One can not discuss Anne Perry, born Juliet Hulme in 1938, without noting her conviction as a fifteen year old in New Zealand for the murder of her best friend’s mother. Both Hulme and her best friend, Pauline Parker, served five years in prison for the murder. They were paroled separately and with the proviso that they have no further contact. Upon her release Hulme returned to England and became a flight attendant.
She adopted the name Anne Perry upon writing her first novel in 1979. She has been an unusually prolific writer, with forty-seven published novels and several short stories. She typically writes in the mystery genre and focuses on historical conspiracies and murders. She tends to use two main characters who do not appear together. They are Thomas Pitt, a Victorian police inspector and William Monk, an amnesiac private investigator.
Her plots have involved such diverse story elements as unearthing the bodies of two newborn babies, questionable suicide, railroad fraud, murder under unusual circumstance, bombings, questionable automotive deaths, spies and clandestine operations.
Her characters usually have dark personalities and hidden motives. As the stories progress the characters become well developed and their backgrounds are slowly revealed while they solve the crimes. Perry’s characters tend to evolve over time, through a series of novels.
In 2003 Perry released "Much Ado About Murder,” an anthology of seventeen stories which uses Shakespeare's “Much Ado About Nothing” as the background. She puts new twists on characters, plots and actors who performed in the plays and the Bard himself. She received outstanding reviews for this effort.
She has remained a very controversial writer, with a portion of the public considering her fame a slap in the face to the woman she murdered and the New Zealand legal system. Perry is, for the most part, silent on the details of her past.
