Tag Archive for: Anne Perry

Conferences for Writers—Part II, ThrillerFest

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By Kay Kendall

Many
differences make ThrillerFest stand out from other conferences that are offered
to crime authors. This annual conference of International Thriller Writers is
held at the same time every year and in the same hotel. It begins right after
Independence Day at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City and includes a full
six days of activities, each one priced separately. If you attend everything
that is offered, then your conference fee will be much higher than any other in
your whole year.
Rambo’s creator, David Morrell

While
ThrillerFest stands out because of its cost, it is also worth every one of your
hard-earned dollars. You will see more star power on one stage or at just one
of the many cocktail parties than you will ever hope to see in your whole life.
The literary energy and brilliance just zing. What’s more, all those big-name
authors are helpful and supportive to hopeful writers.
If you
are a debut author and get published by a press on the approved list, then you
can join the ITW Debut Author program in that year and receive even more
support and applause. I was urged to participate in 2013 when my first book Desolation Row launched. I figured I’d
go once and be done with such a pricey gathering. I was wrong. I returned in
2014 and again this year. Here are just a few of the reasons why—bestselling
authors who participated in this year’s programs.

Spy novelist Gayle Lynds

  • 2015 ThrillerMaster Nelson DeMille plus
    2015 Silver Bullet Recipient     Kathy Reichs
  • 2015 Spotlight Guests Mark Billingham, Charlaine Harris, and Greg Iles
  • 2014 ThrillerMaster Scott Turow and
    2014 Silver Bullet Award recipient     Brenda Novak
  •  Lee Child interviewed Billingham–they both grew up in Birmingham, England.
  • Rambo’s creator David Morrell interviewed DeMille—they
    both have long and stellar careers.
  • Gayle Lynds introduced her newest thriller THE ASSASSINS
  • Anne Perry flew over from the UK to talk about her historical mysteries.
  • Steve Berry moderated several panels.

Other favorites were Catherine Coulter, Clive Cussler, Jeffery Deaver, Joseph Finder, Heather
Graham, Laurie R. King,  CJ Lyons, Daniel Palmer, Chris Pavone, Hank
Phillippi Ryan, MJ Rose, Karin Slaughter, and RL Stine. Each has at least one huge bestseller, and most have many more.
This conference is only ten years old. The genesis came from successful authors
who wanted to help budding writers learn the ropes and get ahead. Co-founders David
Morrell and Gayle Lynds both attended this year as usual and remain always
supportive to other writers. The learning opportunities at ThrillerFest are
endless. If you are an aspiring or newly published crime writer and have not
yet attended this magnificent event, I encourage you to save up so that you too
can attend in 2016. I hope to see you there!

*******

Kay Kendall is a long-time fan of historical novels and writes atmospheric mysteries that capture the spirit and turbulence of the sixties. She is a reformed PR executive who lives in Texas with her husband, three house rabbits, and spaniel Wills. Terribly allergic to her bunnies, she loves them anyway! Her book titles show she’s a Bob Dylan buff too. RAINY DAY WOMEN published on July 7–the second in her Austin Starr Mystery series. The audio-book will be out soon. 

http://www.amazon.com/Rainy-Day-Women-Mystery-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B00W2X5SCS
*******

Cars, Rats & Anne Perry

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By Kay Kendall
I don’t give a fig how a car works. Or electricity. Or a
computer. They all might as well be black boxes, as far as I’m concerned. Inside
mysterious things happen. Poof! The car turns on. Poof! Electricity powers the
air conditioner. Poof! The computer recalls everything you write.

What I do care about is how people work. Why they do the
things they do. I discovered this passion one teenaged summer when my boyfriend
dumped me and I drooped into churlishness. After a week my mother tired of my
moping around the house and suggested I work at one of her charities.

I ended up volunteering at the county’s psychiatric clinic,
helping with rudimentary clerical tasks. As I typed up forms and patients’
reports, I was shocked to see so much pain appear on the pages. But later I was
gratified to see the clinic’s psychiatric social worker help some of those patients
whose woes I’d typed up. Sometimes the patients left our office with springier steps.
I fancied I could see their anxieties and depression lift, if only a little.
That same summer my favorite cousin began exhibiting
behavioral problems. Merle was super bright but troubled. I never saw him act
out or be mean to someone, but I began to hear stories.  I wanted to help him but didn’t have the
skills. Ah-hah, I thought! I’d study psychology in college and become a
psychiatric social worker so I could fix him.
Please note that I never aspired to be a psychologist or
psychiatrist. Perhaps that was because I’d only seen a psychiatric social
worker in action and therefore could imagine being one. But also note the date
was 1962, the year before Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique.  And
eight years before I became an ardent feminist.
When I entered college in 1963, most courses I took fascinated
me, including for a short time even geology and astronomy, subjects taken only
to fulfill liberal arts distribution requirements. Psychology, however, was a letdown,
a huge bore.

All we studied were rats. I wanted to learn about people. While
two friends in my class did manage to cope with rodentia behavior, I
couldn’t.  These women went on to earn
their doctorates in psychology and help countless people. For me, however, the
gap between the actions of rats and people was too great a leap. I never took
another course after Psych 101.

I toyed with various majors, but English literature was my
mainstay. Fiction encompassed everything about humanity, and I’d always been a
ferocious reader. Writing was a joy. After getting a graduate degree in history—real
crimes that happened in the past, I now say—I fell back on writing and developed
a solid career as a corporate communicator.
I never felt I’d found my niche, however. My heart did not
sing.
When I began writing fiction a decade ago, I finally responded
to an inner compulsion. What I had to explore is why people do the things they
do. Character development and plot are almost synonymous to me. It’s like attending
another high school reunion and seeing old friends again after ten years. I’m
reading the newest chapters in their lives. People are walking, ongoing stories.
Curiosity drives me to learn everything I can and then fictionalize it—showing
their behavior and uncovering their motives.
Anne Perry, author

The mystery comes in when good people do bad things. Anne Perry was the first mystery author I noticed whose killers weren’t thoroughly
evil, but I didn’t know what to make of this. And then the film Heavenly Creatures came out in 1994, exposing her secret. As a teenager she
had helped murder a friend’s mother. Maybe Anne Perry has been trying to fathom
her motives ever since? No wonder the killers she devised—especially in the
first half of her career—are complicated, unfathomable people, jolted into acting
horribly in bad situations.
Each of us is a mysterious black box. Inside are so many factors
all jumbled up—memories, desires, hurts. How can other people ever hope to
understand us? How can we hope to understand ourselves?
Yet still we try. We must try. I was never able to decode
what caused my cousin Merle to derail. I did solve part of the puzzle but was
helpless to alter his sad trajectory. Alas, after living for twenty years in a
hospital for the criminally insane, he wandered off into a field while on
furlough and simply lay down and died. He was forty.
As a mystery author, though, I can put characters into
extreme peril and see if they’ll sort out their own complicated lives as well
as the sometimes vile things that others do. Solving the puzzles of people
living only on pages (or in E files) is a full-time job. After I figure out one
set of interconnecting lives, then I go on to develop another set, another, and
another. This is a job I relish. You can call me a contented Sisyphus.
*******
Kay Kendall is an international award-winning public relations
executive who lives in Texas with her husband, four house rabbits, and spaniel
Wills. A fan of historical mysteries, she wants to do for the 1960s what
novelist Alan Furst does for Europe in the 1930s and 1940s–write atmospheric mysteries that capture the spirit of the age.

Discover more about her at


http://www.KayKendallAuthor.com

Death by Stiletto

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By Kay Kendall

Earlier this
week I was brainstorming with my manager (AKA my husband) about topics for my
next piece here on the Stiletto Blog.

“Eureka,” he said. “Today on the radio I heard about a woman who’s charged with
murdering her lover using her stiletto. At first I figured it meant a stiletto
knife. But no, it was a shoe.”  

Kay & bunny Dusty

“Perfect,” I
said. “I hope I can find the story online.”  And so I began to search, typing in only these
words—stiletto murder. Up popped
pages and pages of articles. Naturally many citations were from local media
outlets, but also from major media like CNN, Huffington Post, and People
magazine.
For lots of detail about this murder, you can Google it yourself. But here is the story in a
nutshell:  
Prosecutors say Ana Trujillo (age 45) was out of control and stabbed her boyfriend Alf Andersson (age 59) at least 25 times, holding him down
until he bled to death. The defense says Andersson was an alcoholic drug user
who was drunk and attacking Ms. Trujillo, and she “did the only think she could
do.”
At least
25 times!
As luck would
have it, the murder took place in Texas. Do you realize how many interesting
(read bizarre) murders occur in this
state? Remember the cheerleader mom contracting out a hit on her daughter’s
rival for a place on the cheerleading squad? Yep, that was Texas all right.


In fact, both
the stiletto wielder and the cheerleader mom inhabited my crazy, fast-growing
city—Houston. Oh, it doth make one so very proud. Yes indeed. (All jokes aside, but I
really do love living in Houston.)
I once read an
article that said if you want to publish a bestseller, then just throw the name
Texas into the title. That state name outsells any other. Again, I am so proud. Texas Chain Saw Massacre anyone? 
Seriously, it’s
a good thing that I enjoy unusual human behavior, since I live where I do.
There is so much material just lying all around, material for a mystery author
like myself to pick up and use.
Now, I’m not
going to claim that Texas has a lock on unusual behavior. Immediately other
states come to mind—like California and Florida. Or cities like Chicago and New
Orleans. Places where unusual behavior is more commonplace then where I was
born and raised—Kansas. When all people can say about your state of birth is
that a fictional character named Dorothy wore sparkly red shoes and had a
little dog named Toto, you know they think your state is boring.
No one ever
says Texas is boring. For good or ill, I cannot argue that fact.
Here’s why I’m
telling you all this. It’s because mystery authors have a warped sense of
interest in some things. I am totally curious about all human behavior, what makes
people tick, as we used to say all the time. I could care less how a car runs
or anything else technical. Just bores me to tears. But people, oh how
endlessly fascinating they all are—we
all are.
That’s the kind
of mystery I like to write—when the person “who done it” seems to be a perfectly normal
human being, but then snaps. I don’t care for the serial killers who everyone admits
are out and out crazy. Where’s the interest, the mystery, in that?
The British writer
Anne Perry has produced endless streams of who-done-its, now numbering more
than 60 books that have sold more than 26 million copies worldwide. At least
the first half of them featured killers who were actually nice people, driven
to do the ultimate evil deed, murder.
When I first
began reading her books in the early 1990s, I noted that quirk in her fiction
right away. Then in 1994 a film was released—Heavenly Creatures, an early feature directed by Peter
Jackson, who went on to direct the hugely successful Lord of the Rings trilogy—that let the cat out of the proverbial
bag. 


As a teenager, Anne Perry had helped a friend kill her mother in 1954.
Both teens were imprisoned in their home country of New Zealand, and then
released five years later under the condition that they never see each other
again. Ms. Perry had gone on to adopt a pseudonym and make a new life for herself. I
myself sat beside her during a luncheon at which she was going to speak. (Of
course we were in Houston!)
Now if that
doesn’t tell you truth is stranger than fiction, I don’t know what would.
========

I wonder if any of you are as fascinated by this tale as I am? The teen killers did not use a stiletto. Do you know what weapon they did use to murder the mother in NZ?

For more on
Anne Perry (real name Juliet Hulme, played by Kate Winslet in the film), I
recommend reading these:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/7367284/Perry-biography-breaks-silence
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/when-anne-perrys-dark-past-was-revealed/article4592201/
*******
Kay Kendall is an international award-winning public relations
executive who lives in Texas with her husband, five house rabbits, and spaniel
Wills. A fan of historical mysteries, she wants to do for the 1960s what
novelist Alan Furst does for Europe in the 1930s during Hitler’s rise to
power–write atmospheric mysteries that capture the spirit of the age.





http://www.KayKendallAuthor.com