TP Fielden Books in Order

If you want cozy seaside mysteries: The Riviera Express → Resort to Murder → A Quarter Past Dead → Died and Gone to Devon.
If you want wartime royal intrigue: Stealing the Crown → Burying the Crown → Betraying the Crown.
If you want to sample both sides of Fielden's fiction: The Riviera Express → Stealing the Crown.

T.P. Fielden is the fiction name used by Christopher Wilson, a British journalist, broadcaster, and royal biographer who came to crime novels after many years in newspapers and nonfiction.

He was born in Lancashire in 1947, the son of a naval officer, and was educated at Bedford Modern School. That early mix of ordinary English life and formal public worlds would end up feeding both sides of his career, the reporter who noticed detail, and the writer drawn to class, power, and good manners under strain.

He came to fiction the long way round.

Wilson started out at the Bedfordshire Times, then moved into Fleet Street, working for the Daily Mail and the Sunday Telegraph. He later became one of ITV's first environment correspondents, returned to the Daily Express as diplomatic correspondent, and went on to write the William Hickey column before contributing columns to The Times, the Daily Telegraph, and Today.

Those years trained him to notice status, gossip, silence, and the odd little clue that gives a person away. They also led him toward biography. As Christopher Wilson he wrote books on the royal family and public figures, including A Greater Love, The Windsor Knot, Dancing with the Devil, and Absolutely... Goldie. His work on figures such as Charles, Camilla, Diana, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor later fed directly into the background of his palace-set fiction.

You can feel both careers in the novels.

When he began publishing fiction as T.P. Fielden in 2017, he put his journalism and his love of setting to work in The Riviera Express. That novel introduced Judy Dimont, a former naval intelligence officer turned local newspaper reporter in the fictional Devon resort of Temple Regis. The books that followed, Resort to Murder, A Quarter Past Dead, and Died and Gone to Devon, mix seaside charm, newsroom bustle, and neatly built murder plots.

He has said the Miss Dimont books were written as a love letter to Devon, and that shows on the page. Temple Regis may be fictional, but it is built from very real Devon textures, beaches, cliffs, hotels, holiday camps, and the nervous pride of a town that depends on visitors. Readers who like cozy mysteries usually come for Judy's sharp questions and stay for the sense of place.

His second fiction series shifts from sunlit Devon to wartime royal corridors. Stealing the Crown, Burying the Crown, and Betraying the Crown follow Guy Harford, an artist, courtier, and reluctant investigator moving through Buckingham Palace and Windsor during the Second World War. Here Fielden's long knowledge of royal history becomes part of the entertainment, not as homework, but as atmosphere, pressure, and motive. Readers tend to enjoy the mix of murder mystery, palace gossip, and wartime unease.

Outside the novels, Wilson founded the Philip Geddes Awards after the death of a young colleague in the Harrods bombing, and he has lectured and appeared on television as a commentator on the royal family. He lives in Devon, on the edge of Dartmoor, and still turns up in public life as a royal expert. It feels like the right home ground for a writer whose fiction likes beauty, secrets, and the trouble people cause when they try too hard to keep things tidy.