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Who is the real Elly Conway? The real author of Argylle, unmasked

Feverish speculation ends here, as the Telegraph blows the cover of Elly Conway, the world's most enigmatic spy novelist

Eventually, the trailer for Vaughn’s Argylle was released, bringing with it the revelation that Elly Conway was a character in the film – a spy novelist, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, who gets caught up in real-life espionage. More bizarrely, social media has been awash with “Swifties” weaving together scraps of circumstantial evidence (noting, for example, that Taylor Swift often works with Conway Recording ­Studios) to argue that their idol is the book’s true author. But now, in one of the most ­startl­ing unmaskings since Mr Big ripped off his prosthetic face in Live and Let Die to reveal that he was really Dr Kananga, we can announce that Elly Conway is, in fact, two people: Terry Hayes, the Australian novelist and screenwriter, best known for his world-conquering 2013 debut I Am Pilgrim; and Tammy Cohen, the British author of psychological thrillers such as When She Was Bad (2016) and They All Fall Down (2017)

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