Asperger's Novel wins Crime Award

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A novel about a student with Asperger's syndrome who investigates a murder has won a top crime writing award.

Rubbernecker by Belinda Bauer has been named crime novel of the year at the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, North Yorkshire.

Bauer's fourth novel, it tells the story of Patrick Fort, an anatomy student who suspects the body he is dissecting is a murder victim.

http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-28344533

Sounds pretty cool.

I read the article. Does Belinda Bauer have first experience of Aspergers? how did she portray the main character? is the portrayal a correct representation of somebody with Aspergers or is the main character merely Sheldon Cooper in another guise?

I'm an Aspie and a writer, but in all seriousness, I don't know if I could write convincingly about Asperger's because I'm just not aware most of the time of my own eccentricities and odd behavior. In fact, most of the time I actually believe I'm acting normally, and am astounded that others take notice of the strange way I come across.

Maybe you could base an Aspie character on yourself and how you would react to different situations?

Excerpt from the Guardian's review:

Rubbernecker by Belinda Bauer (Bantam Press, £14.99) provides a different sort of reality check. In her fourth novel, the author of the outstanding Blacklands turns her attention to altered states of mind, in the form of the Asperger's syndrome of Patrick, the eponymous rubbernecker, and a ward full of comatose patients in a Cardiff hospital. Unable to read emotions and lacking access to metaphor, Patrick finds other people baffling, but an obsession with death, prompted by the demise of his father, leads him to study anatomy at university in a bid to understand what happens when people cease to be. Meanwhile, lying speechless and motionless in the neurological ward, Sam Galen believes that he has witnessed a doctor murdering the man in the next bed but is unable to tell anybody about it ... There's a third, Roald Dahl-esque storyline involving a lazy and self-centred nurse, and Bauer draws all three strands together at the end for an intelligent, disturbing read.

Always a bit of punch in the stomach for me when I read the assertion that I (as an ASD person) cannot read emotions (I can) and can't understand metaphor (I'm a published poet and writer). The usual stigmatising stereotypes, I guess.

Anything's possible.

It's often the way that stereotypes are accentuated in books or movies when the main character is supposed to have a disability...