In Resurrection Row Perry takes us through a land where the Dickensian trajectory of one's life is often set at birth. For all Perry's occasional ironical comments on the society her books are almost always about evil. The set up is a bit like Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry (a film only I seem to enjoy) in that the corpse of Lord Augustus Fitzroy-Hammond keeps being buried and then keeps reappearing, still dead of course, in hansom cabs and church pews among other places. If you haven't read Perry I'd suggest you start with Resurrection Row, an early Pitt and Charlotte notable for its cleverness of plot and its particularly droll skewering of the British royal classes. Perry writes in a straight clear way that allows for a fair amount of description-necessary if she's to create a believable Victorian era-that somehow never seems to slow the story. I prefer her first series, that of commoner Inspector Thomas Pitt and his royal wife Charlotte. Today I have a list of reliables whom I read each time they publish, one of them being Anne Perry.

Even when I was reading fifteen hard-boiled paperbacks a month* I still picked up a traditional at least twice a month or so. I've never outgrown the enjoyment some traditional mysteries give me. The ones that dealt with the mysteries of adulthood offered the titillation of modest sexual references but I was too young to understand the emotional underpinnings of all that smart intriguing adult behavior. In those days, the Fifties, the type I preferred leaned heavily on plot and atmosphere. Forgotten Books: Resurrection Row by Anne Perryīetween the ages of ten and fourteen I probably read a hundred or more traditional mysteries.

Resurrection row