Dear Sir, Our client Mr Arthur Cladgebind...

A little booklet just published called Safe Names (New Writers’ Association, £3.95) will be a boon not only to new writers but to all writers of fiction. The team of compilers (who remain anonymous, asserting that their own names are too humorous to mention), realised that for many authors thinking up names for their characters is a time-wasting chore, and have made up a list of over 15,000 possible names from which writers can choose as many as they need before starting a new novel. Every one is a perfect compromise between the real-sounding but forgettable and the memorable but ridiculous.

More importantly, every one is guaranteed not to belong to any living person. In today’s world, if an author gives a thoroughly nasty character the name of a real person, he or his publishers run a serious risk of that person demanding substantial damages. One can imagine an agent, in the middle of negotiating film rights, tetchily phoning the author: “Look here, old man, this coke-head character you’ve got who gets had up for bigamy in Chapter IV. You’ve called him George Crumshaw. Damn it, there must be hundreds of ‘em and some are sure to sue, can’t you make it Charlie Grapefeather or something?”

Obviously a great deal of research went into the compilation. It would have been no use just dreaming up unlikely names and hoping for the best, because some people’s names really do sound preposterous; I mean, you might think you’d be safe with Nora Barnacle, but James Joyce’s lover was actually called that.

Perhaps in a later edition there will be a section listing names of people who have agreed that, for a fee, characters in a novel who behave splendidly throughout may be named after them. Personally I wouldn’t ask for a fee if some young novelist wanted to use my name for his handsome, tough, brilliantly successful but somehow deeply lovable hero.