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Maybe you'll remember Jules, the teenage motorcyclist messenger who is whacko about music and especially about Cynthia Hawkins, an American soprano who is making her Parisian debut. He goes to her concert and surreptitiously tapes it, then in her backstage dressing room he steals her - I'm afraid Delacorta calls it her gown. It was on a chair, chums. Meanwhile we have gangsters and corrupt cops. Chief gangster honcho is Jean Saporta who owns drugs and prostitution in Paris, and his accomplice Boulanger, head of the vice squad. Saporta's mistress fingers him and Boulanger on a cassette and delivers it to an intermediary. For various reasons the cassette winds up in Jules' saddlebag, though he is not on to this dangerous fact. So Jules is tearing around Paris carrying two exceedingly interesting items. Saporta discovers that Jules has his tape but he can't find Jules who has teamed up with Gorodish and Alba, and I shan't say any more except to remind you of Jules' triumphant ride through the Paris Metro on his motorcycle.

In 1975, Emile Ajar's second novel, La Vie devant soi, was a French literary sensation. The fictionalised memoir of an Arab boy growing up in a Parisian suburb, packed with extraordinary slang, aggressive jokes and almost unbelievable characters, the book was lathered with praise by critics, eventually wining the Goncourt, the French equivalent of the Booker. It went on to become the bestselling French novel of the 20th century. There was only one problem: Ajar was actually Roman Gary, already a bestselling French author (and previous winner of the Goncourt, which is supposed to be awarded to any particular writer only once), who had reinvented himself to outwit the literary establishment and win a new readership. David Bellos doesn't appear to be a huge fan of Gary's work - he describes at least one of his books as \"unreadable\" and others as \"middlebrow\" - but he's cleverly used his life to investigate the connections between a writer's fiction and his autobiography, and as an excuse for some very funny digs at literary fame, fortune and fashion. The success of La Vie devant soi turned Ajar into a major literary star, who could no longer be hidden behind veils of secrecy. Gary asked his cousin's son, Paul Pavlowitch, to impersonate the writer in interviews, but made the mistake of allowing a photograph to be distributed too. When Pavlowitch was recognised and journalists made the connection, Gary first issued statements promising that he was not Ajar and then dashed off a book, Pseudo, written in six weeks and published under Ajar's name, in which Pavlowitch acknowledged his own authorship while admitting that he was quite mad.

In a memoir just published, ''L'homme que l'on croyait,'' Mr. [Paul Pavlowitch] says that Mr. Gary asked him to pose as the writer, not only of the 1975 book, ''La Vie Devant Soi,'' but of three other novels as well. ''La Vie Devant Soi'' was published in England and the United States as ''Momo,'' which was also the name of a film based on the book. It starred Simone Signoret. According to Mr. Pavlowitch, Mr. Gary told him in 1972 that he planned to write other books under another name because ''he no longer had the freedom he needed.'' Mr. Pavlowitch does not explain the quotation. In December 1973, Mr. Gary finished ''Gros Calin,'' the first novel by ''[Emile Ajar].'' It was modestly successful. In 1975, ''La Vie Devant Soi'' appeared and soon won the Prix Goncourt for fiction.

In 1984 the American Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters awarded one of its distinguished fiction prizes to a new and presumably young Chicano writer named Danny Santiago, for his first novel, ''Famous All Over Town.'' Subsequent to the award it was revealed, with some embarrassment, that the newly discovered Chicano writer was not Chicano at all: ''Danny Santiago'' turned out to be the pseudonym of 73-year-old Daniel James, author of several previously published books, and better known as a playwright and screenwriter, a former Communist Party member who had been blacklisted by Hollywood in the 1950's. By his account, James wrote ''Famous All Over Town'' as a consequence of his experience doing volunteer work in Mexican-American districts of Los Angeles in the 1950's and 60's, and chose to publish it under a Hispanic pseudonym because he had lost confidence in his own writing ability. Yet it is plausible to assume that he chose ''Santiago'' over ''James'' because, while writing the novel - which is narrated by a 14-year-old Chicano boy - he felt closer to ''Santiago'' than to ''James.'' (Though ''Famous All Over Town'' alone should have been the issue, and not its author's identity, the awards committee confessed that they might have had second thoughts about giving the novel their prize, had they known its author was ''Anglo'' and not ''Chicano.'') It may be that, after a certain age, our instinct for anonymity is as powerful as that for identity - or, more precisely, for an erasure of the primary self in that another (hitherto undiscovered?) self may be released. [Romain Gary], writing as the unknown ''[Emile Ajar],'' is no longer writing as Gary, but as Gary-through-''Ajar''; the Danish noblewoman Baroness Karen Blixen, choosing ''Isak Dinesen'' (''Isak'': one who laughs) as a pseudonym, is writing as Blixen-through-''Isak Dinesen,'' thereby evoking an ancestral, magisterial and certainly unfeminine self. Jonathan Swift, behind the mask of ''Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq.'' in the deadpan satire of 1708-09 known as the ''Bickerstaff Papers,'' is Swift-through-''Bickerstaff'' - and should one doubt the existence of ''Bickerstaff,'' his thought-tormented likeness is reproduced in The Tatler in 1710. When, for instance, Gore Vidal published several mystery-thrillers in the 1950's under the name ''Edgar Box,'' the novels were praised as successes of their genre by the very publications that were, at the time, ignoring Mr. Vidal's serious fiction. (By Mr. Vidal's account, the American literary establishment was so offended by his third novel, ''The City and the Pillar,'' for its ''perverted'' - i.e., homosexual - subject matter, that his next five books were boycotted by major reviewing publications. In order to support himself he wrote the ''Box'' novels, each in eight days. And though they were well received when issued under the name ''Edgar Box'' they were conspicuously less well received when reissued under ''Gore Vidal'' some years later.) FOR a woman to write under a male or a male-sounding pseudonym - ''Currer Bell,'' for instance, instead of Charlotte Bronte; ''George Sand'' instead of Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin, Baroness Dudevant - may be a decision based upon practical expediency in a male-dominated culture; but it may also stimulate the imagination in unanticipated ways. As Robert Southey, then the Poet Laureate of England, explained to young Charlotte Bronte: ''Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be.'' Consequently the Bronte sisters chose androgynous pseudonyms: ''Currer Bell'' (Charlotte Bronte), ''Ellis Bell'' (Emily Bronte), ''Acton Bell'' (Anne Bronte) for ''Jane Eyre,'' ''Wuthering Heights'' and ''Agnes Grey'' respectively. When ''Jane Eyre'' appeared in 1847 it was an immediate success - ''Currer Bell'' became famous overnight - and much speculation raged concerning the probable sex of the author. The intelligence, vigor and passion of the work argued for its having been written by a man, commentators noted; at the same time, its sensitivity, and, of course, its point of view in the heroine Jane, argued for its having been written by a woman.