DEBUT author Frances Crawford was at the wonky veg section in a budget supermarket when she heard news that completely changed her life.
Having lived close to the breadline for many years, the 64-year-old couldn’t believe it when she was told a publisher had made an offer for her first novel.
“I was standing there with the wonky veg when I got the message – it was very surreal,” Crawford said. “My husband said ‘drop those, we’re going to Waitrose!’.”
Substantial though the offer was, her agent advised her to reject it as there was so much interest in her crime novel, which is set in Glasgow’s Possilpark.
It went to auction instead, with 10 different companies bidding for it. When her agent asked what she would accept for an advance, she told him she’d like to cover her gas bill.
In the end, Transworld at Penguin offered enough to cover the gas bill and a whole lot more in a two-book deal, which has been life-changing for Crawford, who has a rare autoimmune disease.
“It was like living inside a mad, crazy dream and I still feel like I haven’t woken up,” Crawford told the Sunday National. “We had all these lovely meetings with the editors, with them telling me about their plans for the book and how they connected with the characters. Honest to God, it was the weirdest week of my life.”
The book, A Bad Bad Place, has gone on to win the prestigious McDermid Debut Award at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, and she is one of the six women on the first all-women shortlist for Bloody Scotland’s McDermid Debut Prize. She is also on the long list for the McIlvanney Prize.
“I’m absolutely over the moon – I can hardly explain it,” said Crawford. “It has changed my whole family’s life. My kids are so excited, and my husband gets to come to all the lovely events with me – it’s been exciting for him as well.”
Her ill health has meant she has only been able to work part-time in short bursts, with her husband, Willy, acting as her carer for much of their married lives.
However, with their two children now grown up, she wanted to find something she could do and having always been a keen reader, she decided on a degree in English literature with the Open University.
“Reading was the one thing I have a huge passion for, apart from punk rock and I’m not going to be learning the guitar and joining a band at my age,” said Crawford. “Open University was great because everyone who is there is overcoming some kind of obstacle in their life, so it was very inspiring.”
Creative writing classes were part of the course, which she greatly enjoyed, so after graduating, she looked for scholarships to continue her education, finally winning a place on the Master’s in Creative Writing at Glasgow University.
Here she had her “big Damascus moment” on a crime-writing course led by the author Louise Welsh.
“I had no big ambition to be a novelist, but I was just overwhelmed by how amazing Louise made crime writing seem,” Crawford said. “There are all these different layers – it’s never just about the crime.”
At the end of the year, both Welsh and author Zoe Strachan, who also taught on the course, told Crawford that the character in the short story she had written had the potential to sustain a full novel.
“I’d never planned to write a novel but I thought I’d have a pop at it,” said Crawford. “It took a year and then another year of self-editing because the first draft was just awful. Then I looked for an agent, although I didn’t expect it to be taken up at all.”
To her surprise, agents were enthusiastic about the book and helped Crawford to land her life-changing sum.
“It is an amazing, lovely thing to happen, especially at this stage in my life,” she said. “My ambitions were so small that I keep thinking I’m going to wake up.”
As well as the windfall, Crawford’s health has improved, thanks to a new drug which has been “phenomenal”.
“If I hadn’t been on this drug, I wouldn’t have been able to go to all the events, so it’s like all my stars aligned at once,” said Crawford.
“I got the book deal, I got the money, and then my health improved as well.”
Her condition is called myasthenia gravis and is a little like Multiple Sclerosis in that it leads to weakness of the muscles. At times, she has been in intensive care, but Crawford considers herself lucky because there has always been some form of treatment.
She is managing to continue to write and is just finishing her second novel, which is also set in Possil. It features one of the characters in her first book who is now in his late teens and struggling with the issue of toxic masculinity in Glasgow.
Crawford has found the second book harder to write than the first as she was more conscious she was writing a novel that would be read by others, rather than just for her own interest.
“I wrote the first one the way I speak and I wasn’t thinking about whether someone in Kent would know what ‘bogging’ meant or that they might not know what Irn-Bru is in America,” she said. “I had none of those concerns, and now I’m asking myself if people will know what words mean or whether it’s clever enough.
“I was also trying to make this really clever, intricate plot and had just forgotten my character, so it was absolute rubbish and I had to start again.”
She is now happy with it and is proud of the fact that it, like the first, is set in Possilpark where she grew up and still lives.
“Possil has this awful reputation, but I wanted to show there is a different side to it and that good people come together when a terrible thing happens,” she said. “That’s the Possil I know.”
A Bad Bad Place by Frances Crawford is published by Penguin
