I first met Sam Reaves, a.k.a. Dominic Martell, a.k.a. Allen Salter at a duo book signing he and Michael Black held in Chicago. Wow, was I impressed. Here was a most thoughtful man. Tragically, his novels have not had the sales numbers they deserve.
That’s one of the reasons why Sam/Dominic/Allen is willing to write under any name a publisher will take.
So now listen in as Allen Salter—that is his real name, really it is—talks about why he and other writers use pen names.
The man behind Sam Reaves and Dominic Martell
“In grade school, I read Mark Twain,” says Chicago mystery/suspense writer Allen Salter. “When I learned that wasn’t his real name, I realized we could make up our own names.”
And so he did. Twice.
Allen Salter became Sam Reaves for his crime novels A Long Cold Fall (1991), Fear Will Do It (1992), Bury It Deep (1993), Get What’s Coming (1995), Dooley’s Back (2002), Homicide 69 (2006), and Mean Town Blues (2008).
For his international espionage/suspense novels, Lying Crying Dying (1998), The Republic of Night (1999), and Gitana (2001), Salter became Dominic Martell.
Salter always intended to be a writer, and, after his grade school revelation about Mark Twain/Samuels Clemens, he knew he would write under a pen name.
“It’s as simple as I never liked my name as a kid,” he says. “Samuel Reaves was my great uncle. I was named for him. Yes, my first name is Samuel. When I decided to go for a pen name, I looked to see whether anyone named Samuel Reaves had ever published anything. One had, my great uncle. He had published his dissertation in mathematics from the University of Chicago.
“So I decided to become Sam Reaves to honor my great uncle.”
That worked well for Salter’s first series of books, crime stories set in and around Chicago. Putnam, his publisher, eventually dropped the series and told Salter to send them something different.
And did he ever—a story of espionage and intrigue set in Barcelona, Spain, built around a character named Pascual, a terrorist turned informer.
Salter could do the book easily because he’s fluent in six languages, he’s worked as a translator, and he’s lived and traveled extensively in Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America.
“So I wrote Lying Crying Dying, something radically different, and Putnam rejected it because it was too different. It wasn’t a Sam Reaves book.”
Salter did what any good writer would do. He took the manuscript to another publisher, the British publisher Gollancz. They loved it. But, said they, “we need a new name because Sam Reaves sounds too American for this European type of book.”
“When they asked me for a new name,” Salter says, “I sat down and drew up a list of vaguely Latin-sounding first names and vaguely Latin-sounding last names. I sent them the list and said choose one from Column A and one from Column B, and they did. And that’s how I became Dominic Martell.”
There’s a business reason for writing under more than one name.
“A lot of people are taking on pseudonyms as a way of beating the Barnes & Noble computer,” Salter says. “If you get labeled in the Barnes & Noble computer as a low-sales author, they won’t order your next book. So you have to fake out the computer.”
A new name will do that.
“So established writers are starting out with new names, sometimes several times, which I almost did with Homicide 69—a Sam Reaves book. My agent and I discussed it,” Salter says. “Some of the rejections said, ‘We’d love to publish this book, but we won’t be able to break this guy out because he has several books in print that haven’t done well.
“I wound up telling my agent they can put any name they want on the book as long as they’ll publish it. But I also felt, and my agent agreed with me, that it would be a little silly to change my name in the middle of a series because Homicide 69 is a prequel to Dooley’s Back that was already out.”
Salter wanted unity for what he hoped would be a long series, a series of novels about the Dooley police family. He got what he wanted, and Homicide 69 came out under the Sam Reaves name.
Then came Salter’s latest novel, Mean Town Blues. He calls it a shoot-’em-up, and he ripped the story out in a hurry. “It was eventually published as a Sam Reaves book, but when I first sent it to my agent, I said, ‘If the name is a problem—because we had just gone through the whole thing with names with Homicide 69—I said if the name is a problem, we’ll go with another pseudonym.’ He said, ‘Fine. What would you like?’ I said, ‘I have a daughter named Jessie and a son named Nick, so let’s go with Jesse Nicks.’ So for a brief time, I almost became Jesse Nicks.”
Looking back now, Salter wishes he’d given in and gone with a different pen name for Homicide 69. “I wish I had let one of those publishers put a snazzy new pseudonym on the book and try to break Homicide 69 out. It would have been interesting to see if it would have made a difference.”
Books out on the horizon? Nightfall Algiers, a Dominic Martell noir suspense novel set in Algiers in 1961, and the third Sam Reaves novel in the Dooley series. Both are with Salter’s agent.
To find out more about Salter/Reaves/Martell and his books, go to samreaves.com
He also blogs as Sam Reaves at conjecturesandrefutations.blogspot.com
© Jerry Peterson.
