Belinda Bauer

She spent seven years writing screenplays before she tried a novel. One script won a BAFTA. Sidney Poitier handed the award to her, which is a detail you could not invent. Before screenwriting she had been a court reporter in Cardiff. She grew up in South Africa and then Devon. Devon stuck. All her books come back to it, to the moors and the villages where everybody knows what you had for dinner last Tuesday.

Blacklands was the first one. She was forty-five. A twelve-year-old boy writes letters to a convicted killer because he wants to know where his uncle ended up. That won the CWA Gold Dagger. Rubbernecker picked up the Theakstons prize. Then in 2018 Snap turned up on the Man Booker longlist, and people in the crime fiction world lost their minds a little because that basically never happens.

“I like to write from a child’s point of view because children lead secret lives below the radar of the adults around them.”

She never writes sequels. Every book is a standalone with a different protagonist, usually someone on the margins: a kid, a grieving mother, a retired volunteer who helps people die and then discovers his last patient might not have been terminal. The only constant is Devon, and the fact that she always picks the person in the room you would least expect to solve a crime and makes them the lead.

Quick facts

• Debut age: 45
• CWA Gold Dagger for Blacklands (2009)
• Snap longlisted for the Man Booker Prize (2018)
• BAFTA-winning screenwriter before turning to novels
• Every book is a standalone, never writes sequels

Her prose is spare and her plotting is nasty in the best possible way. She writes about children and outsiders with a kind of fierce protectiveness that makes you want to reach into the book and help.