[Pulpmeister]

I have been reading and preparing an e-book from a 1916 newspaper serial by "Paul Urquhart," and boy is there potential for confusion.

There are several characters whose names are similar:

Brand
Grant
Hardy
Davis
Sharp

All those "a' names! What was Urquhart thinking?

There is enough visual similarity in them to cause a shake of the head and a "say what?" while you work out which of the characters is involved, specially if there are two or three of them together. This is made even more tricky because, like so many writers good and bad, "Urquhart" doesn't distinguish characters much by speech patterns either.

I am sternly resisting the temptation to "global replace" one or two of the names with something like "Templeton" or "Moore" just to get rid of a couple of the "a" names and make things clearer.

But it is a good reminder to writers: you really do have to distinguish characters very clearly from each other by name and, wherever possible, by speech patterns.

This was the last book written as by "Urquhart" by the duo Ladbroke Black and Paul Meech; later "Urquhart" books were by Black alone.