Belinda Bauer — Blog

On a broiling summer’s day in 1998, eleven-year-old Jack Bright and his two sisters sit in a broken-down car beside a busy road waiting for their mother who went to get help. No-one stops. No-one notices. No-one comes back.

Jump forward three years and a trio of police officers are hunting the “Goldilocks burglar” who breaks into homes and sleeps in the beds. Is he the same criminal who has left a knife and a threatening letter beside a pregnant woman’s bed?

And how does a burglar who mainly steals healthy food - "When the opportunity arose, he stole organic” - tie in with a cold case of a murdered woman from 1998?

Belinda Bauer’s razor-sharp wit and black humour always freshens my reading palate. Her plotlines and characters are decidedly quirky – even bizarre. In SNAP, a Dickensian vision of three children surviving on the fringes of modern society is touching, at times very funny, and distinctly weird. Minor characters such as "Smooth Louis Bridge", a criminal who obsessively removes his own hair, reveal the extent of her freaky imagination. But an eye for detail brings all this eccentricity back to real life.

Jack Bright’s eyes were narrow as a smoker’s and pale grey, as if all the colour had been cried out of them.

Detective Chief Inspector Marvel wasn’t one for knick-knacks but he did have an ashtray in the shape of lungs.

Belinda Bauer switches perspectives between characters without ever making it feel contrived. She somehow slides from one vivid and fleshed-out internal world to the next, puppet master-style. I love the smoothness and authority of her writing. And the profound characterisation, such as here, when the unveiled burglar reflects on his bad behaviour:

He always knew it wasn’t right, but his anger made it feel fair.

I’m a big fan of Belinda Bauer, as you might tell, although SNAP is an unusually light-hearted crime novel. I love gallows humour as much as the next swinger, but on reflection I didn’t feel much fear related to the actual killer who gets a bit lost in a crowd of cranks and crazies (the police as much as anyone else). It doesn’t matter to me, though – this book is dark, funny and heartfelt - and heroic Jack Bright and his sister's tortoise will live long in my mind.

Reading Belinda Bauer thrillers when you're alone in the house is never a good idea. Reading her books when you're alone and supposed to be writing your own novel is a terrible idea. With the story dipping and diving between the surface tension of the plot and the depths of the characters, it is hard to come up for air.

Eve Singer is a TV reporter on the 'meat beat' as a crime correspondent. Although a fairly typical hack in terms of ruthlessness and cunning, her squeamishness and aplomb in the face of casual sexism from rival hacks give her instant appeal. Most sympathetic of all, her home life is almost as tragic as the news she covers day-in, day-out. When a serial killer bursts onto the scene - literally, he sees himself as an artist - Eve thinks she has a chance to make the big time. Until she realises that she might become the next item on the evening news.

The baroque nature of the killer, who bears a passing resemblance to whatsisname from Silence of the Lambs, is alluded to in the butterfly-strewn cover art. But that is perhaps the only over-familiar aspect of this elevated crime novel - Bauer rings unusual notes that lift The Beautiful Dead out of the realms of the ordinary; lashings of black humour, a sweet little romance, a touching father-daughter plot line, and a wonderful kick-ass female detective whose diminutive size belies her mad skills.

Fans of crime fiction will love The Beautiful Dead. Fans of a nicely-turned phrase will too.