There really are two of us, and we are very different. A book buyer who reads one of us is unlikely to want to read the other. The problem is that readers have no way of telling us apart either on the net or in a store.

The only serious attempt to separate us started with a letter I wrote to the Bookseller several years ago:

“Sir, My name is no longer my own, and there's not a damn thing I can do about it. So I've got a plan. I'm going to call myself Stephen King, churn out 60,000 words and get my local stationer to publish it…” read more »

Follow-up articles appeared in the Guardian January 19 and January 21, the Independent on Sunday January 31  and the Western Morning News January 20. There were also a number of letters in response to my letter and the articles as well as at least half a dozen amused radio interviews.

All this, and yet the situation remains unchanged. Any suggestions?

...And this is by any means just my problem or a problem solved

Literary doubles
The Guardian, July 31, 2008, By Christie David Jenkins

Sharing a name with another writer was bad enough, but when their work began to be confused by friends and readers, David Jenkins decided that enough was enough: he had to meet his journalistic doppelganger. Then both men made a shocking discovery ...

I'm having an identity crisis, because there's a new David Jenkins on the block, journalistically speaking. There have, of course, been loads of my namesakes; the steroid-smuggling silver medallist has been around for aeons now, and the perhaps heretical Bishop of Durham hung up his mitre 14 years ago - though not before I, then a toiler on a religious affairs programme for Granada TV, had him deliver a 10-minute homily to camera solely so that the credits could read, "Presented by David Jenkins ... Researched by David Jenkins".

As for the David Jenkins who wrote a pre-Lonely Planet guide to Laos - well, I remember shuffling down the main street in Vientiane one sultry day in 1975 with my friend Bruce Palling, then the BBC's stringer in Bangkok. A young man approached: "David Jenkins!" cried Palling. "Meet David Jenkins." Perhaps it was that David Jenkins the Jakarta Foreign Correspondents' Club were looking for when they emailed me a couple of months ago, asking if I had been their founder back in the 70s. They'd lost touch with me (or him) and was I him (or me, if you see what I mean). I wasn't, but if that David Jenkins is out there, the chaps are looking for you.

But this new David Jenkins ... He writes for Time Out, as I used to, and he writes about film, as I have done. At first, I shrugged it off; it was, it's true, mildly embarrassing to have friends ask if I had really liked some particularly dour example of Slovenian cinema, but I could rise above it. After all, when I had first hit the London magazine scene in the early 70s there was another and much revered David Jenkins on the scene, operating as features editor of Nova, the hip 'n' happening periodical of the time.
Anyway, that David Jenkins didn't seem to pay any heed to my acidulous scribbling in IT and Time Out. Indeed, the only contact I had with him was tangential: I once met an attractive young woman at a noisy party. "Hello,"

I shouted, "I'm David Jenkins." "Yes," she yelled, "I divorced him last week." She was, of course, Valerie Jenkins, now Valerie Grove, sometime writer for all the best newspapers as well as the acclaimed biographer of Dodie Smith and John Mortimer. In fact, it's just possible that her David Jenkins had reacted to the hot breath of my hackish prose for he had by then given up journalism in favour of writing books - first, Black Zion, about Judaism in Africa, and then a study of Patti Hearst that took him to California and marriage to June, who ran the San Francisco Women's Choir. That didn't last, and he ended up in Kyoto, translating haikus. He died, much mourned, in 2000.

So, I decided to take a lofty view of the new David Jenkins. Or I pretended to: actually, the frequency of being asked, "Is it you who writes that stuff for Time Out?" was beginning to grate. And then came the remake of Flight of the Red Balloon. The 1961 original was itself a byword for nauseating sentimentality but it was at least well made. This year's version wasn't just pass-the-sickbag-Alice twee, it was also abysmal. And David Jenkins liked it. Loved it. Raved about it.

I had to do something. I'd already tried to mess with his mind a little by writing a piece on mumbling in the movies for G2, wondering how he'd feel when he saw a piece about film, under his name, that he hadn't written. Would he pale? Think he'd turned to automatic writing, in his sleep? Start worrying about his alcohol consumption? He'd be forgetting his own name next. Then I started publishing pieces about my drug-addled days on the hippy trail; let's see how he'd like to be thought of as a 60-year-old man in a young man's body.

It wasn't enough. So I phoned Tony Elliott, who owns Time Out and whom I've known for a long time. What was this David Jenkins like, I asked. Tony emailed me a photo of my doppelganger: fresh-faced, trusting, kind - clearly not me. But I'd scratched the itch; I had to know more. I had to meet him. So I phoned Time Out and I got his voicemail and it said, "This is David Jenkins," and I said, "This is David Jenkins," and he called back, and we made a date.

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