The work of crime writer Mo Hayder has been adapted into the biggest crime show of the summer so far: Wolf on BBC One. And it turns out the author had a more colourful life than anything she committed to print.
Over the course of her life, Hayder – a pen name – worked as a nude model, an English language teacher in Tokyo and appeared in shows including Are You Being Served? and the Benny Hill Show. Here’s what you need to know about the author dubbed the “connoisseur of corpses.”
Early life
Born in Essex on January 2, 1962, Hayder started her life as Clare Damaris Bastin, the daughter of astrophysicist John Bastin and teacher Susan Hollins.
The young Hayder rebelled against her parents’ more academic leanings, describing her upbringing as “bookish and dusty”. Her mother, she later said, ““wanted to protect our innocence... I wanted to throw my innocence out the window.”
To that end, Hayder dyed her hair green, left school at 16 and headed straight for London, where she moved in with a musician boyfriend, assumed the name Candy Davis and started working as a nude model. She won the Miss Nude Beauty Pageant in 1982 (at the age of 20) and became a Page 3 model.
After that, she segued into acting, playing a stripper in the British comedy series Minder, and the secretary Miss Belfridge in Are You Being Served? As Candy, she also appeared in The Benny Hill Show and The Two Ronnies.
In 1985, she married actor Gary Olsen, though quickly divorced him. By the age of 25, she moved to Tokyo – “I had a mad fantasy that I was going to be a geisha call-girl,” she said later. “Instead I became a gei-no-nai geisha, which means ‘geisha with no talent’.”
She worked there both as a foreign language teacher and as a nightclub hostess. While there, one friend of hers was killed and another brutally raped. Shortly after, she saw three random deaths happen in quick succession: a snakebite, a man falling to his death and a heart attack.
It was these incidents, Hayder later said, that sparked her fascination with gruesome crimes, especially male violence towards women.
Writing career
Hayder’s varied life experiences made perfect fodder for her writing career.
In the 1990s, she sent a copy of her first manuscript to several agents, netting £200,000 for a two-book deal. The first of these was Birdman (about a serial killer who stitches live finches into the chest cavities of his victims), which became an international hit – and was described by Patrick Janson-Smith of Transworld as one of the most powerful and violent books he’d ever read. It was also the book that introduced readers to DI Jack Caffrey, the troubled detective on the hunt for his brother’s childhood killer.
This was followed by a slew of others – The Treatment, Tokyo, Pig Island and Ritual. While they won awards, they were also heavily criticised for their ultra-violent themes and content. To create an air of extreme authenticity, Hayder used to visit forensic laboratories and murder incident rooms; a critic once said of her, “she knows exactly what kind of fly lays eggs in what body cavity and the exact moment a body turns black.”
Hayder didn’t deny it – in fact, she admitted once that she had a “kind of obsession” with putrefying bodies and murder scenes. “I have this kind of compulsive need to wriggle my toes in life’s gutters,” she said. “I’m sure a lot of people think it is a prurient interest which is a bit destructive, but for me it is about getting rid of ghosts.”
Later life
Wolf, the basis for the BBC show, was published in 2014 and became the last book published under the Hayder moniker.
She was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in December 2020 and died in July 2021; in 2022, her last book, The Book of Sand (described as a speculative thriller) was published under the pseudonym Theo Clare.
