Mo Hayder
Author whose inventive thrillers were ‘jaw-droppingly grisly’
CLARE DUNKEL, the crime novelist Mo Hayder, who has died of motor neurone disease aged 59, specialised in graphic thrillers of the sort it would be inadvisable to read on a full stomach.
Her first novel, Birdman (1999), featured a necrophiliac serial killer who stitches live finches into the chest cavities of his mutilated victims. Her second, The Treatment (2001), concerned a sadistic paedophile killer called the Troll.
Yet her books, many of them featuring sleuth DI Jack Caffery, were much more than mere “splatter” fiction, the crime writer Val Mcdermid describing Mo Hayder as a “ferociously inventive writer who saw the conventions of the genre as a challenge rather than a constraint”.
Rejecting the “cosy crime” of Ruth Rendell and Agatha Christie as dishonest because “you never see the shit and blood and vomit,” Clare Dunkel toured murder incident rooms and forensic laboratories. “She knows exactly what kind of fly lays eggs in what body cavity and the exact moment a body turns black,” one critic observed, while another found that “the authenticity comes across on every page, from the smell of the autopsy room to the sound of a powersaw meeting an Achilles tendon.”
Interviewers found it difficult to square the gory subject matter of her books with the glamorous, bright and friendly author. But as she explained, “My writing is all about me wiggling my toes in life’s gutters, examining the worst in the human condition.”
She was born Beatrice Clare Bastin (later changing her surname by deed poll to Dunkel) on January 2 1962, one of two children of a teacher mother and astronomer father, and brought up in Loughton, Essex. She would describe her upbringing as “bookish, dusty”. Her mother “wanted to protect our innocence … I wanted to throw my innocence out the window.”
To this end Clare dropped out of school, dyed her hair green, ran away to London before her 16th birthday, moved in with a musician boyfriend and “drifted” – taking a number of acting roles – until after a brief marriage, she bought a one-way ticket to Japan.
“I had a mad fantasy that I was going to be a geisha call-girl,” she recalled.
“Instead I became a gei-no-nai geisha, which means ‘geisha with no talent’.” While there, a friend was raped, and by her account Clare became obsessed with male violence towards women – and death.
She left Japan to do a film course in California, where she made “Claymation” films: “I’d start off with these cute little Wallace and Gromity figures, and then they would start doing terrible things to each other.” Her films won awards, though television stations deemed them too shocking to broadcast.
Returning to London, she started to write Birdman in 1995, financing the project by working as a secretary and as a security guard. The book was snapped up by publishers in 10 countries. Billed as a successor to Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, it became an international bestseller.
Of her nine other books, The Treatment won the 2002 WH Smith Thumping Good Read award; Tokyo (2004, “jaw-droppingly grisly, all bayoneted babies and self-harm”, wrote one critic) won several awards. Pig Island (2006, featuring, according to one review, “body parts glued to the walls like mince in a Magimix”) was nominated for a Barry Award for best British crime novel; Gone (2010) won the Edgar Allan Poe award, while Wolf (2014) is being adapted by the BBC.
In 2011 she won the Crime Writers’ Association Dagger in the Library award.
She was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in December 2020 and had recently started writing a new series under the name Theo Clare.
She is survived by her husband Bob and a daughter from a previous relationship.