by M. K. Waller

This post doesn’t aim to inform, persuade, or entertain. It’s more of an observation, a meditation, a rumination, a mulling over, a puzzling. A rambling through recent events and old secrets. A mystery.

I. The Story

Crime fiction writer Anne Perry died in Los Angeles on April 10. She was eighty-four. A native of New Zealand and long-time resident of Scotland, she published her first mystery novel, The Cater Street Hangman, in 1979. Her latest, The Fourth Enemy, was published the week before her death. A final novel, A Traitor Among Us, will appear in September 2023.

In all, Perry published over a hundred books: the Thomas and Charlotte Pitt series (32 novels); the Daniel Pitt series (6 novels); the William Monk series (24 novels); the Elena Standish series (5 novels); the World War I series (5 novels); the Christmas Stories (20 novellas); the Christmas Collections (6 anthologies); a fantasy series (2 novels); the Timepiece series (4 novellas for young adults with dyslexia); standalone novels (7); and three volumes of nonfiction. She also contributed to and edited four short story anthologies. To date, over 26 million copies of her books have been sold.

A television series based on her William Monk novels is being developed. In 2017, Perry moved from Scotland to Los Angeles to “more effectively promote films based on her novels.”

In 2014, freelance writer Lenny Picker wrote in Publisher’s Weekly, “Quantity for Perry has not come at the cost of quality. She’s won major mystery awards, including an Edgar and two Anthonys, which demonstrate the esteem of fellow writers and fans alike.” At the 2009 Malice Domestic, she received the Agatha Award for lifetime achievement.

Her two fantasy novels, Tathea (which she began writing in her twenties) and Come Armageddon, instead of concerning “good men laboring to clean up London’s mean streets by bringing wrongdoers to justice,” instead “present a heroine seeking answers to life’s big questions.”

“Her belief in free will,” writes Picker, “allows Perry to hope for spiritual progress, both for herself and for humanity at large.”

He continues, “Perry’s writings are an effort to facilitate such progress. Through mystery and fantasy, she aspires to make a difference in her readers’ lives, by teaching them, in her words, ‘something of the human condition—a wisdom and compassion, an understanding of life that enables feeling empathy for people whose paths may be very different from our own.’”

II. The News Media

BBC News, 27 November 2014
PD James, crime novelist, dies aged 94

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BBC News, 2 May 2015
Author Ruth Rendell dies aged 85

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BBC News, 13 April 2023
Anne Perry, Murderer turned crime writer, dies aged 84

Three major British writers of crime fiction die. They were contemporaries. They were prolific. Their novels received both popular and critical acclaim.

One major British news outlet reports the deaths. But the third report expends over 300 words before focusing on the author’s literary career–and then devotes only ninety-nine words to her books.

P. D. James lived an exemplary life, untouched by notoriety. The most serious offense I’ve found reported about Ruth Rendell is that on her first writing job, reporting for a newspaper in Essex, ” . . . she was forced to resign after filing a story about a local sports club dinner that she hadn’t attended. Her report failed to mention that the after-dinner speaker had died half-way through the speech.”

But Anne Perry was a murderer. In 1954, when she was fifteen, she helped to bludgeon her best friend’s mother to death. Convicted, she served five years in a New Zealand prison, was released under a new name and identity, joined her family in the United Kingdom, and worked for twenty years in what her New York Times obituary refers to as “less creative fields,” before becoming a writer. In 1994, forty years after the murder, and fifteen years after the publication of her first novel, her secret became public. She has since spoken about it in interviews. Although the Personal Biography on her official website omits reference to the crime, she has never claimed innocence. In the reporter’s judgment, Perry’s criminal past was of more import than her years as a literary superstar.

III. Social Media

Readers, too, judge. So do other writers.

Comments on Perry’s Facebook page express admiration for her and sadness at her passing. Elsewhere, however, reactions are mixed. A paraphrased and truncated sample of what I’ve seen on social media follows:

Perry was a gracious person and a brilliant writer. She should be remembered that way.

She was a murderer. She should have written in a different genre. A murderer shouldn’t write about murder.

Reading her books and knowing what she did–it makes me feel weird.

She didn’t celebrate murder in her books. She brought murderers to justice.

Can writers choose what they write? Choose what they’re good at? Perry tried writing historical fiction but didn’t succeed. Should she have refused to do what she did best?

She had to make a living.

It doesn’t matter what she was; it’s what she became that counts.

She served her time, paid her debt to society.

Five years isn’t enough to make up for murder.

She behaved badly at the trial. She laughed. She’s never expressed remorse.

Maybe bringing criminals to justice in her fiction was an attempt to atone.

It’s impossible to atone for murder.

What about redemption? Don’t you believe in redemption?

When you buy her books, you’re supporting her and condoning murder.

She made a major contribution to the mystery genre and to the culture.

She was a great person.

She read some of my work and offered advice. She was very helpful.

If she’d been a man who committed a brutal murder, would the public let her off so easily?

I love her books. I don’t care what she did before.

She was a murderer. I’ve never read her books and never will read them.

Her books raised awareness of social issues.

It’s a shame reporters dredge up all that business about the murder. That shouldn’t be her legacy.

Leave her to heaven
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge
To prick and sting her.

The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interrèd with their bones.

All right–Shakespeare wrote those last two, and he didn’t post them on social media. But they’ve been looping through my brain over the past week, so I thought I’d throw them in.

IV. The Questions

The social media exchange is about more than just Anne Perry. It concerns how we view the relationship between artists and their art.

How do we separate writers from what they’ve written? Can we? Should we try?

And what do readers have the right to expect of writers, beyond words on the page? Do good writers have to be Good People? Just how good do they have to be? When people who’ve done bad deeds write good books, are we wrong to read them?

If writers and their books are inextricably linked, and reading is wrong, how much imperfection should we tolerate before we take those books off our To Be Read list? (Should books by Bad People be pulled from library shelves?*)

Or maybe reading isn’t the issue–maybe it’s money.

When we purchase books by writers whose past acts are abhorrent to us, and thus support them financially, do we condone their crimes? Money talks, but what exactly does it say?

Does time matter? What if a writer is dead, and the crime is long past, and our purchase instead supports heirs, publishers, booksellers–are we still enablers?

Is there a flip side? Do writers–artists–have a responsibility to the public? When they behave unacceptably–in Perry’s case, an understatement–should they expect the public to embrace their creations on merit alone?

Had Perry become a painter or sculptor, would the discussion be different?

Does Art stand on merit alone, independent of its creator?

Should there be a discussion at all? Are these questions a waste of time, gray cells, and energy, and not worth the pixels they’re written in?

Is Hamlet correct:

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

V. One Answer

To Perry, at least, the issue was more than academic. The New York Times obituary quotes from the 2009 documentary film Anne Perry: Interiors:

“‘In a sense it’s not a matter — at the end — of judging,’ she said in the documentary. ‘I did this much good and that much bad. Which is the greater?’

“’It’s 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: bravery, honesty, caring. ‘If you’re that kind of person — if you’ve done something bad in the past, you’ve obviously changed.’

“She concluded, ‘It’s who you are when time’s up that matters.‘”

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Sources–And possibly a summing-up of everything that comes before:

Leave her to heaven
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge
To prick and sting her.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, I, v

The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interrèd with their bones
– William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, III, ii

Why, then, ’tis none to you, for there is
nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it
so. – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, II, ii

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*Librarians select books and materials based on their reading of multiple reviews published in professional journals, without regard to the Goodness or Badness of the authors. It’s a matter of professional ethics.

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Kathy Waller blogs at her website, Telling the Truth, Mainly, and with Austin Mystery Writers. She’s published short stories and has a novel in progress. Follow this link to her on Facebook.