Detective Manon Bradshaw is not particularly young, or pretty, or slim. Her love life is practically non-existent – the few saddos she meets internet dating don’t really count.

Her work is all-encompassing and she is extremely good at it but sometimes she feels there must be more to life than catching criminals. Truth is, she would love to have a family, children, before her biological clock stops ticking.

There may be something of Bridget Jones about Manon – and indeed she’s been described as ‘Bridget meets Agatha Christie’ – but what sets her apart from the myriad fictional detectives that populate the pages of today’s crime novels is that she is a well rounded character, messy, slightly screwed-up, but funny and lovable, somebody one can relate to.

Indeed her creator Susie Steiner, who has died aged 51, used to say – only half jokingly – that Manon was 98.34 per cent her: the rest was “pure invention”.

Steiner already had a successful career as a journalist and had published a critically well-received novel, Homecoming, by the time Missing, Presumed, the first of her three Manon Bradshaw novels, came out in 2016. But the Bradshaw series would be her breakthrough and make her name.

The daughter of two psychoanalysts, Deborah Pickering and John Steiner, Susie Steiner was born in north London, the youngest of three children.

She attended Henrietta Barnett School, followed by York University to read English. She started in journalism at the Hendon and Finchley Times and after stints at the Daily Telegraph, the Standard and The Times she moved on to the Guardian in 2001 where she worked in the features department for 11 years.

In 2005 she was at a writing retreat in the Devon countryside when she came across a poster bearing the slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On”, which had been part of the British Government’s morale-boosting campaign during the Second World War.

When she featured it in the paper’s Weekend section, it quickly became a sensation, which it still is to this day.

As for Steiner, the motto with its stoic message had a more personal meaning: when still a child she had been diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eyesight condition. It had got progressively worse and by 2013, when Homecoming was published, she was already registered blind.

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Steiner's book Missing, Presumed

Not that her sight loss stopped her from writing, which she still managed to do with the help of oversized cursors and fonts. She also found that her condition increased her output as a novelist, “as if the less I can see of the world, the more I can focus inwardly.”

The first Manon Bradshaw novel was an immediate success with the critics and also, more importantly, the public, selling some 700,000 copies worldwide and being shortlisted for the 2017 Theakston Crime Novel of the Year. Here was a police procedural with a difference – a big one: not only did it have an interesting, even gripping plot, more significantly, the characterisation was superb and in Manon (whose name, explained Steiner, came from the Hebrew for “bitter”) it had a heroine who was human, flawed but all the more likeable for it.

Steiner had not originally set out to write a police procedural; what she had in mind was something combining the pace of a thriller with “the riffing and depth of literary fiction”, which she considered as “the ultimate reading enjoyment”.

Books should be gripping, she explained, but also “beautiful at sentence level”. For her what mattered wasn’t just the destination, it was also the view on the journey.

And so it was for the readers of her books: finding out “who’d done it” became secondary to getting there, thanks to a richly portrayed cast of characters and the mundane – but beautifully observed – details of everyday life that made her books come alive.

Steiner also succeeded in weaving in important social issues – children left to fend for themselves and struggling to survive in the pitiless urban jungle, day-to-day racism – without ever sounding preachy or worthy.

Instead, issues become an integral part of the stories, as in the second book of the series, the 2017 Persons Unknown, where Manon’s black adopted son is accused of murder, an event in which – we are left in no doubt about that – the colour of his skin plays an integral part.

By the time Steiner wrote what turned out to be her final Manon Bradshaw book, Remain Silent (2020) about the plight and exploitation of migrant workers, her protagonist has a child of her own and has, against all hope, found love.

But a sugary “happy ever after” was never Steiner’s thing: what we get instead is a story brimming with the imperfections, the light and shadow of ordinary life, the things that life throws at us when we least expect it.

So, in the end Manon does indeed solve the murder of a young migrant worker, in the process showing us the inhuman conditions illegal workers are forced to endure.

However, tragedy strikes close to home and her partner, the man she now shares her life with, is diagnosed with cancer.
In a bitterly cruel case of life imitating art, Steiner was herself diagnosed with a brain tumour, an incurable grade 4 glioblastoma, just after finishing the book.

Six hours of brain surgery followed and, after that, months of radiation and chemotherapy, a disheartening experience that laid bare to Steiner the extreme vulnerability of the cancer patient, an experience she wished she had been able to put in the book.

Most of this took place during the pandemic and the ensuing lockdown but strangely enough, according to Steiner, in a way it made her personal situation slightly easier to bear because, as she said, “I am not the only one whose life is on hold, not the only one terrified of dying.”

In the end, unfortunately, none of the treatments helped and Susie Steiner lost her final fight.

She is survived by her husband Tom Happold, her sons George and Ben, her parents John and Deborah, her brother Michael and her sister Kate.


Susie Steiner, born 29 June 29, 1971, died 2 July, 2022