I was so poor I could only buy wonky carrots but now I’m a top author | Books | Entertainment

Frances Crawford was in Lidl with her husband Willy trying to work out how many wonky carrots they could afford to buy when they heard her debut novel, A Bad, Bad Place, had been bought by a publisher after a ten-way bidding war.

“I got this email saying, ‘Congratulations, Frances, you’re going to be a published writer and you’re getting this lovely amount of money.’ And I went, ‘Put the wonky carrots down, Willy! We’re going up to Waitrose!’” she smiles.

It was a moment that radically changed her prospects and gave her a new lease of life after “really struggling” for decades with a muscular disease that left her largely unable to work and wondering how to pay for heating and food.

“I have a muscular disease, myasthenia gravis, which I’ve had since my twenties. It’s been difficult for me to work, just part-time off and on through my life, with no big career or anything,” explains the 64-year-old Scottish author. “After I had children my health got worse and Willy stopped working to act as my carer, so we were living on benefits.”

At the same time, Crawford was offered a new trial drug on the NHS that has transformed her health in the same way that the book deal has transformed her finances. Without it, she says, she’d be in a wheelchair today.

With son Daniel, 34 and daughter Sarah, 26, now older enough to be independent Frances completed an English literature degree online through Open University and then with the help of a couple of scholarships did a Masters in creative writing aged 60 with Scottish author Louise Welsh, which gave her the confidence to write her novel.

She says the book deal, “absolutely changed our life, it’s made a huge difference, not just to Willy and I, but our children and the family. I have a lovely, supportive family, and they would take us on holiday. And for the first time in my life, I took them out for dinner!”

Crawford describes winning the McDermid Debut Award at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival at Harrogate, North Yorkshire, on Thursday night, as “the icing on the cake” of an incredible couple of years.

She received a £600 cash prize for this along with an engraved beer casket from festival title sponsor T&R Theakston.

Bad, Bad Place is set in Possilpark, north Glasgow, where Frances grew up and still lives, and tells the story of 12-year-old Janey Devine who finds the body of a murdered woman while walking her dog, Sid Vicious. Janey says she can’t remember what she saw at the abandoned railway but the police think she is hiding something as her grandmother Maggie desperately tries to protect her.

Frances says: “Possilpark’s just notorious, you know. If you Google it, you’ll get all these horrible statistics, but it’s not my experience of it. Really decent, good people that live there. The book’s almost like a love song to them.”

She adds: “Janey represents the sort of cheeky Glasgow girl. A lot of girls in Glasgow are dead up-front, dead in your face, so she’s a sort of representation of them. With Maggie there is a little bit of me, a little bit like my mammy and my nana.”

Frances now hopes her story will inspire more older people to write a novel.

“To even be a debut novelist at almost 65, I feel really proud of that. Some people will say, ‘I don’t have a deal yet and I’m 30,’ and I can say, ‘There’s always time’.”

• A Bad, Bad Place by Frances Crawford (Bantam, £16.99) is out now