This week's guest on REPORT FROM SANTA FE is Anne Perry, an international bestselling novelist best known for her two long running historical detective series, the Thomas Pitt series and William Monk series. She has written over 75 books and none of her books has ever been out of print. They have received critical acclaim and huge popular success, with over 26 million books in print world-wide, translated into fourteen languages.  The Times (London) selected her as one of the 20th Century’s "100 Masters of Crime."

Perry's Thomas Pitt character features in one of the longest sustained series by a living writer with 29 titles to date. Death On Blackheath is the latest in the series, and appeared on the New York Times Bestseller list. Perry extensively discusses her long-running series and why she loves the time period of World War I (in which her own grandfather was a war chaplain).

Anne won an Edgar award in 2000 with her short story "Heroes." The main character in the story features in an ambitious 5-book series, set during the First World War. These are being re-published internationally, fueled in part by a resurgence of interest in the era, sparked by the popularity of PBS-TV's “Downton Abbey.”

QUOTE: “Reads like Thackeray edited by Elmore Leonard.” -- Booklist

"Americans sometimes say to me that they have no class system themselves. All human beings have class systems. It can be based on a different thing in a different country, but the thing about breeding is, you can't buy it. You can't buy class."  -- Anne Perry