Anne Perry, who died recently at age 84, wrote dozens of popular mysteries set in Victorian-era England. According to her website, more than 26 million copies of her novels have been sold since the first one was published in 1979.
Perry wrote 32 William and Charlotte Pitt mysteries; they feature a police officer in late 19th-century London and his wife, an unconventional aristocrat. Perry also wrote a 24-book series about a detective named William Monk, who loses his memory after a carriage crash, and Hester Latterly, a former Crimean War nurse who becomes William’s wife and helps him adjust to his brain injury and to solve crimes.
I met Perry in 2013 at a conference of the Historical Novel Society, held in an old hotel in St. Petersburg, Florida. I had just completed a manuscript for the first Gideon Stoltz mystery, A Stranger Here Below, and was looking for a literary agent. I’d also signed up for a course on how to craft effective pitches – both a longish description of a novel, and a shorter one, sometimes called an “elevator pitch” from the notion that you can deliver this near-breathless summary during a brief elevator ride.
Perry gave an entertaining and informative speech on the conference’s first evening. The next morning when I came down to breakfast, I saw her sitting by herself. I asked if she wanted company, expecting her to say no, but she was delighted to share the meal and some conversation.
She asked where I was from and what I was working on. I said with a laugh that I would just give her my brand-new elevator pitch: “In 1835 in the Pennsylvania backcountry, a young sheriff unearths disturbing links among a judge’s suicide, a trial and hanging 30 years ago, and a recent murder. To conduct his investigation, he must relive his own mother’s murder, a crime that remains unsolved.”
I also mentioned that one reason I’d written a murder mystery was because I had lost my own mother to a murder, and I wanted to write a story that did not trivialize the horrific, life-swerving effects that a murder leaves in its wake.
(Years later, I would find out that Perry had committed murder herself. In 1954, in Christchurch, New Zealand, at the age of 15, she and a 16-year-old female friend killed the friend’s mother by bludgeoning her using a sock with half a brick in it. They somehow thought that killing the woman would prevent the friend’s parents from leaving New Zealand, which would have forced the two friends to separate. Perry’s criminal past had been revealed in 1994 when Peter Jackson told her story in his film Heavenly Creatures, starring Kate Winslet as the confident, conniving teenager Juliet Hulme – who, after serving five years in prison, would receive a new name and ultimately would become the bestselling mystery author Anne Perry.)
That morning at the conference in Florida, after hearing about my planned mystery series, Perry urged me to develop Gideon’s wife, True Burns Stoltz, into a major character. Perry said that in writing her novels, she felt that having both male and female main characters helped her examine situations, relationships, and crimes from two very different perspectives. She felt that readers liked that approach. And she said that writing from those differing viewpoints was fun.
By then I’d begun working on my second mystery, Nighthawk’s Wing. In it, True hauls herself out of a deep and nearly suicidal depression brought on by the death of her and Gideon’s infant son David. And in the third mystery, Lay This Body Down, True blossoms into a quirky, tough, determined heroine whose way of looking at the world differs from – and complements in important ways – that of her rational, sometimes almost plodding sheriff husband.
Perry’s obituary in the New York Times noted that she never married; friends felt she ended romantic relationships because she didn’t know what to say about her past. It alsoquoted some things she’d said in a 2017 documentary film about her life: “In a sense it’s not a matter – at the end – of judging,” she said. “I did this much good and that much bad. Which is the greater?”
She continued: “In the end, Who am I? Am I somebody that can be trusted? Am I someone that is compassionate, gentle, patient, strong?” She mentioned other traits, including bravery, honesty, and caring. “If you’re that kind of person,” she said, “if you’ve done something bad in the past, you’ve obviously changed.”
Anne Perry offered me encouragement and spot-on writing advice. I’m glad to think of my character True as one of the things she gave to the world.
