From The Sunday Times
February 7, 2010
Unknown UK crime writer Simon Beckett wows Europe
Richard Brooks


Left - Author Simon Beckett with his wife Hilary

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.
The rest at The Times.