Anne Perry's Last Mystery

Historical crime writer Anne Perry died last year. She died in April 2023, less than a year and two weeks after my mother died. 

Anne Perry was a thing with me and my mother. Mom discovered her at the library, I'm sure, and started sharing the books with me. Anne Perry wrote historical mystery novels. She had two main series. One of the series featured Hester Monk (nee Latterly) and William Monk. The books take place in London beginning in the 1860s - in fact, at one point, the couple traveled to the southern United States during the U.S. Civil War.

My mother loved the character Hester Monk. Hester Monk had served in the Crimean War as a nurse with Florence Nightingale. She was angry and jittery, often sabotaging herself at the various hospitals and other jobs she worked at, frequently ending up in danger or accused of murder. Hester's partner in crime solving, eventual paramour and husband William Monk, was no better. As the result of an injury, he did not even know who he was. He went through life thinking he might have murdered someone - and had a vicious side to his cold personality that made this plausible. Like Hester, William Monk fought nastily with his supervisors and lost decent police jobs. In short, William and Hester Monk were difficult. Their books were difficult - especially after William Monk ended up working for the London River Police. All those descriptions of dunks and near drownings in the dirty Thames in the 1860s and 1870s. The ship full of little boys being prostituted out to rich London men and government ministers. Just some really awful stuff that made me shudder and have to close the book for a few minutes or days. Of course my mother loved Hester and William Monk. They were messy and complicated and obnoxious and full of tension. I always had to take a deep breath before starting a book about William and Hester Monk.

I always preferred the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novels, which took place in London in the 1880s and 1890s. Charlotte Pitt was sane and kind. She was beautiful - not slender, but with an hourglass figure and rich reddish brown hair. When she dressed up, Charlotte wore jewel toned dresses that brought out the color of her blue eyes. Charlotte's biggest scandal was marrying beneath her - the kind and sweet and responsible Inspector Thomas Pitt. There was almost nothing wrong with Thomas Pitt beyond the fact that he had a scratchy beard, uncombed hair, and kept the pockets of his ill-fitting pants and coats full of all kinds of bits of paper, buttons, pencils that needed to be sharpened, and other junk. There was always a warm kitchen hearth in the Charlotte Pitt novels. Charlotte and Thomas Pitt sat next to the hearth and shared love and support and understanding with one another. Their sweet maid married Thomas Pitt's lantern-jawed sergeant. They had two sweet and loving children. Charlotte often helped solve Thomas Pitt's crimes with the help of her pretty blonde sister. The two sisters once disguised themselves as maids to infiltrate the house of a murderer in the upper crust of London society.

Of course I loved the Charlotte Pitt novels. I don't like messy and complicated. I don't want to delve into the uglier side of the human soul unless I have to. I like to pretend everything is happy and going great, even though it is clearly not. I bumble around life like Mr. Magoo, TSA personnel confiscating the pocket knives and mace my husband slips into my purse for my self protection. I look on innocently as the pocket knives are dumped in the trash at the airport security gate. For me, opening a new Charlotte Pitt novel is like opening the door to good friends. I look forward to seeing what everyone is up to.

I read all of the William Monk and Charlotte Pitt novels. My mother mailed me more than one cardboard box filled with Anne Perry novels, both softback and hardback. In fact, I have read every single Anne Perry book except for one Elena Standish novel published in September 2023. As I look at the bookshelf to my left, the top shelf is filled with Anne Perry paperbacks. Beneath that, there are various hardbacks of Anne Perry novels. Books in Anne Perry's World War I novels (also hard to read) as well as several of her Christmas novels are intermixed with random books from other parts of my life - Pollock's Machiavellian Moment, All Creatures Great and Small (a gift from my grandmother, which I never read), 501 Spanish Verbs, Death in the Haymarket, Interpreting NAFTA  (2 copies), Danish Grammar, The Working Poor, Edward Rutherfurd's The Princes of Ireland. Dot Frank's Pawley Island, Locke's Second Treatise of Government, The French Legal System. My Kindle library is full of a similar collection of random and seemingly disconnected and random books - and lots and lots of Anne Perry novels. I started sneakily purchasing them on Kindle so my husband has no idea how many books I bring into the house right under his nose - or he knows perfectly well, but I pretend I do not know what he knows.

And between the books, the Smart TV with the TV apps, still with my mother's logins. The shows and movies she loved to watch with the TV volume at full blast with the front door wide open - Dexter, Grimm., every single Harry Potter movie, all of the Star Trek television series. The Jacques Cousteau documentary we watched when Mom was in the hospital (he was her first crush, before my dad). The Disney movies we watched when we did not know how little time we had left in the assisted living hospice - Coco, Encanto, Red, the surprisingly morbid West Side Story. How did I not know how depressing that move was? Wasn't it supposed to have a happy ending?

Mom and I loved Isabel Allende. She in particular loved The Japanese Lover, which I ordered for her in Large Print. A lovely lightly toned book that tip toed through the not so easy topics of aging, racism, and spirited old women with secret loves. I know Mom would have loved Allende's The Wind Knows My Name, a book about immigrants published after Mom died. Isabel Allende writes about the serious subjects but in a way that we laugh while we cry and leave the book floating and staring at the clouds in the sky, not drowning in sorrow and tears despite this frequently sad and terrifying world in which we live.

As time and the William Monk and Charlotte Pitt novels went on, life got easier for the Monks and a little more complicated for the Pitts. Thomas Pitt eventually became Head of Special Branch - the national clandestine police. The Monks adopted a "mudlark" - a little boy who made his living by salvaging bits of useful trash on the beach of the Thames. The Monks achieved a bit of ease and happiness after their somewhat hard and fractious lives. Both my mother and I loved that Hester Monk swindled a pimp out of his house of ill repute and made it into a clinic for women selling their bodies on the street - and got to him to keep the accounting books for the clinic.

Anne Perry's last novel was a Christmas novel called The Christmas Vanishing. The Christmas novels were where Anne Perry let minor characters have their sweet stories - where the abused wealthy woman who volunteered at the clinic for street women got to fall in love, where the lawyer whose wife left him for prosecuting her father found new love. The main character in The Christmas Vanishing was Mariah, Charlotte Pitt's bitter and frankly mean grandmother. In the novel, Mariah visits a friend in a little village, solving a mystery after she achieved redemption and forgave the long dead husband who verbally, physically, and sexually tortured her when they were married.

Anne Perry's books are not the Land of Old Men. They are the Land of Old Women. Over the decades she wrote about women's issues - secret physical and sexual abuse in the highest and lowest parts of British society. Reading about two little old women over the age of 80 skidding around the ice in a tiny village in the middle of winter was truly the most terrified I have ever been reading  an Anne Perry novel. Yet the little old ladies in her novels - like the young ladies, mothers, maids, and little boys and girls - are no less brave for being old and overlooked.

And as my mother and one of her favorite author take hands and step onto a path made of books, books on tapes, Large Print novels, videos, Star Trek episodes, and violent murder shows, I wish them both peace and redemption and look toward the day when I too slip off my shoes and step onto the path of the endless story of women and men that is humanity.