CityLife

Questions for Anne Perry

Anne Perry

ANNE Perry is the author of numerous bestselling mysteries featuring Victorian maverick Thomas Pitt and amnesiac detective William Monk.

She has also written a quintet of books about World War One and a short fantasy series, Tathea. 

For decades you have written two books a year – how do you maintain such a prolific rate?

I love what I do and I have amazing people to help me. I have a researcher, and a secretary – I write by hand. Treat writing as a job, and people will help you.

Your books are much more successful in the United States than in this country.

My books are successful everywhere but here! France, Germany, Spain, Serbia, everywhere but Britain. My books have an optimism that is not fashionable in this country. Americans tend to be more aspirational.

Most of your work is Victorian crime fiction. What drew you to this genre?

I love historical fiction because it takes you out of the standard police procedural – I don’t want to get bogged down in ballistics and forensics. But if I got bored of the Victorian age, I would stop – and I like to challenge myself. I’ve just written a novel set in Byzantium in the thirteenth century.

That’s piqued my interest – could you tell us about the Byzantium novel?

It’s set in 1273 and the action takes place over Venice, Naples, Athens, Italy. The big action scene is the Sicilian Vespa Massacres. It was a complex, colourful age with lots of political and religious intrigue. Tremendous cuisine, and art – pre-Renaissance.

My main character is a doctor, and medicine at that time was viewed as a manifestation of sin – if you were sick, you had to repent and pray to a statue until you felt better. There were Jewish and Arab doctors who understood that illness is physical but hardly anyone was allowed to use them. Naturally the Pope and the high priests had special dispensation!

You once said that ‘when you look at yourself from the outside, you might not like the things you do.’ Questions of morality seem to inform your fiction a great deal.

The choice between good and bad isn’t worth exploring. You don’t write a novel about ‘Shall I kick the dog?’ the answer is that you don’t. But when you have a choice between two evils – these hard questions are worth exploring.

No hero is completely good, no antagonist is completely bad. It’s the difficult questions, when you’re caught between a rock and a hard place, that make stories interesting.

With which of your fictional characters do you most identify?

With whoever I’m writing about at the moment. Tathea, because she embodied all of what I believed at the time. And Joseph Reavley, the WW1 chaplain, because he is all that I would like to be – he does his best to help even at the worst times. And a lot of us aren’t like that – the distress of others just makes us turn away.

There’s a story about a man whose only child committed suicide. And the local minister came and sat with him every evening for weeks, then every other evening. Not talking, not pretending he could bring the child back or make everything better. Just this silent promise: I won’t leave you.

Anne Perry will be appearing at the Manchester Literature Festival’s Past Crimes event at the John Rylands Library on Friday October 17. For more information, visit the link on the right.