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Biography
A lifelong North Carolinian, Richard Helms graduated from Appalachian State University in 1982, with a master's degree in clinical psychology. As North Carolina is one of only six or seven states that offer licensure to masters level psychologists, and because he was lucky enough to be assigned to a string of very lenient and trusting supervisors, he was allowed to practice relatively independently for over twenty years.
He had intended to become an adult outpatient therapist, working primarily with people suffering anxiety and depressive disorders, but fate had other plans. He entered the job market at the height of the Reagan era cutbacks in mental health services, and positions in the outpatient sector were nearly impossible to find.
There were jobs, however, in an experimental program in North Carolina that resulted from a court order in a federal lawsuit. Dubbed the 'Willie M.' program, after the name of the first plaintiff in the suit, this program was charged with providing treatment and educational services to the most emotionally disturbed, violent and aggressive children and teenagers in the state - children who had been denied these services to that point because of their emotional and behavioral problems.
He worked as a staff psychologist in a day treatment program for 'Willie M.' certified youth between 1983 and 1986, before being offered a position as Supervising Psychologist and clinical director in a 24-bed secure facility for the most dangerous and violent teenagers in the state. This facility, in Charlotte, was the model for the detention center setting in Bobby J., and Helms himself was the role model for the character of Phil Snipes. Many of the events in the book Bobby J. were inspired by actual events during his tenure at this facility. It was also during this job that he was tapped to become the county's expert on sex offenders, and its forensics specialist. He founded the first and longest continuously running residential sex offender treatment program in North Carolina, and helped found the North Carolina Association for Management and Treatment of Sex Offenders, a network of other experts in this field. Again, his years of experience working with violent teenaged sex offenders served as excellent preparation for the writing of Bobby J.
Helms originally intended to stay with this secure treatment facility for no more than four years, but again circumstances conspired against him, and he remained there for seven years before being offered a position as the court psychologist for a four-county mental health system in the counties surrounding Charlotte, NC. He maintained an office in the Cabarrus County Courthouse in Concord, NC, where he worked for almost ten years before deciding that it was time to pursue other career opportunities in college counseling and teaching.
In the course of the last seventeen years of his psychology career, Richard Helms testified in over a thousand court hearings, performed over nine hundred forensic psychological evaluations, established himself as one of the best-known experts on adolescent sex crimes in North Carolina, and served as the President of the North Carolina Association for Management and Treatment of Sex Offenders. He has been a lead presenter at local, regional, and national conferences, has mentored over twenty psychology graduate interns who have now picked up the mantle of providing treatment to the same populations Helms used to serve. His two decades of clinical experience exposed him to virtually every diagnosis in the APA Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, and provided him with the expertise he now uses in the classroom to teach his undergraduate students.
Mr. Helms now works for a local college as a psychology instructor, where he teaches General and Abnormal Psychology to a whole new crop of eager students. He has retained his license to practice psychology, but this practice these days is limited to instruction and some occasional consultation.
Between 1971 and 1999, Helms drove racing cars in NASCAR, SCCA, World Karting Association, STQMRA, and NMMA, and at various outlaw dirt tracks around the Charlotte, NC area. His career began in July 1971 at Little River Raceway, a three-eighths mile high-banked dirt track in South Carolina, and ended in June 1999 at Lowes Motor Speedway in Charlotte, NC.
He won the Carolinas Cup Championship in 1991 at North Carolina Motor Speedway in Rockingham, NC. Over the course of his racing career, Helms started over 300 races, won 12, and had an overall finishing average (after he started keeping records) of 6.2. During the course of his career, he raced at Rockingham, Talladega, Daytona, Charlotte, Summit Point, Hickory NC, Roebling Road in Savannah, Road Atlanta, and Virginia International Raceway. He hung up his helmet for good in 1999, because - as he put it - he was "getting too old, too fat, and too slow to compete with all the teenagers coming up in the sport." You can see pictures of the cars he drove over the last ten years of his racing career HERE.
Helms began writing almost as soon as he started reading. His mother taught him to read a year and a half before he started school, and by third grade he had begun to churn out short stories. His mother has kept some of them. Sometimes she pulls them out at family gatherings to embarrass him.
A telephone company brat, Helms moved with his family frequently during his childhood, from Charlotte to Charleston, back to Charlotte, then to Atlanta, and from Atlanta to a small town in North Carolina called Clemmons, which Helms detested. That led to a move back to Charlotte, and the true beginning of Helms' writing career.
Back in Charlotte, Helms fell in with a drama crowd after failing to make the cut for his junior high football team. He was recruited by his ninth grade English teacher, Mimi Kehoe, to write a play for Earth Day in 1970. The next year, in high school, he was 'discovered' by his Creative Writing teacher, Dare Steele, herself a published playwright. She saw something in his raw talent, and encouraged him to write something new every day - a habit he continues even now. She also taught him that there was nothing he could not accomplish if he wanted it badly enough, and if he was willing to work hard enough to achieve it.
Helms didn't know it, because Dare Steele kept it a secret, but his mentor was battling cancer even as she took him under her wing. She passed away when Helms was in the eleventh grade, leaving him without his muse.
Helms continued to write however, and focused on theatre works, as he eked out a living working as an itinerant actor, singer, and dancer for three years after high school. He wrote and directed plays that were produced at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and television scripts that were produced by the local educational station. He ventured into radio broadcasting in his early twenties, and became a successful copywriter for commercials and public service announcements. This led to news writing, and a stint as the News Director at one station, and as the Production Manager at another.
Helms learned the hard way, however, that without a legitimate education his future was limited. With the encouragement (and financial support) of his parents, he enrolled at UNC-Greensboro, with the goal of majoring in English and specializing in fiction writing. Like most students, he became energized by other subjects, and blew through five majors before settling on psychology in his junior year.
He continued to write, however. Just before graduating, and while returning to college after a weekend of racing enduro karts at Road Atlanta, it occurred to him that a writing a novel about kart racing might be fun. His previous fiction works had consisted almost entirely of short stories and plays, and he had never attempted to write anything in the novel form, but he attacked this new project with typical enthusiasm and vigor, remembering Dare Steele's advice that he could do it if he really wanted to, and if he put forward the proper effort.
His first two novels, Geary's Year and Geary's Gold were serialized in World Karting Magazine, between 1981 and 1984. They are - perhaps charitably - no longer in print. Helms wrote The Valentine Profile and The Amadeus Legacy between 1982 and 1987, but neither was published until 2001, when they were brought out through the Mystery Writers of America's imprint, Mystery and Suspense Press.
Helms is probably best known for his series featuring slacker New Orleans jazz cornetist and reluctant knight errant Pat Gallegher. Four books in that series have been published by Back Alley Books, the mystery imprint of Barbadoes Hall Communications.
In 2003, Richard Helms was nominated for the Private Eye Writers of America's Shamus Award for the third Pat Gallegher novel, Juicy Watusi. In 2004, he was nominated again, this time for the fourth book in the series, Wet Debt.
Helms also has two books out in his San Francisco-based Eamon Gold PI series. The first, Grass Sandal, was published in 2004. The second, Cordite Wine, came out in late 2005 and garnered Helms' third Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award nomination.
His stand-alone novel Bobby J. was optioned by a Los Angeles film production company for a theatrical release film.
Having written crime series based in New Orleans and San Francisco, Helms felt the pull of his own state, and the desire to pen a story set in a small North Carolina town. While working as a forensic psychologist at the Carbarrus County Courthouse in Concord, NC, he happened to get into a conversation with a Cabarrus Sheriff's Deputy who had formerly been the chief of police in a small town north of Charlotte. This gentleman related several stories which became the foundation of Helms' new Judd Wheeler series, set in the fictional town of Prosperity. The first book in that series, Six Mile Creek, is being agented presently by Jacky Sach of Bookends, Inc. Helms just recently completed the first draft of a sequel, with the working title Thunder Moon. He has already outlined the third book in the series, and plans to call it Carolina Blue.
Besides his writing and teaching pursuits, Richard Helms enjoys gourmet cooking, amateur astronomy, building guitars and dulcimers, reading, traveling, and rooting for the Carolina Panthers and Tarheels. He lives, as he refers to it, Back In The Trees in North Carolina with his wife Elaine, their two college-aged children Alex and Rachel, and an inconstant number of cats.
To contact Richard Helms directly, email at:
To schedule a signing or appearance, please contact C.E. Gaulden at:
Richard Helms is represented by Jacky Sach, of BookEnds, LLC.
