Anne Perry was a British author best known for her historical detective fiction. She received recognition for the Thomas and Charlotte Pitt and William Monk series. Perry received several awards, including the 2000 Edgar Award for Best Short Story for "Heroes" and a lifetime achievement award at the Agatha Awards in 2009.
Her books regularly appeared on The New York Times bestseller list and sold over 10 million copies.
Anne Perry was born Juliet Marion Hulme in London. She was the daughter of physicist Henry Rainsford Hulme. As a child, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to the Caribbean, South Africa, and New Zealand for her health, where her father became rector of Canterbury University College.
In 1954, at the age of fifteen, Perry and her friend Pauline Parker were convicted of murdering Parker's mother, Honorah Rieper, in Christchurch, New Zealand. Perry returned to the UK after serving a five-year sentence. After the release of Heavenly Creatures in 1994, which depicted the murder's events, journalists identified her.
Perry debuted with The Cater Street Hangman (1979), featuring Thomas and Charlotte Pitt. Her works typically fall into historical murder mysteries and detective fiction. The Pitt series, set in the Victorian era, includes notable titles such as Callander Square (1980) and Resurrection Row (1981).
The William Monk series, which also gained popularity, started with The Face of a Stranger (1990) and includes titles like A Dangerous Mourning (1991) and Defend and Betray (1992). These novels are set earlier in the Victorian period and feature Monk, an amnesiac private investigator, and Hester Latterly, a Crimean War nurse.
Perry also wrote the World War I series, starting with No Graves As Yet (2003), and explored the fantasy genre with the novel Tathea (2000).
In 2017, Perry moved to Los Angeles to promote films based on her fiction. She had a heart attack in December 2022 and died on 10 April 2023. Her novel, The Fourth Enemy, was published posthumously in 2023.
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