Claire Allan, author of The Nurse writes an open letter to Helen Fields

9 June 2022

Claire Allan, The Nurse

Dear Helen,

I hope you can excuse the shameless fangirling that will follow because there will be a lot of it.

Choosing a favourite thriller author was a hard task. There are so many incredibly talented authors creating amazing, dark and twisty reads that it feels a little bit like choosing a favourite child. Almost impossible!

But what makes you stand out for me is the way you can write across the genre so brilliantly, be it with a police procedural from the perspective of Ava Turner and Luc Callanach, an historical thriller (These Lost & Broken Things), a twisty psychological romp in Degrees of Guilt (writing as HS Chandler) or the incredibly dark and disturbing, but unputdownable standalone ‘The Shadowman’.

It's a mark of true talent to look at your wider genre and come at it from multiple perspectives – and managing to nail each one perfectly, creating characters who the reader feels immediately invested in.

There’s a bravery to your writing, and perhaps you don’t really realise that but with each book you have pushed the reader to think of things a little differently. Your ‘good guys’ are frequently flawed – and sometimes incredibly so. In Luc Callanach in the ‘Perfect’ series you have created a male lead who is carrying a dark secret. Having been accused of rape, and subjected to a time in custody, he is a character the reader has to learn to trust. Just as his colleagues and friends have to learn to trust him. It’s a big topic to tackle – and it doesn’t fall into the usual tropey territory of a detective who drinks too much or can’t maintain a home life. Here we have a detective who has faced the worst accusation any man can and, despite his innocence, is living with all the mud that was thrown still clinging to his body.

While we see his friend and colleague Ava Turner – face her own problems. We see a strong and confident woman manipulated by a male partner (I’m trying to minimise spoilers here!) and it is so incredibly important that stories such as her’s are told. Because people need to know this can and does happen to people of all ages, intellects and backgrounds.

Sofia in The Lost and Broken Things is one of your most compelling characters – a mother desperately trying to provide for her family who turns to darker deeds to keep her children from the Poorhouse. It is her brilliantly drawn shades of dark and light that make her so readable.

Your writing has inspired my own. It has inspired me in the way the books of Liz Nugent, and Jane Casey inspire me – to dig deeper, to go darker and not to shy away from the details which make the crimes stick in the mind of the reader.

Your writing has not only given me hours of entertainment but buckets of courage to push my own boundaries a little further.

I, and my readers, shall be forever grateful.

With thanks,

Claire