40-year-old novel by Muriel Spark could win best 'lost' book of 1970 award

IT'S a crime novel with a difference at the centre of a cold case worthy of Inspector Rebus himself.

A story by one of the city's most renowned authors, Dame Muriel Spark, has been nominated for a major literary award 40 years after it was published.

And Rebus author Ian Rankin, who abandoned a PhD thesis on the grand dame of Scottish letters when his own writing career started to take off, said Dame Muriel's novel The Driver's Seat would be "a worthy winner" of the Lost Man Booker Prize.

The prize is a bid to recognise the best books of 1970 which lost out on a Man Booker Prize due to a change of entry criteria the following year.

Mr Rankin said: "The Driver's Seat is amongst my top three Spark novels, alongside The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Girls of Slender Means.

"What I like about it is it's a crime novel, but it's not in the least a typical crime novel because it's about a victim looking for a murderer.

"It's an incredibly short, complex novel about a woman who wants to commit suicide but doesn't want to do it herself, and so sets out to find a killer.

"That only becomes clear as the novel develops. It's an incredibly bleak novel but incredibly well written. It would be a worthy winner."

Despite his love of Dame Muriel – who died in 2006 – Mr Rankin said he would probably put his money on Australian author Patrick White's novel The Vivisector for the prize.

He added: "Australians always win the Man Booker Prize, whereas Scots seldom do. Dame Muriel was shortlisted a couple of times.

"I only got to meet her once, at the Book Festival the year before she died, and I think she would have been very pleased to see The Driver's Seat nominated because it's such an experimental novel, and not an easy novel."

The Lost Man Booker is the brainchild of Peter Straus, the honorary archivist to The Booker Prize Foundation.

He realised that in 1971, just two years after it began, the Booker Prize ceased to be awarded retrospectively and became – as it is today – a prize for the best novel of the year of publication.

At the same time the award moved from April to November and, as a result, a wealth of fiction published for much of 1970 fell through the net and was never considered for the prize.

Dame Muriel was shortlisted for a Booker Prize for her 1968 novel The Public Image, and 1981's Loitering With Intent.

The Driver's Seat was adapted for film in 1974 in a movie called Identikit, featuring Elizabeth Taylor and Andy Warhol.

Gail Wylie, chair of the Muriel Spark Society, said the society was delighted with the nomination.

She added: "She always said The Driver's Seat was her favourite book out of them all and it would be wonderful if it won the prize."