Presumed to be INTRIGUED
Author builds on reputation with troubled police detective
If you ask Susie Steiner about the inspiration behind her critically acclaimed mystery thriller, Missing, Presumed, you’ll get a refreshingly straightforward answer.
“I wanted to write the kind of book I most want to read,” she says with a smile.
Still, there’s more to the equation than that. It’s not by accident that Steiner has given the novel’s conflicted heroine an eye problem.
That makes it personal because Steiner herself has known since childhood that she’s going blind.
Detective Sergeant Manon Bradshaw faces no similar fate, but her cavalier attitude toward her prolonged eye infection might infuriate anyone suffering from a real vision crisis. She’s a dedicated member of the Cambridgeshire police force. She is also a messedup human being — in the words of one critic, “a character so real, she bleeds.”
Here, she finds herself plunged into a high-profile criminal case when the 24-year-old daughter of a celebrated physician goes missing. But in the most critical days of the investigation, Manon is also suffering from a simple eye infection and can’t be bothered to do anything about it.
“Not being able to see your way clear in a police investigation and not being able to see and have insight — all these things feed into how I feel about eyesight,” Steiner explains calmly over coffee in a Bloomsbury hotel.
“I did an interview on Radio 4 recently where I was talking about the fact that Manon suffers from conjunctivitis, which can be killed with antibiotics, whereas my eyesight is not curable. It’s still hard to face, actually, even though I’ve known since I was five.”
Steiner suffers from a degenerative disorder called retinitis pigmentosa, the hallmark of which is encroaching tunnel vision. Hers is a milder form and its progress has been slow — until it started accelerating five years ago.
That led to a tough moment of truth in 2013, the year when her first novel, Homecoming, set in an agricultural community in Yorkshire, was published to universal praise.
It was also the year Britain’s Moorfields Eye Hospital classified her as blind.
“It can sometimes seem that just when you get the thing you most want in life, something else gets taken away, as if some celestial reckoning is going on,” she wrote in a Daily Mail piece three years ago. “My right eye is responsible for all my seeing. It aches with the task. It seems, at 41, my time — and my sight — is running out faster than I expected.”
Yet today, in the atrium of a London hotel, there’s no sense of anything wrong. The lighting is bright enough not to cause anxiety. She’s arrived for her interview under her own steam after a shopping expedition on Oxford Street. She’s happy at the success of this new novel. And she’s certainly not asking for pity.
“I don’t want to be known as the ‘blind’ writer,” she tells Postmedia bluntly.
Hers is a milder, slower version of the disease, and she’s learned to live with the small window of vision remaining in her right eye. And she understands the meaning of stoicism.
“I still function very well at the moment. But for most of my life, they ’ve been saying — don’t worry, within 10 years they’ll be treating this. But then you find that’s still 10 years away, so it feels like an evermoving target.”
Meanwhile, she continues to work as a journalist. Married with two children, she enjoys a warm and fulfilling family life. And now she’s carving out her own niche as a novelist.
Missing, Presumed, published in Canada by HarperCollins, is a big departure from her first book, but does it mark her entry into the crime genre?
“I don’t want to sound snobby, but I don’t write crime fiction,” Steiner says with a laugh. “I write contemporary literary fiction.” If she has a role model, it’s Kate Atkinson, a literary novelist who also has won popular success with a series of stories featuring a troubleshooting investigator named Jackson Brodie. “They’re mysteries but not conventional crime fiction,” Steiner says.
But the mystery that Steiner comes up with in Presumed, Missing should satisfy the most demanding aficionado. And Steiner manages to produce some surprising twists, especially when it comes to character. Indeed, the more you learn about missing Cambridge student Edith Hind, the less you’re inclined to like her.
“No, I don’t think she’s a very likable person,” Steiner says cheerfully. “But then she’s young … as spoiled and narcissistic as all 24-year-olds.”
On the other hand, it’s difficult to dislike Manon Bradshaw, the cop with the troubled private life. The novel begins with a wickedly funny episode in which Manon is experiencing another disastrous Internet date — a self-absorbed bore who wants to talk about newts.
“Well, it’s tough out there on the dating circuit,” Steiner grins. “She’s needy and nutty and she’s probably not going about it in the best way.”
“But I think she’s very much in the normal range of being neurotic. I don’t think she’s crazy. She’s lonely in the ordinary way and wants the things that lots of people want. … She’s at a tense age for lots of women — she’s 39 — and for men there isn’t the same fertility clock going. She’s a good cop and highly intelligent but she feels she’s in a race against time.”
British reviews for Missing, Presumed find Manon irresistible. So does her creator. That means Manon will be back in Steiner’s next novel, which is proving a challenge.
“I don’t enjoy plotting at all, and I’ve tied myself into a knot with this next book,” she says merrily. “In Missing, Presumed, I knew the basic shape and ending. But with this book there’s a dead body and I literally don’t know at this point who did it. That’s really frightening. But we’ll see how it turns out.”