Anne Perry

Anne Perry (1938-2023) was an English historical crime novelist, author of the Victorian detective series featuring Thomas and Charlotte Pitt and William Monk, who as a teenager in New Zealand had taken part in the 1954 Parker-Hulme murder.

She was born Juliet Marion Hulme in London on 28 October 1938. In June 1954, aged 15, she and her friend Pauline Parker killed Parker's mother, Honorah Rieper, in Christchurch, New Zealand; both were convicted that August and released five years later, after which she returned to Britain and took a new name. Her first novel, The Cater Street Hangman, appeared in 1979 and introduced the policeman Thomas Pitt and Charlotte, who becomes his wife. A second series began in 1990 with The Face of a Stranger, in which William Monk wakes after an accident with no memory of his past. She also wrote Great War and Christmas novels.

Her short story "Heroes" won the 2000 Edgar Award for Best Short Story, and she received a lifetime achievement award at the 2009 Agatha (Malice Domestic) Awards. Headline was her British publisher. She lived for many years in the Scottish village of Portmahomack, moved to the United States in 2017 and died in a Los Angeles hospital on 10 April 2023.

For collectors. The Cater Street Hangman was first published as a hardback by Robert Hale in Britain in 1979, with St. Martin's Press as the American publisher. As her first book and the opening of the Pitt series, the Robert Hale edition is her most significant first.