by Anne Perry
Alexandra stood in the dock, her body thin, ravaged by emotion, and the tears at last spilled over and ran in sweet, hot release down her face.
Rathbone stood with his own eyes brimming over, unable to speak.
Lovat-Smith rose and shook him by the hand.
At the back of the courtroom Monk moved a little closer to Hester.
With fifteen William Monk novels under her belt and two more in the pipeline, celebrated mystery writer Anne Perry chats with Mortalis about her famed amnesiac detective, self-portraits, and the life of a writer.
Mortalis: You have been crowned the “queen of British historical mystery” (Chicago Tribune). That must be gratifying!
Anne Perry: I didn’t know that. It’s very nice.
M: For you, what are the ingredients of a good mystery?
AP: Tension, conflict, and characters that you care about. If you don’t care about people, it doesn’t matter who did the actual crime. It has to be about why, how did this happen? For me there has to be a distinct moral dilemma where I can believe that a person had no alternative. One reason I like writing mysteries is that it’s not just about who committed the major crime, but what you discover about all of the other characters under the pressure of investigation.
We all have things we’d rather not have made public; it might not be something seriously wrong but just jolly embarrassing. You don’t want to walk down Main Street with no clothes on. The question becomes, Will you lie to protect those you love? There’s always the temptation to evade the truth, fudge it, not to admit to something embarrassing. How honest will we be, how brave? What happens to our integrity when we’re pushed to the edge of admitting something embarrassing? Also, how will we deal with disillusion? Do we blame everyone else? Maybe we expected something unfair of someone and now must face the truth.
So I’d say it’s conflict and what we discover about the whole cast. And it must be believable. In the end, saying “He’s mad” is not an answer. And I’m very bored with “He did it for the money.” It’s been done so many times. I’m also tired of detectives who are social misfits.
M: You bring to life the idiosyncrasies and mannerisms of Victorian high society—the servants, the below-stairs gossip, the peculiar customs. (Incidentally, I love the “grave offense” of knocking on the withdrawing room door!) How did you come to understand what it was like to live and work within these great estates?
AP: It’s great fun to look at old books of manners, and there are plenty of them published—many of the best ones in America. You can set a scene very accurately by describing what was involved in doing the laundry. You didn’t just shove the clothes in a washing machine. There was a specific recipe for the type of cloth, and you had to make your own soap depending on the fabric. Then you had to hope it would dry, which was not easy on a wet day, and you had to iron with two flat irons—use one while the other heated up on the stove. It took the whole day! This all set you back immediately.
On the other hand, there used to be four postal deliveries a day in London, so not everything today is better. You could invite an acquaintance to dinner by post in the morning and receive an answer in the afternoon mail. It was a wealthy society in which there was plenty of leisure time, which led to more rules to divide the up-and-coming from the not-so-good.
M: Don’t you think the ritual of calling hours would have driven you crazy?
AP: If I had been part of it, I suppose I would have known. I wouldn’t fit in remotely in Victorian society; I’d demand to be treated as an equal, not as lesser because I am a woman.
M: You would have been like Hester Latterly, then?
AP: I would like to think I would, if I had the courage Hester had. My brother is a doctor, an army surgeon. I have some skills in that arena but not like him. Whether I would have the guts for that sort of work, I doubt it.
M: You’ve written previously that The Divine Comedy, Gilgamesh, and the works of Oscar Wilde are among your favorite books; that’s a varied reading list. Are there any other books or authors that have had an important impact on your career?
AP: G. K. Chesterton. He is my favorite poet.
M: Do you like his Father Brown mysteries?
AP: Father Brown is a bit dated. It’s Chesterton’s poetry that I love: the music of it, the passion, the lyricism, but most of all his philosophy. I am still surprised when I read it and am made to think. When I’m reading for pleasure, I want a complete holiday from what I’m doing myself. In terms of present-day authors, there is nobody better than Michael Connolly, Jeffery Deaver, and Robert Crais.
M: All fellow mystery writers—how is that a complete holiday for you?
AP: They write about the present day, in cities like Los Angeles, with male protagonists, all of which is pretty different from Victorian London. Also, I think books written by men have a different flavor. Though I hope one wouldn’t know immediately whether my books were written by a man or a woman.
M: Were you influenced by any of the other great detectives in literature, such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, or Agatha Christie’s sleuths?
AP: Not Agatha Christie. Dorothy L. Sayers was good. Holmes is iconic in lots of ways, and the stories are better than they are often given credit for, especially in the complex relationship between Holmes and Watson. Watson was a lot sharper than he’s been portrayed in the films; he was not an idiot at all, and more mentally well balanced than Holmes, who was erratic.
M: Tell us a little bit about William Monk, and what he means to you.
AP: I start him off waking up in a hospital after an accident, and he knows nothing about himself at all. He sees his face in a mirror and it means nothing to him, and he has to discover who he is by detection. He’s lying there in his hospital bed when a nurse says, “The police want to see you,” and when they come in, it’s obvious Monk is a policeman, and the visitor is his boss who doesn’t like him and is only too ready to catch him in a mistake. When Monk is well enough to leave the hospital, he is assigned a rotten case and he has to discover who committed an appalling crime, while at the same time trying to discover who are his own friends and enemies. It’s a hell of a thing to find out the two at once. The more Monk pursues both threads, the more he experiences flashes of memory and feels he’s finding out not only about the case, but about himself. There’s evidence indicating he’s been at the crime scene before, and yet he can’t remember it.
M: You’ve called Monk a darker character than your other creations.
AP: Yes, he is, because he wasn’t a particularly nice person before his accident. If I had to discover myself through the eyes of others, I wouldn’t like that, would you? You know what you did, but not why. We all have reasonable excuses for our actions that we can live with at the time, but viewed at a distance by someone else it becomes quite difficult. The evidence is there, I did this, but why? Of course, Monk doesn’t go on seeking himself forever, that would become boring; but there is always this awareness that he was not very nice, and he can’t defend himself because he doesn’t know why. He is more acerbic than Thomas Pitt, and not as kind. Monk is clever yet vulnerable, a bit quick to judge. Pitt is not a troubled character. He deals with ethical issues, of course, things we all have to deal with, but he is not as complex as Monk.
M: What are the challenges of writing an amnesiac main character?
AP: It was a lot of fun for seven or eight books, but then it was enough. In Death of a Stranger, Monk really comes to a peace with it and moves on, and now there is really only a very casual mention of his amnesia. It’s been quite an interesting challenge, to write about the condition. No one yet has come up to me to say he or she had amnesia and it was not like that—and one or two have said it did feel that way and was accurate. I don’t really know as much about it, except that it is very unlikely that Monk would actually one day get his memory back. That would be medically inaccurate. So the poor soul must be held in suspense. It gives Monk an extra edge of anxiety and event
ually a sense of compassion because he’s forced to move around in the dark.
M: Will Monk ever find real happiness?
AP: Of course he does marry Hester Latterly eventually, but they don’t have children. Hester needs to stay active, to keep doing what she does, rather than stay home and look after children. Besides, it would make them too much like the Pitts. They do, however, have a special relationship with a local mudlark. Do you know what a mudlark was? Mudlarks were little boys who lived along the edge of the Thames, hunting for debris that would be valuable.
M: Is that like a tosher, which you write about in A Dangerous Mourning?
AP: Mudlarks are like toshers in that they salvage things that people have lost, but toshers work in the sewers and mudlarks are children. Well, there is a boy, about eleven years old, a little mudlark, a skinny little kid who helps Monk when he becomes a river policeman. Scuff is his name, and he adopts Monk to look after him. They adopt each other, really. (Hester and Monk don’t formally adopt him—he’s eleven—but he will deign to look after them.) That’s the nearest they come to having a child. Scuff is an independent little soul and he pops up again in The Shifting Tide, which actually has in it the worst nightmare that I could ever possibly imagine.
M: Your worst nightmare? How intriguing. What is it?
AP: Hester gets to run a clinic for street prostitutes, and one woman comes to the clinic with a fever and dies. When Hester is dressing the body she discovers buboes under the dead woman’s arm: the Black Death, bubonic plague. But even more astonishing is the discovery that the woman has been murdered. Imagine that: The whole clinic goes into complete lockdown and they can’t let anyone know why, and those who try to run will have their throats ripped out by patrol dogs. Hester is shut in a clinic with people who could develop the plague, and one of them is a murderer. There are lots of ways to go but this must surely be the worst.
M: That’s wonderfully ghastly. How do you come up with your ideas for the crimes and mysteries at the heart of each book?
AP: Mostly I look at events happening today and backdate them. Often it’s either a social issue we haven’t yet solved or a moral/emotional issue that is timeless. The new Monk novel I’m working on is based on the question of family loyalties, among other things. For instance, if you discover that someone like your mother or father is charged with a crime you couldn’t possibly excuse, how would you react? I think it’s your natural instinct to say, “Certainly not, I’ll never believe it,” but then how far would you actually go to defend that person you love? It’s a very interesting issue of how you deal with disillusion. Do you blame the person who wasn’t what you expected? Do you blame everyone but yourself? I don’t know that anyone could be sure until he or she is facing it, then and there.
So, as I said, it’s either a social issue that is current or an emotional or moral issue that is eternal, or something very present-day that I backdate. For example, the Patriot Act in America. When the Patriot Act first came out, do you remember stories about people making lists of what others borrowed from the libraries? Imagine that you’d no longer be able to borrow whatever you wanted without people leaping to wild conclusions. If you read Mein Kampf—possibly if you were learning German or were a student of history—people could come to any conclusion. And what about phone tapping—we had that here, too. Doesn’t a citizen have the right to have a private conversation without the wire being tapped? During Victorian times bombings made the police want to have the power to question anyone’s servants privately without anyone knowing, so I connected the present-day concern with privacy to that. Think of the power that would have given servants to misinterpret and blackmail. If a conversation was overheard outside a room and one person’s voice carried and only half the discussion was heard, what sort of a twist could be put on that conversation, innocently, ignorantly, or perhaps maliciously? I think it’s quite a good Victorian parallel to what could be done today. It’s rather fun and very interesting to put the same problem in a different light and maybe see it more clearly.
M: You obviously enjoy writing very much.
AP: Writing is a lot of fun. It is work, yes, but there is nothing wrong with work. I never have writer’s block because I plan with great care. I know what any given scene must show, who’s there, when, and why. Often I write rubbish, but I just go back and rewrite. Sit down and write words—that’s how you get over writer’s block. It will work itself out.
M: How do you compose the anatomy of a crime? I’m wondering about the actual nitty-gritty of fashioning a mystery; do you sketch out the crime, motive, and suspects at the outset, or does the whole thing evolve?
AP: You start with a crime in the middle of your composition because you may enter the story just before or just after the crime. Then you are unraveling what led up to it but doing so in real time, from the crime forward. The narrative thread goes in both directions, uncovering the past and creating the future. One mark of a mystery writer who’s new at it is having a villain who’s static. A character is going to react to what’s going on, to the investigation, and not wait for you to unravel it. He may commit more crimes or interfere with the investigation. All the other characters are doing something as well, reacting to the situation. And you’ve got to have at least two reasonable suspects—better still, three—and then narrow it down to one. It’s very difficult to mislead the reader without ever lying, but you mustn’t lie.
Carefully, bit by bit, you have more ideas as you go along and you rewrite as many times as necessary. Often I have great ideas at the end of the book then go back to weave them in from the beginning.
Also, no character is unimportant. No matter how peripheral, everyone should be a real person who came from somewhere before he walked onto your page. Give him a face, a name, interests. Don’t make him cardboard. Even if he’s a postman delivering a letter, give him a blister, a limp, a new shirt—something that makes him real. All people are real.
M: Do you ever see any bits of yourself in your characters, for instance in Hester Latterly’s gumption or William Monk’s inquisitiveness?
AP: There are little bits of me in everybody, even that postman with the blister. If you are not on the page then you’re in the wrong job. Your characters are not a reflection of you but a little of your empathy or emotion should come through them. But I don’t have any self-portraits in my books and I don’t want to write one.
M: What about Hester’s interest in history, the Crimean War, and Florence Nightingale? And Charlotte Pitt’s as well? Surely that bit—this genuine interest in history and a woman’s place in it—must be close to your own heart?
AP: Yes, I hadn’t thought of that. Well, Florence Nightingale’s situation certainly appeals to me, but not her personality. She was pretty awkward, difficult, neurotic, a hypochondriac, but boy did she have guts. Mary Seacole was very good, too, but you don’t hear much about her. There were lots of wonderful women in that century: explorers, collectors of botany and species of birds, teachers, women who went up the Congo in skirts, women who crusaded for social reform in Britain.
M: You have a talent for different dialects, from the accents of the underworld patterers and toshers, to working men and women, to lords and ladies. How did you develop this ear?
AP: I don’t think it’s very good, actually! You have to be very good to get it right. Otherwise, you need just enough to suggest it is different speech, but not too much to confuse what is being said. It’s a judgment call, how much you can put in, what dialect words to use. I actually like using expressions best. Like, “a face like a burst boot.” Can you imagine what that looks like? Pretty grim! Or, “Silly little article, haven’t got the wits you were born with.”
M: That’s funny!
AP: Good. It’s meant to be.
For an excerpt of
the next thrilling novel
in the
WILLIAM MONK SERIES
A Sudden, Fearful Death
please turn the page
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1
When she first came into the room, Monk thought it would simply be another case of domestic petty theft, or investigating the character and prospects of some suitor. Not that he would have refused such a task; he could not afford to. Lady Callandra Daviot, his benefactress, would provide sufficient means to see that he kept his lodgings and ate at least two meals a day, but both honor and pride necessitated that he take every opportunity that offered itself to earn his own way.
This new client was well dressed, her bonnet neat and pretty. Her wide crinoline skirts accentuated her waist and slender shoulders, and made her look fragile and very young, although she was close to thirty. Of course the current fashion tended to do that for all women, but the illusion was powerful, and it still woke in most men a desire to protect and a certain rather satisfying feeling of gallantry.
“Mr. Monk?” she inquired tentatively. “Mr. William Monk?”
He was used to people’s nervousness when first approaching him. It was not easy to engage an inquiry agent. Most matters about which one would wish such steps taken were of their very nature essentially private.
Monk rose to his feet and tried to compose his face into an expression of friendliness without overfamiliarity. It was not easy for him; neither his features nor his personality lent itself to it.