Promoting Crime Fiction : Unsung Heroes of Crime Fiction By Lynne Patrick

Monday, 5 February 2024

Unsung Heroes of Crime Fiction By Lynne Patrick

An occasional series which looks at the work of authors whose books qualify as bestsellers,
but who still aren’t quite as famous as they deserve to be.

Helen Fields

Edinburgh is one of those places to be visited with great care and a certain amount of trepidation, given the number of gory murders that happen there between the covers of a great deal of best-selling crime fiction. The most famous crime fighter in Scotland’s first city is arguably Ian Rankin’s redoubtable Inspector John Rebus, but Rebus retired in 2007, leaving a vacancy that was hard to fill.

Hard, but far from impossible. For the past few years, the task has been in the capable and effective hands of DI Luc Callanach and DI (later DCI) Ava Turner, courtesy of their creator, Helen Fields. And though she lives in Hampshire, Helen describes Scotland as the place where she feels most at one with the world.

Helen’s first career approached the rule of law from a different direction: for thirteen years she worked as a barrister in criminal and family law, and gathered a huge amount of knowledge about crime as she prosecuted and defended its alleged perpetrators in real life. When the second of her three children was born, she decided it was time to give up the Bar, and began to run a film production company with her husband.

It wasn’t until 2017 that she embarked on a life of crime fiction alongside scriptwriting and production work. Callanach and Turner made their first appearance that year in Perfect Remains, the first in a series which is set fair to run and run. Fields made a strong impression on crime readers from the outset; Perfect Remains was long listed for the McIlvanney Scottish Crime Book of the Year, and a year later so was Perfect Death, the third in the series.

Fields’s burgeoning career in crime writing isn’t confined to the exploits of Callanach and Turner. In These Lost and Broken Things (2020), she ventured into historical crime and

moved away from Edinburgh into Edwardian London. In 2021 a newcontemporary protagonist, Connie Woolwine, made her first appearance in The Shadow Man, and reappeared last year in The Institution.

Connie is an American psychological profiler with a reputation for getting under the skin of suspects and quickly working out exactly what makes them do what they do. In The Last Girl to Die, Fields’s 2022 standalone, the location is the beautiful and remote Isle of Mull, and the protagonist isn’t a police professional at all, but a young woman in search of her missing sister. And as if she hadn’t already clocked up a work rate many writers would envy, Helen Fields is also H S Chandler, author of Degrees of Guilt, a gripping psychological thriller.

Twelve books in six years, every one as gripping and unputdownable as the last, with that elusive ‘just one more chapter’ quality which keeps readers up till the small hours. And in parallel with that, a thriving career as a film producer. Helen Fields is clearly one of those lucky people who knows where to find the shop that sells forty-eight-hour days. Her books are popular, translated into several languages, and she has an enthusiastic following in the UK and Europe.