Volume 2, Issue 2 – April 1999
Anne Perry: Victorian Muse
Anne Perry didn’t invent the modern Victorian mystery, but sometimes it’s hard to remember that fact. Ever since The Cater Street Hangman, the first novel featuring Thomas and Charlotte Pitt, appeared in 1979, Perry’s passionate, lyrical mysteries have become almost as much a part of the literary scene as the Pitts’ “contemporary,” Sherlock Holmes.
Recently, Perry’s work made the jump from printed page to television screen with the Arts and Entertainment Channel’s broadcast of The Cater Street Hangman. On a sunny April day in Washington, D.C., Perry took time out to talk to Crescent Blues about the movie, her most recent mysteries and an allegorical fantasy set for U. S. publication this fall.
Crescent Blues: Your current novel, Bedford Square is the 19th book in the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt mystery series. What do you think is the secret of the Pitts’ enduring popularity with readers?
Anne Perry: I listen to what people say at my book signings. I really do. And they tell me they like the Victorian background. They like the people, and they like ethical and moral questions raised by the times.
And when you’ve written a number of books, people have certain expectations. They know certain people will never give them graphic violence or hurt animals. As a writer, you must keep the promises you’ve implicitly made, because it’s fair for readers to read between the lines in that manner.
In Bedford Square, someone threatens to destroy the reputations of several prominent men by accusing them of dishonorable acts they did not commit — but can’t prove they didn’t commit. What was it about this situation that most attracted you as a writer? What made it so compelling for you?
You can’t prove a negative. The minute you start to discuss certain types of accusations, you imply that there is something to the charges. You cannot walk up to someone and say, “By the way, I did not sleep with your wife,” without immediately setting up a suspicion that cannot be explained away.
The worst thing about the situation in Bedford Square was that nothing specific was asked in return. The victims kept waiting for the blow to fall. If you know what someone wants, you can always think of ways to supply it. It’s a tremendous threat to know someone is out there with this hold over you, and not know how or when they will make their demands or what you will need to do to save yourself.
The fragility of a person’s reputation seems such a Victorian theme. Do you think it still has meaning for the end of the 20th century?
You live in Washington, D.C., and you have to ask me that? I think people can get blown up by committing acts that may not be crimes but still ruin their reputations. The accusations and damage are based on different things, but it can still happen. And does.
You deal with a related theme in last year’s Breach of Promise, the ninth in your William Monk series. When a young girl’s fiancé cancels their engagement, the girl’s parents file suit to protect her reputation. How common were such cases in Victorian times?
I really wouldn’t know. But the story wasn’t about reputation. It was really about an obsession with beauty, which we certainly have today. How many people diet themselves ill to meet the current standard of beauty? Look at the size of the diet industry!
It’s certainly worthwhile to try to look as good as you can, but not to the extent that you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on plastic surgery or diet yourself ill — or diet yourself dead. We’ve lost a sense of proportion about our physical appearance, and that’s what Breach of Promise was about — obsession with beauty.
Mysteries and other novels set in the Victorian era continue to fascinate modern readers. Why do you think the period has such a resonance for people today?
It’s partially the morality of the times. It’s also partly because it was a very ebullient era. It’s far enough away to be different from our own time, but still close enough that we can identify with it.
There was such a great optimism then. There was a feeling that no matter what problem you faced, you could fix it. Whereas, these days, people tend to think, “Oh dear, there’s a problem. Better not try that.”
Speaking of fixing things, how far do you think we’ve come in remedying the social ills of the Victorian era that you explore in your books?
We’ve made enormous advances in the position of women. In some cases, I think we’ve gone a little too far and become unfair to men, especially in divorce and access to children.
I don’t think marriage should be viewed as a free meal thicket for life unless the woman has given up her career solely to advance her husband’s. I think we should have equality in the workplace, but I don’t think we should have any extra perks just because we’re women.
With respect to the social ills of Victorian society, one of the great problems we’ve addressed in varying degrees is the plight of the ill who cannot pay for medical treatment. We have socialized medicine in Britain, and you have it to some degree here.
We do allow women to own property and earn their own living. We have Legal Aid and other social programs. But the things that spring from human nature haven’t changed — the things that cannot be legislated against.
For those readers who’ve not yet read your mysteries, could you describe what you feel to be the major differences between the novels that feature the Pitts and those featuring William Monk and Hester Latterly?
Earlier on, I would’ve said that the books featuring Monk were darker, but lately the books featuring the Pitts have become more complex.
The Monk books deal with most with military and medical matters, and always end in a trial. The Pitts deal with social and political issues, and have a little more of the ebullience of the “Naughty Nineties.”
We’re living in the Naughty Nineties now.
Yes, but without the fun. We don’t have the optimism of the 1890s, and we don’t have the wit. There’s no Oscar Wilde for our generation. We’re much more cynical, sadder people now.
And they had wonderful fashion back [in the 1890s]. It would’ve been very uncomfortable to wear, but it was wonderful to look at.
Getting back to the series, the Monk books seem to have a sharper edge. Could that be because, although Thomas Pitt comes from humble origins and Charlotte married beneath herself, they have very defined roles in society, whereas William Monk and Hester Latterly are outsiders?
I think it’s just because the Monk books are set in an earlier period. Things were considerably more restrictive in the 1850s and ’60s than in the 1880s and ’90s. And also, I didn’t want the two series to have the same voice.
How does your reading affect your writing? Do you read much fiction when you’re working on a book, or do you spend most of your time doing research?
I don’t have time to read much fiction, unfortunately. Life isn’t long enough. If I could, I’d want three lives: one life for writing, one for reading and one for other things. But I don’t have the time, so writing comes first.
Are there things you read to inspire your writing or that put you in the right frame of mind to write? By the same token, are there things you avoid reading, because they might have a negative affect on your writing?
I avoid reading anything too similar to what I’m writing. You never mean to plagiarize, but you do, unconsciously.
Depending on what I’m writing, yes, there are things I read to put me in the right frame of mind. Obviously, I read a great deal of research [material]. I also read poetry and philosophy, particularly poetry. Poetry puts me in the mood to want to write something good, because poetry captures the essence of a particular mood or thought. It makes me want to write more powerfully.
Please, don’t phrase that so that it makes me sound as if I do write more powerfully. I can’t say that. But poetry always makes me want to write better.
Is there any particular era in poetry that you turn to?
Yes, the poets of the period between 1890 and 1940. We call them the Georgians, but I don’t think that name will mean anything to American readers.
The Georgians are the great poets of the first World War: Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, G. K. Chesteron, Wilfred Owen, A. E. Houseman. Chesterton is one of my favorites.
Didn’t Chesterton also write mysteries — the Father Brown series?
Yes, and poetry and fantasy and a tremendous number of essays. His poetry’s wonderful, but there’s a tremendous lot of it. And his best isn’t necessarily in the anthologies. You could probably find “The Donkey,” in an anthology, but you should try to find “The Man Who Was Thursday” or “The Ballad of the White Horse,” though they are less well known. “The Ballad of the White Horse” will probably never be anthologized. It’s too long — around a hundred pages.
Back to your books. In Breach of Promise, you describe the work of Killian Melville as being unconventional but beautiful, and particularly innovative in the way Melville’s buildings used light. Were your descriptions of Melville’s work based on a particular architect of the period?
No, not at all, but just this trip, I learned that there was an architect in America in this period who did the same sort of thing. But when I wrote about Killian, I was only describing what I would like to have done — what seems beautiful to me in architecture.
What did you think of the recent television movie made from The Cater Street Hangman, the first Thomas and Charlotte Pitt mystery?
I was very pleased with it and wish they would do more. We’re working to try to have more movies made, and all encouragement will be gratefully accepted. Every letter about the movie that’s sent to The Perry Illustrated Chronicles, my official Web site, is copied and sent to the producers of The Cater Street Hangman. They’re actually using the letters as ammunition to go higher up and show people there is an audience for these films; the public likes this.
Without giving away the plots, it’s safe to say your latest installments in both series show a gradual growth in the lives of all your secondary characters. Do you plan to continue these developments?
I intend to do different things with various minor characters as the series progress. I’ve got plans for Gracie and Tellman, for Rathbone, Vespasia, Joshua, the bishop’s wife — all sorts of minor characters.
So many of these subplots explore the intricacies of Victorian romance over lengthy periods of time, I can’t help but wonder if you regret having Charlotte and Thomas fall in love and marry so quickly in their series. Do you ever wish you handled the Pitts’ romance differently?
When The Cater Street Hangman was accepted for publication, I was so jolly pleased to have a “yes” instead of a “no” after twenty years of trying to write and be published, I couldn’t think of anything else. I didn’t think it would be a series. St. Martin’s Press [the publisher which bought The Cater Street Hangman and other early Perry mysteries] never commissioned books in advance.
But since I strung out the romance between Hester and Monk, it’s probably better that I resolved matters between Charlotte and Thomas quickly. If I were to start today, I probably would have drawn out their romance. But at the time, I was working in the classical mystery tradition, where one did not emphasize romance, and I didn’t have the confidence to follow my feelings then.
It’s wonderful to have a contract for several books in advance. You can plan your story and write it, then see if your notions will turn out.
When we met a few years ago on the set of a local television show, you mentioned you were also writing a science fiction novel —
Not science fiction! There’s nothing remotely scientific about it. It’s an allegorical fantasy.
For fantasy readers like me, that’s even better. How far along are you with the novel?
[Tathea] was published in Britain in February. I regret I cannot offer you a copy, because it’s out of print. My British publisher brought it out in a short run of a little over a thousand or so books, which is a respectable run for hardcover fantasy in Britain, and they sold out completely. I was looking for copies for some friends before I left, and I couldn’t find any, but I signed two here in Bethesda [Md.] just yesterday.
However, the book will be coming out from Deseret Book, LDS, in the U. S. in September 1999.
LDS?
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It’s the Mormon-owned press. I’ve been a member of the Church for 33 years.
Since the British print run was so small, would you mind telling our readers a little bit about the plot of the book to tide them over until September?
Tathea tells the story of a woman in an alternate world a little bit like our own Classical era circa 1 A. D. She is an empress who wakes in the night to a palace coup, in which her husband and child are killed. She goes into hiding and becomes a fugitive.
Naturally, the sudden reversal of her condition causes her to think about the larger questions of life. Yesterday, I was an empress with the world in my hand; today I am a fugitive. Who am I? The answer, I believe, for everyone is that I am a child of God, but growing up is a long, hard journey.
Donna Andrews & Jean Marie Ward