Belbin began his career by writing Young Adult Fiction, where his work is known for breaking boundaries and dealing responsibly with difficult social issues that affect teenagers. He first attained success with a number of books for Scholastic's Point Crime series. One of these,
Avenging Angel, led to his own popular series, The Beat, which followed a group of young police officers through their two-year probationary period, culminating in the adult novel length
Fallen Angel in 2000. The
series dealt with racism, rape, paedophilia and homosexuality as well as conventional crimes, often of the kind committed by teenagers.
Belbin's best-known Young Adult novel is Love Lessons, which was published in 1998. "It is a full-length novel which examines the machinations and morality of a sexual affair between a male English teacher and a fifteen-year-old female student," Belbin has said. "I wrote the first draft as an adult novel. The young-adult version took me nearly ten years and a brave editor to get right, but it turned out to be a better book for it."
[1] Denial, published in 2004, deals with a similar theme—a teacher accused of molesting a student—in the first person, and many readers found it even more shocking. His most popular novels this century are
Festival (2002) about the Glastonbury Pop Festival, and
The Last Virgin (2003) which is a wide ranging book about teenage sexuality: 'The author always chooses to understand rather than condemn. He has written numerous novels about young adults but this is his most outspoken.'
[2]
Since the publication of
Nicked! in 1999, Belbin has written a string of short novels for 'reluctant' readers, often dealing with the same kind of edgy themes as his full-length work.
Stray (2006) is about a girl gang and drug dealing, while
Shouting at the Stars (2005) about the nervous breakdown of a disabled teenage singer/songwriter is one of many books that reflect Belbin's interest in popular music.
Belbin's fiction for adults reflects many of the same concerns as his work for teenagers, but without the limits dictated by Young Adult Fiction's place in Children's Literature.
Witchcraft (Ambit magazine, 1989) is about ritual sexual abuse of children. Different Ways of Getting Drunk looks at a young woman's experiments with drugs and bisexuality.
[3] Vasectomy (Horizon magazine, 200
[4] shows a philandering Labour MP in the run up to the Iraq war. His first 'adult' novel, The Pretender (Five Leaves) was about literary forgery. He has also written an early guide to eBay and edited the Crime Express series of novellas which features work by both major and emerging crime writers.
