1) So, who are you & what have you written?
1) So, who are you & what have you written?Belinda Bauer. I’ve written eight crime novels – Blacklands, Darkside, Finders Keepers, Rubbernecker, The Facts of Life and Death, The Shut Eye, The Beautiful Dead and Snap. I’ve also written High Rollers – a thriller about an air crash investigator – under the pen name Jack Bowman.
2) Why do you write crime fiction?
Because the first novel I had published was deemed to be a crime novel. I’d planned on writing a scifi novel next but it was not to be! Marketing departments love to pigeonhole you …
3) What informs your crime writing?
I’m inspired by many different things. Sometimes real life, sometimes dreams, and sometimes just ‘what if?’ moments. I wrote The Shut Eye entirely because I heard a radio documentary. I loved the term for an ‘honest’ psychic so much I knew I had to write a book called The Shut Eye, and immediately started to do some very interesting research!
Many of my books have children at their centre. I like to write from a child’s point of view because children lead secret lives below the radar of the adults around them.
4) What’s your usual writing routine?
Ideally, 9am to about 2pm. If things are going well I can easily do 2000 words in that time. If they’re not, I can’t do 2000 words in a week…
5) Which crime book do you wish YOU’D written, and why?
If it were first published today, To Kill a Mockingbird would be sold as a crime novel, so I wish I’d written that. Outrageous injustice unfolds so seamlessly through the eyes of a child that we barely realize the horror of what we’re witnessing. That childlike sense of only half-understanding is palpable.
