This is Fresh Air. I'm David B. Kooley in For Terry Gross.

Today, we're going to remember Anne Perry, a popular mystery writer who, for decades, kept

secret her participation in a murder as a teenager. Perry died last week at the age of 84.

She was the author of several historical mystery series featuring central characters Thomas

Pitt and William Monk. In 1998, the Times of London included her on the list of 100 Masters

of Crime of the Past Century, placing her alongside Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler,

and Arthur Conan Doyle. When Anne Perry was 15 years old, she helped her best friend

murder that friend's mother. Perry's involvement with the murder would have remained a secret,

if not for the 1994 Peter Jackson film Heavenly Creatures, starring a young Kate Winslet and

Melanie Linsky, which dramatized the incident. Journalists tracked Perry down. She had changed

her name and moved across the ocean after spending five and a half years in a New Zealand prison.

Perry was English, but was sent to New Zealand as a girl to recover from tuberculosis.

Terry spoke to Anne Perry in 1994 just months after her story had come out. Terry began

with her latest book, Her 20th, called The Sins of the Wolf. It was the fifth in her series

featuring Detective William Monk. When Monk was introduced in the novel The Face of a Stranger,

he was just regaining consciousness from an accident to find he had totally lost his

memory. The most important mystery that faced him was the mystery of his own identity.

He's in the position of having to learn who he is by seeing what other people think of him.

So we have to see him sell through the eyes of others. That can be a very unnerving experience.

Very unnerving indeed, because he learns what he has done, but not why he has done it.

And so often is one of my mother's favorite sayings, if you just knew the one thing more,

you know why somebody does what they do. It all falls into place and becomes not necessarily

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