Harrogate, North Yorshire, UK– Belinda Bauer’s novel Rubbernecker has won Novel of The Year at the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival.
The novel tells the story of Patrick Fort, an anatomy student with Aspergers who suspects the body he’s working on could be a murder victim. The author of Rubbernecker beat out many other writers, including two-time winner Denise Mina.
Before turning to a life of writing crime, Bauer was first a journalist, then a winner of a Bafta screenwriting competition the 1990s. This spurred her to write Happy Now-a movie staring Ioan Gruffudd and Alison Steadman but it didn’t make it to the silver screen. She tried her hand at writing books instead. As she told BBC News:
“I wrote my first book Blacklands, and that was so successful that I immediately knew I could become a novelist rather then a screenwriter.”
Become she did. Blacklands won the British Crime Writers Associations Gold Dagger Award in 2010.
With thirty per cent of all novels sold in the UK stemming from the crime genre, it’s no mystery why Bauer’s books do so well. Violate crime rates are also falling, which Bauer finds to be a huge factor in the uptick of crime novel sales. She says,
“We actually live in a very safe, civilized society. They like to imagine what it would be like to be in that situation.”
The full report can be read at BBC.co entertainment news here.