STRANI MECCANISMI DEL MERCATO EDITORIALE

DA TIMES
Unknown UK crime writer Simon Beckett wows EuropeRichard Brooks

STEP aside, J K Rowling and Ian McEwan. Last year’s bestselling British fiction writer in continental Europe was a former odd-job man from Sheffield who is little known in his own country.

Simon Beckett, 49, did not find literary success until his mid-forties, but he is now mobbed at book readings in Germany and recognised at airports in Scandinavia.

In 2009, Whispers of the Dead, his latest book, sold 300,000 copies in hardback alone in Germany and about 200,000 more copies elsewhere. It also reached No 2 in Poland and was a bestseller in Sweden and Italy.

In Britain, by contrast, it crept in as No 9 for one week last February in The Sunday Times top 10 hardback fiction chart and then, for one week last month, the paperback version was in at No 8.

Across the continent he has sold a total of 4m copies of his thrillers in the past three years.

The new league table for 2009, compiled by The Bookseller magazine in Britain and from comparable publications in six European countries, puts Beckett far ahead of writers who have a higher profile in the UK, such as Hilary Mantel, author of the Booker prizewinning Wolf Hall.

Beckett also outsold some established authors such as Marian Keyes and Patricia Cornwell and was on a par with American thriller writers such as John Grisham and James Patterson.

He was at No 11 in the full league table which was topped by Stieg Larsson, the Swedish detective writer. The next mainstream British writer is Mantel, at No 46.

Beckett, whose main character in his books is an emotionally damaged forensic scientist called Dr David Hunter, is especially popular in Germany, the country with the biggest book-reading public of any European country.

Beckett said this weekend: “I really don’t know why I am so huge in Germany.” He added that perhaps the “melancholy nature of Hunter might appeal to Germans”.

Beckett’s publisher, Simon Taylor at Bantam Books, said that his popularity had spread in Europe mainly by word of mouth.

“We get reviews, of course, but in Germany especially everybody just began to talk about him,” said Taylor.

Before he found success in middle age, Beckett often drifted from job to job. After a period in his twenties doing any work he could find, such as cavity wall insulation, he became a drummer in a rock band. He did little work during his thirties.

Even in his early twenties he thought he had a novel inside him. He tried several times, but was always rejected.

“My highlights were rejection slips with an accompanying and sometimes encouraging note, while I suppose my most amusing rejection letter was one which called me Mr Samuel Beckett,” he said.

Beckett eventually had a novel published in 1994. Three more, all dark thrillers, appeared over the next four years, but none sold in large numbers. Eventually, as he scraped around for writing work, a chance visit to America changed his career.

“I gave up trying to write books and dabbled in freelance features for newspapers before a trip for a magazine six years ago to what is known as the ‘body farm’ in Tennessee,” said Beckett.

The site in Knoxville is part of the University of Tennessee’s forensic anthropology centre. Its grounds contain about 1,000 corpses in settings such as shallow graves and plastic bags, so that scientific and forensic researchers can study how the body decomposes.

Beckett, inspired by this trip, began to write what turned out to be his first David Hunter crime novel, The Chemistry of Death, published in 2006. Since then, the character has been at the centre of the subsequent two novels and will feature in the next three, following a new deal agreed with his publishers. Like Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse, P D James’s Adam Dalgliesh or Henning Mankell’s Wallander, the troubled character of Hunter, with his messy personal life, has become someone for whom fans develop an attachment. Beckett’s late-found fame may finally make him a household name in Britain. Plans are now advanced for Hunter to follow Morse and Wallander into a British television adaptation.