I’m proof it’s never too late to write a BESTSELLER

Belinda despaired she’d never get a book deal. Now her thriller is in the running for the Booker Prize

WHen Belinda Bauer, 55, was long-listed for the Booker Prize for her novel, Snap, shockwaves reverberated through the literary world.

The £50,000 prize is traditionally awarded to highbrow literary fiction ( previous winners have included Julian Barnes and Penelope Lively).

But now a crime thriller — written by a mid-life woman — has been nominated for the UK’s most prestigious book award alongside new novels by the poet Robin Robertson and Michael Ondaatje (a previous winner for The english Patient).

‘I knew crime books never get on the Booker list, they’re considered the secondclass citizen of the literary world,’ says Belinda (right), who confesses to having once been ‘a crime snob’ too.

‘I was horrified that I was going to be pigeonholed as a crime writer, partly because crime has been ghettoised over the years. But now I realise I can tell every story I’ve ever wanted to tell in this format. And I’m so grateful.’

The Booker judges described Snap, which is inspired by the murder of a pregnant mother, Marie Wilks, on the M50 in 1988 (the real-life crime remains unsolved), as ‘ an acute, stylish, intelligent novel about how we survive trauma’. ‘It’s come completely from left-field, it’s amazing,’ says Belinda, when we meet in London. She is on a flying visit from Cardiff, where she lives with her boyfriend, Simon, an IT consultant.

The irony is Belinda hadn’t even read a crime novel before writing her debut novel, Blacklands, ten years ago. A former journalist and screenwriter, with half a dozen screenplays in her bottom drawer that never got made, she had begun to despair about her future.

‘I’ve always been a late starter. I wrote my first novel to shut my mother up. She had nagged me horribly for years to write a novel. She was so sick of hearing me moan about my screenwriting misadventures.’ BeLIndA

is close to her mother. The family moved to South Africa when she was eight and, although her parents separated when she was 12, it was a privileged existence ‘with a big house and beautiful garden’ .

When Belinda was 18, her mother brought her and two of her siblings back to the UK. ‘We lived in an extremely damp little cottage in north devon. We were the smelly kids at school because our clothes stank.’

Her mother worked as a cleaner. There was no phone or washing machine.

The dedication of her first book reads simply: ‘ To my mother who gave us everything and never thought it was enough.’ Today, most of Belinda’s books are set in idyllic devon locations but she knows how challenging life can be, especially for children. Indeed, she is fascinated by their resilience.

‘It’s much easier to be objective about children if you don’t have them,’ she adds dryly. The opening chapter of Snap is devastating — three children sit in a sweltering car by the side of the motorway waiting for their mother to come back with help.

When she doesn’t, 11-year-old Jack picks up the baby, Merry, and marshals his little sister, Joy, along the hard shoulder.

nobody stops. When they finally get to the emergency phone that their mother set out to reach, it is dangling off the hook. Bauer read about the Marie Wilks case 30 years ago and it still haunts her.

‘Those children were the starting point: that scene on the motorway.’ In real life, Marie Wilks’s 11-year- old sister was found walking up the side of the M50, carrying Marie’s one-yearold son. ‘They walked up the hard shoulder on the motorway on a blazing hot day for miles, and not one single car stopped to see if this little girl carrying a baby was okay,’ Belinda says.

She covered later developments during her time as a journalist in Cardiff. Marie Wilks’s murder was seemingly random and opportunistic: it also taught Belinda that ‘dreadful things can happen to people like me’.

She openly admits: ‘I’ve spent my whole life being terrified. I don’t trust anybody. I’ll take my dog for a walk and think: “Wow, what if somebody jumped out of a hedge, what would I do?” I go through worst-case scenarios all the time. And now I have a job where I can use that stuff.’

The central idea for her 2010 debut, Blacklands, also came from an horrific real-life crime. The story of a boy who enters into correspondence with an imprisoned paedophile serial killer, it was inspired by a TV interview with Winnie Johnson, mother of Moors Murder victim Keith Bennett.

Bravely, Belinda took a year out of work to write Blacklands. Just as she was running out of money, she saw an advert in a magazine requesting submissions for the Crime Writers’ Association debut dagger Award for unpublished writers.

She entered the first 3,000 words of Blacklands and was shortlisted, which brought her to the attention of agent Jane Gregory, who represented crime writer Val Mcdermid. With Jane on board, Blacklands sold within a week. ‘I was in Ikea when Jane called and said there was a bidding auction.’

Belinda says the real triumph was putting a finished copy in her mother’s lap.

Seven more crime novels followed, but it’s Snap that has really put her on the map — and made other crime writers cheer.

Just published, the paperback went straight into the top-ten bestsellers list at number four.

Although her books deal with murder and child abuse, Belinda avoids gratuitous detail. ‘I can achieve what I want without too much blood. You can make the reader feel compassion or horror or fear for your character without chopping their head off!’

And therein lies Belinda Bauer’s great talent, it is her empathy for the victims that leads us beyond the grisly facts and keeps us hooked.

At last we have a truly accessible Booker nominee.