Thomas Perry

• Born: August 7, 1947
• Place of Birth: Tonawanda, New York

TYPE OF PLOT: Thriller

PRINCIPAL SERIES: The Butcher’s Boy, 1982-2020; Jane Whitefield, 1995-2021; Jack Till, 2007-2013

Contribution

Thomas Perry began his career writing thrillers about flawed heroes engaged in sometimes less-than-legal schemes and missions, who appear sympathetic only because their opponents are more morally reprehensible than they are. His best works in this vein are the four novels in the Butcher’s Boy series about a professional hitman. His later works, his most successful and popular novels, are those in a series about an Indigenous American woman, Jane Whitefield, who helps make victimized people “disappear.” Whitefield is a capable, believable, and sympathetic hero who resorts to force only when necessary and uses her intelligence and culture to defeat her foes.

Perry’s later novels have been more uneven because he has eschewed a series hero. His protagonists are sometimes bystanders drawn into investigating a mystery by their characters or circumstances. However, Perry remains an expert at structure, pacing, constructing believable plots, and creating sympathetic and plausible characters. Further, in the 2020s, Perry has revisited his Butcher’s Boy series with Eddie’s Boy (2020) and his Jane Whitefield series with The Left-Handed Twin (2021). In 2023, Perry published Murder Book, and, in 2024, Perry published Hero.

Biography

Thomas Edmund Perry was born on August 7, 1947, in Tonawanda, New York, an area that became the setting for his Jane Whitefield series. He is the son of Richard Perry, a superintendent of schools, and Elizabeth Perry, an English teacher. He attended Cornell University, receiving a Bachelor’s degree in 1969, and received a doctorate in English literature from the University of Rochester. He was a member of the Air National Guard.

After his studies, Perry worked for a year as a commercial fisherman before working in higher education, first as assistant to the provost of the College of Creative Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara from 1975 to 1980. There, he met his second wife, Jo Anne Lee, also a writer with a doctorate in English, whom he married in 1980; they have two daughters, Alix and Isabel. He then became assistant coordinator of the general education program at the University of Southern California. His third attempt at writing a novel, The Butcher’s Boy, was published in 1982. The book won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1983 and a silver medal from the Commonwealth Club of California the same year. His next novel, Metzger’s Dog (1983), was named a New York Times notable book for 1984.

In 1984, Perry began to work in television as both a producer and a writer. Although he worked mainly for the light detective series Simon and Simon (1981-1988), he also wrote for Twenty-one Jump Street (1987-1991) and Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994). He and his wife cowrote some episodes, including “Reunion” for Star Trek, but when their first daughter was born in 1989, Perry’s wife decided to stay at home to raise her, and Perry resolved to become a full-time novelist.

Perry’s first novel about Jane Whitefield led to a series, and these books, like many of Perry’s other novels, have been optioned for films. Of Perry’s later, nonseries novels, Pursuit (2001) won the Gumshoe Award for 2002. Perry's later work continued to win awards as the twenty-first century progressed. The Informant (2011) was awarded the 2012 Barry Award for Best Thriller. Eddie's Boy received the 2021 Barry Award for Best Thriller. In 2021, Vanishing Act, a 1995 novel in the Jane Whitefield series, was included in Parade's list of the 101 Best Mystery Books of All Time. 

Analysis

Thomas Perry’s fiction usually involves stretching one element of the thriller novel—the chase—into the mainspring and focus of his plots. The hunted and the hunter can also change roles, sometimes unknown to each other and perhaps even to the reader. In his early works, it is sometimes difficult, but never impossible, to distinguish good characters from bad.

The primary device that Perry uses to distinguish his protagonists from his villains in his early novels is to change the point of view from the main character to another character, often filling in that character’s backstory, but never at a length that significantly retards the action. Thus, we learn that the person the main character will kill or cause to die is even more worthless than the often amoral protagonist. For example, as the Butcher’s Boy, Perry’s first main character, moves across the United States, killing off various syndicate bosses so that he can survive, readers learn that his victims often need eliminating. The Butcher’s Boy’s lack of a proper name through his first novel reinforces reader identification, and his backstory inspires sympathy: Taken in by an older professional assassin, Eddie Mastrewski, whose cover is his butcher shop, the boy can react only as Eddie taught him. The Boy has his own primitive sense of justice: When the syndicate in Buffalo kills an older man who helps people disappear because he tried to help the Boy, he avenges the older man by killing his assassins and their superior to pay off a debt, as he calls it.

Perry’s next major character, Jane Whitefield, was his most popular. Some critics have attributed this popularity to a supposed deliberately calculated appeal to politically correct shibboleths, such as Jane’s identity as an Indigenous American and her gender. However, she feels authentic, plausible, and sympathetic as a character. Her Indigenous American heritage is an outgrowth of her growing up in the area of New York in which Perry grew up. Jane’s Deganawida seems very close to Perry’s Tonawanda. Her motivations for becoming a guide fit in with her heritage and her own sense of justice, and she relies on her observation skills rather than on superior firepower or violence, which she employs only when necessary. Perry also skillfully weaves in Senecan legends and history to support the narrative. Jane must be as skillful in interpreting her dreams as she is in observing her surroundings.

It could be argued that Perry’s need to make Jane a believable heroine weakened the later novels in this series. Jane is devoted to her calling, but not enough that she would give up a chance at domestic happiness, so when she receives a marriage proposal, she accepts. Her marriage means she must gradually withdraw from her life as a guide, and her motivations for helping victims in her third, fourth, and fifth novels are more tenuous than those in the first two, which are also more effective as novels because their villains are stronger. Shadow Woman (1997), the third Jane Whitefield novel, is not significantly weaker than the first two novels because the villains are mirror images of Jane. Still, their involvement with her husband is less credible. In The Face-Changers (1998), she becomes a guide at her husband's request, whose mentor has been falsely accused of murder, and her opponents are shadowy and amorphous until the end. Blood Money (1999), the fifth novel in the series, is even less believable in her reasons for helping the victims and in the schemes they all concoct to foil the villains—who are virtually the entire American Mafia. Perry wisely chose to give Jane a sabbatical after this novel. When Perry published his ninth Jane Whitefield novel, The Left-Handed Twin, in 2021, he allowed Jane to return to her roots. In this novel, Jane helps a young woman named Anne who is fleeing from violence after her boyfriend forces her to watch him commit murder. Jane must battle against a Russian Brotherhood keen on thwarting her investigation. The novel takes its name from an Indigenous American story about twins. 

Perry’s later novels involve him in the problem of maneuvering a somewhat naïve yet good-hearted character to solve a mystery or uncover a criminal scheme, as happens in Dead Aim (2002) when a businessperson investigates why a girl committed suicide, and in Death Benefits (2001), in which a newly hired worker at an insurance company must discover why a coworker with whom he was in love has been murdered. Often, the less experienced character is aided by a veteran, and usually less scrupulous, partner, as happens in Death Benefits, Pursuit, and Nightlife (2006), even when the less experienced character is connected to or involved in law enforcement, as in the last two titles. Whatever the initial premise, Perry is an expert at easing readers into a willing suspension of disbelief, with his control of narrative viewpoint and talent for creating interesting and credible secondary characters. His skill at constructing plots and situations usually means the level of disbelief is never high from the start.

Sleeping Dogs

At the beginning of Sleeping Dogs (1992), the second novel about the professional hitman the Butcher’s Boy, he has been retired for ten years, living in England under the name Michael Schaeffer and having an affair with an upper-class Englishwoman. When an attempt is made on his life by an American mafioso who recognizes him, Schaeffer embarks on a killing spree, changing his name as he travels across the United States. Once again, as in The Butcher’s Boy, Justice Department investigator Elizabeth Waring is enlisted by her benighted bosses to figure out what is happening.

The hallmarks that made Perry’s debut novel successful remain: believable action, sympathetic quarry and pursuer, and accurate snapshots of the various portions of the United States (and England) through which his characters travel. The novel emphasizes two points. First, the Butcher’s Boy and his Mafia opponents initially misunderstand each other’s motives. Schaeffer believes that a coincidental sighting and attack on him result from a deliberate assignment, so he goes across the United States, killing the underbosses and bosses he believes are responsible, resulting in a grisly comedy of errors. Second, Schaeffer’s view of America is colored by his ten years’ absence, so he is almost a tourist in his own country who must re-educate himself on how to survive and attack.

Again, Waring has the clearest understanding of the plot, but even she makes a crucial error in judgment that proves nearly fatal. The Butcher Boy’s confrontation with Waring at the end of the novel is not as innocent as the one that concludes The Butcher’s Boy, and while Schaeffer remains a somewhat sympathetic character, his motivations for restraining himself, self-centered as they are, make him less likable.

Dance for the Dead

The second Jane Whitefield novel, Dance for the Dead (1996), begins almost in medias res, as Jane attempts to save a young boy from predators trying to claim his inheritance, and the plot never lets up from that point. The novel features a character who is perhaps Perry’s finest creation as a villain: the ominously named Barraclough (whose name is often misheard as “Bearclaw”), a former police officer turned security specialist who uses his position to find weak criminals or victims to bleed off their stashes or inheritances. He is all appetitive brutality, the personification of the Senecan deity Hanegoategeh, the destroyer. As such, he is Jane’s worthiest opponent, for she represents Hanegoategeh’s brother, Hawenneyu, the creator and nurturer.

Barraclough’s crimes are suitably savage, and the justice that Jane doles out to him is highlighted by a change in point of view at the end of the novel as Barraclough pursues Jane through a deserted industrial area. Once again, Perry uses this narrative device to make his villains appear even worthier of punishment and to show the perception in the villain that the hunter has become the hunted, as well as to sustain suspense. The morality implicit in the Whitefield novels is also made explicit when Jane asks the judge, who is hearing the case of the boy she rescues, whether he wants to be the person who helped the boy or the person who did not. In Perry’s novels, morality is the sum of a series of such choices.

Death Benefits

Death Benefits, Perry’s first after the fifth book in the Jane Whitefield series, was published in 2001, the same year as Pursuit, which suggests that Perry was perhaps eager to explore other types of thriller plots. In this one, a young actuarial examiner for a well-established insurance company, John Walker, is enlisted by an outside expert, Max Stillman, to discover why Ellen Snyder, with whom Walker fell in love during their training sessions, disappeared after apparently arranging a multimillion-dollar fraud. During their investigation, Walker learns that he is not the type of person who can spend his career in an office cubicle; Stillman offers Walker a glimpse of the freedom that Walker never knew he wanted. Such freedom comes with a price: When Walker is forced to kill an attacker, he realizes that the action changes not only his future but also his past.

The novel’s weakness is the introduction of Walker’s love interest, a woman who works for a computer hacker whom Stillman employs for information. She fits in thematically in that she has already embraced the type of career that Walker wants, but she also seems like an amor ex machina when she pursues Walker to join him in bed. The novel’s strengths include the reality of its plotting; Stillman is no Holmesian expert and, at one point, complains that they have no plan and are just reacting to their circumstances. Another is the villains, who are as ruthless as any Jane Whitefield eludes and are also original in conception so that the novel's climax involves a confrontation and chase of such breadth that it is claustrophobic yet wholly American.

Principal Series Characters:

• The Butcher’s Boy is an unremarkable man in his mid-thirties when first introduced and in his mid-forties in his next appearance. He could be mistaken for a college professor, but he is an almost totally amoral, affectless professional hitman.
• Jane Whitefield is a “guide” who helps people escape desperate situations by installing them in new identities. She is tall, has long black hair, and is the daughter of a Senecan father and an Irish American mother. She is particularly adept at reading the surrounding signs in a crowded airport or her dreams.

Bibliography

Baker, Jeff. “Perry Won’t Be Killing Her Off.” The Oregonian, 26 Jan. 2001, p. 9.

Birnbaum, Robert. “An Interview with Author Thomas Perry (Dead Aim).” Identity Theory, 1 Feb. 2003, www.identitytheory.com/thomas-perry. Accessed 30 July 2024.

Mickunas, Vick. “The Latest Thriller from Crime Fiction Master Thomas Perry.” Dayton Daily News, 14 Jan. 2024, www.daytondailynews.com/lifestyles/the-latest-thriller-from-crime-fiction-master-thomas-perry/F5JZRRMB4FD6LOVBUS46TJCZYA. Accessed 30 July 2024.

Reilly, John M., Clive Bloom, and Paul Cobley. “Thriller.” In The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing, edited by Rosemary Herbert. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Smith, Julie. “Of Metzger’s Dog and Perry’s Cats.” Armchair Detective, vol. 17, spring 1984, pp. 132-134.

Stasio, Marilyn. “Shape Shifter.” Review of Nightlife, by Thomas Perry. The New York Times Book Review, 9 Apr. 2007, p. 33.

Thomas Perry, www.thomasperryauthor.com. Accessed 30 July 2024.