Author Opens a New Chapter of Writing Life

Studio City writer Thomas Perry has just made a professional leap of faith.

He has announced that his new book, “Blood Money,” will be the last to feature his popular Native American heroine, Jane Whitefield.

It is not as if the fine suspense series of which this is the fifth book were not popular.

Published only last month, the book has already sold out a first printing of 33,000 copies, and Random House is furiously printing more to fill back orders.

Moreover, a New Jersey newspaper, reviewing the book, gushed: “Life is good because the new Thomas Perry is out.” The reviewer went on to describe Perry’s series about a young Seneca Indian woman who helps endangered people disappear as a formula novel “the way chocolate is a formula and champagne is a formula. It’s a formula that’s always great.”

But Perry, winner of mystery writing’s top prize, the Edgar, insists “Blood Money” is “the fifth and, theoretically, the final book” about his professional Native American “vanisher.”

Writing a series compared to chocolate and champagne is great, Perry says, “but it’s not necessarily what you want to do with the rest of your writing career.”

Perry decided to shelve his critically acclaimed “vanisher” not because he tired of her or because he felt the quality of the books was slipping, but because he wanted to continue to grow as a writer.

“I could probably keep writing these things for the rest of my life and they wouldn’t get any worse, but I wouldn’t get any better,” he says. And then he adds what so many people forget to their ultimate dismay: “If you can’t do your best work, you’re wasting your life.”

Although Perry plans no further Whitefield exploits, he says, “I’m leaving the door open.” He had originally planned to kill Jane off, but he was acutely aware of the mess writers who murder popular protagonists find themselves in if they ever have to resurrect them.

Remember the serious tap-dancing Arthur Conan Doyle had to do to explain how Sherlock Holmes survived his tumble off the Reichenbach Falls. Or the tortured explanations the soap-opera writers of the hilarious movie “Soap Dish” had to come up with to explain how character Rod Randall could return after he was decapitated in an earlier episode.

Perry says he wanted to avoid having to write a scene at some future time in which Jane is in the shower and realizes that she only dreamed that she had died.

When Perry first discussed making “Blood Money” the last Whitefield book, his editor at Random House immediately advised him, “Don’t kill her.” When he asked why, she answered, “As soon as you do, you’ll think of something you can’t bear not to write about her.” That seemed like sound advice to Perry.

Before writing the Whitefield books, which are rich with lore about the Senecas of Perry’s native western New York, he published five earlier suspense novels--each distinctive--including the Edgar-winning “The Butcher’s Boy” and “Metzger’s Dog.”

Liberated from the assumptions about Jane’s nature and behavior that shaped the series, he has already all but completed two new novels.

Hesitant to talk too much about them, Perry says the first, tentatively called “Death Benefits,” is done. It’s about a middle-aged insurance investigator and his younger protege investigating a fraud in the course of which the young man “learns what planet he really lives on.”

And Perry’s currently finishing the last chapter of the second book. It deals with a professional killer and a detective who are both profoundly alike and deeply dissimilar.

“The fun of the book,” Perry says, “is that these guys are the best, the absolute best, and they lay traps for each other and, then, the other will turn the trap into a weapon.”

No one else has read the manuscript yet, he says, not even his wife.

*

I greatly enjoyed Thomas Perry’s early work, but I have a special affection for the Jane Whitefield books.

Several years ago, my dearest childhood friend, Toni Flores, was dying of ovarian cancer. As teenagers in Philadelphia, we had had heated, probably nonsensical arguments about Dostoevsky and our other favorite writers. But, as Toni’s illness progressed, this enormously gifted, warm, courageous woman (an anthropologist, poet, college professor, actress, dancer and mother of five) had the great good sense to read for something of almost unimaginable value--for pleasure.

A month or two before her death on Nov. 3, 1997, she asked if I had a mystery I thought she might enjoy and mentioned how much she liked the Jane Whitefield books (Toni taught in upstate New York and loved both Jane’s valor and the books’ Seneca lore). I think it was Perry’s “Vanishing Act” I gave her.

If one measure of a writer is his readers, Perry will surely be proud to know that his admirers included the extraordinary woman who wrote this poem for the youngest of her children, not yet in their teens:

FOR JOHN AND ANTHONY, in case of an accident

Wait for me. When you feel alone,

when you want to tell me something,

whenever you smell the smoke of burning pine,

right then, stop. Wait.

When you see a pink sky, and say

“She would say, ‘Look!’ ”

wait for me. When you kiss someone,

look over the edge of a snowmound,

cut yourself, get a wart, learn

a theorem, wait, wait. Open

to the waiting. And when the line

of a roof, or the line of a song,

or the line of a rabbit’s tracks

in the first snow wring the breath

from you, wait for me, and you will find

that I am already there.

--Toni Flores, April 1994