Melville House Books

As a member of the U.K.’s famed special forces, the SAS, Andy McNab “shot dead a member of the IRA” at the age of 19 and, before the first Gulf War, “led an SAS patrol behind Iraqi lines” in a daring mission that became the subject of a “staggeringly succesful” book — it sold 1.7 million copies in the UK alone. Now, as Robert Hanks observes in a profile for The Independent, McNab has “parlayed that success into a new career as a writer of gritty contemporary thrillers, and last year was declared the top-selling UK thriller writer.” Yet because of his background, he has to keep his anonymity, with his image obscured on book jackets. And “McNab” isn’t his real name. Yet, as he himself admits, he is a celebrity like many others. “I’ve sold beer, watches,” he observes. And as for the reasons for keeping his anonymity: “The way it was portrayed — ‘Oh, the Iraqis are after him’ — it’s a load of old crap. What it is, it’s domestic terrorism.” So why continue it? Perhaps because it contributes to his success. As Hanks notes of McNab’s newest book, Deep Black, “The plot strains credibility, and the terse, slangy prose is sometimes repetitive . . . .” But what sells his books is “the implicit promise that, though they may be fiction, they are at some level, in some way, real.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.