty Duffy, about a curious case of reverse blackmail, was published three months after Metroland in 1980: unlike that book, Duffy took Barnes not seven years to write, but ten days. Yet the book is suffused with Barnes’s elegance, comic style and understanding of human psychology – he can’t turn them off – even if it is ruder and more violent (‘If you scream’, a thug warns his victim, ‘I’ll see that your dentist gets a good month’s work, darling’) than anything he has written under his own name. The character of Duffy is an ex-policeman, hounded out of the force through the combination of bent copper boss and homophobic honey trap. He hates the sound of clocks and never says ‘Yes’ but only ‘All right’. ‘If you asked Duffy to marry you and he wanted to, he’d still only say “All right”.’ These may be books written with a different aim, but – like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s money-driven Pat Hobby stories – they are just as delightful in their own way as the major works. Booker Prize webpage on Julian Barnes.