The famous British crime novelist Anne Perry has died in Los Angeles at the age of 84, her French publisher announced Wednesday.
In addition to police plots such as
The Highgate Rise fires, A dark sea
or
The Cater Street Murders
and their famous characters William Monk and Charlotte and Thomas Pitt, the author was known for her own true crime, which inspired the 1994 film
Creatures .
Heavenly,
by Peter Jackson: As a teenager, she was sentenced to five years in prison for the murder of her best friend's mother.
In the film, Perry was played by Kate Winslet.
A prolific novelist, she sold more than 25 million copies of her works throughout the world, while managing to keep her personal secret hidden for decades.
In 1954, Perry, then named Juliet Hulme, was 15 years old and living in New Zealand, near her best friend, Pauline Parker.
And when her parents told her they were moving abroad, she hoped Parker could follow her, too.
Her mother, Honora Mary Parker, however, refused.
More information
Redemption in the Victorian haze
The two girls then decided to kill her, to avoid separating.
The death, particularly brutal - the woman received twenty blows from a brick - shocked the entire country, as did a subsequent process that had all the elements to arouse morbid attention: the death of a mother, betrayed by her daughter, and the rumors of a love relationship between the two young accomplices.
Anne Perry later denied dating Pauline Parker, but did acknowledge that their relationship was obsessive.
Too young for the death penalty, both teenagers ended up in prison.
Perry was released five years later, she changed her name precisely to the one that would later make her famous and also changed her life.
She worked for a time as a flight attendant, became a Mormon, and settled in Scotland.
Anne Perry, at her home in Scotland, during an interview for EL PAÍS, in 1998. Luis Magán
With this new identity, he published his literary debut in 1979, the first novel in a very long and successful career, marked especially by two series of books set in Victorian England: on the one hand, those that are focused on the character of William Monk, with titles like
A Dark Sea
and
Blind Justice
;
and, on the other, the one starring Charlotte and Thomas Pitt, which began with
The Cater Street Murders
in 1979. "Perry was selected by
The Times
newspaper as one of the 100 best crime writers of the 20th century," recalls her page on the website of the literary agency Carmen Balcells.
Despite so many changes, her past ended up finding her: her real name and her conviction were revealed by the press in the 1990s and adapted for the big screen.
“Everything she had achieved as an honest member of society was under threat.
Why can't I be judged for who I am now instead of who I was then?" Perry complained to
The Guardian
in 2003.
In any case, in addition to their experiences, the story will retain "its outstanding characters, its historical accuracy, the quality of its detective novels and its interest in social questions," added its editorial in France.
Perry, in January 2015, in Barcelona.Gianluca Battista
