Defend and Betray - Anne Perry [198]
“Alexandra Elizabeth Carlyon, a jury of your peers has found you not guilty of murder, but of manslaughter—and has appealed for mercy on your behalf. It is a perverse verdict, but one with which I have the utmost sympathy. I hereby sentence you to six months’ imprisonment; and the forfeit of all your goods and properties, which the law requires. However, since the bulk of your husband’s estate goes to your son, that is of little moment to you. May God have mercy on you, and may you one day find peace.”
Alexandra stood in the dock, her body thin, ravaged by emotion, and the tears at last spilled over and ran in sweet, hot release down her face.
Rathbone stood with his own eyes brimming over, unable to speak.
Lovat-Smith rose and shook him by the hand.
At the back of the courtroom Monk moved a little closer to Hester.
With fifteen William Monk novels under her belt and two more in the pipeline, celebrated mystery writer Anne Perry chats with Mortalis about her famed amnesiac detective, self-portraits, and the life of a writer.
Mortalis: You have been crowned the “queen of British historical mystery” (Chicago Tribune). That must be gratifying!
Anne Perry: I didn’t know that. It’s very nice.
M: For you, what are the ingredients of a good mystery?
AP: Tension, conflict, and characters that you care about. If you don’t care about people, it doesn’t matter who did the actual crime. It has to be about why, how did this happen? For me there has to be a distinct moral dilemma where I can believe that a person had no alternative. One reason I like writing mysteries is that it’s not just about who committed the major crime, but what you discover about all of the other characters under the pressure of investigation.
We all have things we’d rather not have made public; it might not be something seriously wrong but just jolly embarrassing. You don’t want to walk down Main Street with no clothes on. The question becomes, Will you lie to protect those you love? There’s always the temptation to evade the truth, fudge it, not to admit to something embarrassing. How honest will we be, how brave? What happens to our integrity when we’re pushed to the edge of admitting something embarrassing? Also, how will we deal with disillusion? Do we blame everyone else? Maybe we expected something unfair of someone and now must face the truth.
So I’d say it’s conflict and what we discover about the whole cast. And it must be believable. In the end, saying “He’s mad” is not an answer. And I’m very bored with “He did it for the money.” It’s been done so many times. I’m also tired of detectives who are social misfits.
M: You bring to life the idiosyncrasies and mannerisms of Victorian high society—the servants, the below-stairs gossip, the peculiar customs. (Incidentally, I love the “grave offense” of knocking on the withdrawing room door!) How did you come to understand what it was like to live and work within these great estates?
AP: It’s great fun to look at old books of manners, and there are plenty of them published—many of the best ones in America. You can set a scene very accurately by describing what was involved in doing the laundry. You didn’t just shove the clothes in a washing machine. There was a specific recipe for the type of cloth, and you had to make your own soap depending on the fabric. Then you had to hope it would dry, which was not easy on a wet day, and you had to iron with two flat irons—use one while the other heated up on the stove. It took the whole day! This all set you back immediately.
On the other hand, there used to be four postal deliveries a day in London, so not everything today is better. You could invite an acquaintance to dinner by post in the morning and receive an answer in the afternoon mail. It was a wealthy society in which there was plenty of leisure time, which led to more rules to divide the up-and-coming from the not-so-good.
M: Don’t you think the ritual of calling hours would have driven you crazy?
AP: If I had been part of it, I suppose I would have known. I wouldn