Anne Perry, who has died aged 84, was a prolific and bestselling historical crime novelist whose own dramatic criminal history came to light 15 years after her first book was published.
Perry’s debut Victorian-era mystery, in which the Scotland Yard inspector Thomas Pitt finds both the killer and an upper-class wife, was published in 1979. By 1994 she had written 13 more Pitt novels, along with five in another series set 30 years earlier, starring the amnesiac private sleuth William Monk and his wife, Hester Latterly, a former nurse in the Crimean war.
