of historical mystery fiction with nearly twenty-eight million copies sold, Anne Perry (1938– ) has produced nearly eighty books, most of them classic Victorian-era detective novels about Thomas and Charlotte Pitt or about William Monk. Among much else, she has written a dozen highly successful Christmas-themed novellas in which Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould is featured, plus works set during World War I.
Perry’s first book, The Cater Street Hangman (1979), featured Thomas Pitt, a Victorian policeman, and his highborn wife, Charlotte, who helps her husband solve mysteries out of boredom. She is of enormous help to him as she is able to gain access to people of a high social rank, which would be extremely difficult for a common police officer to do. There are nearly thirty books in the series, set in the 1880s and 1890s. With Twenty-One Days (2017), the Pitts’s son Daniel has been persuaded to take on his own case in what may be the start of a new series.
The Monk series, with more than twenty novels, beginning with The Face of a Stranger (1990), is set in the 1850s and 1860s. Monk, a private detective, is assisted on his cases by an excitable nurse, Hester Latterly.
After winning the Edgar in 2000 for her short story “Heroes,” set during World War I, Perry began a series of novels featuring its protagonist, British Army chaplain Joseph Reavley, whose exploits and character were suggested by the author’s grandfather; the first book was No Graves as Yet (2003).
Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould has been a secondary character in the Pitt series but is the author’s favorite. “She’s always been one of my favorite characters,” Perry has said, “and she’s who I would like to be. She has courage for life, she has wit, and she has intelligence and grace and [beauty], but her beauty is more than just a matter of her features; it’s something within her.” She is noted for expressing her opinion of how women are treated in England at the time.
“An Affair of Inconvenience” was originally published in the Fall 1998 issue of Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine.