Creativity Quote by Thomas Perry

Perry’s provocation lands because it flips the usual moral casting call. We like to call villains “predatory” and “unsavory” as if the label settles the matter. He treats those figures less as ethical failures than as narrative engines: the people who do things, who force decisions, who turn the page. In that framing, goodness isn’t attacked so much as exposed as inert. “Common virtues” read like a polite résumé - patience, restraint, decency - admirable in life, often fatal to momentum on the page.

The intent is practical, almost workmanlike: a thriller needs actors, not saints. Predators pursue. Unsavory characters trespass. They create pressure, and pressure creates plot. The subtext is a little darker: virtue, as socially performed, is frequently a stance of non-interference. It’s a way to keep your hands clean, which in storytelling can look like keeping your hands off the steering wheel.

That cynicism also nods at a cultural appetite. Modern audiences are trained by prestige TV and true-crime podcasting to follow the heat source, not the moral center. Perry is admitting what readers already do, then making it sound like permission: don’t just tolerate the bad people, recognize their utility.

There’s a sly moral paradox hiding underneath. If action is what makes a story matter, and “goodness” is defined by passivity, then the novel becomes an argument for compromised virtue - for characters who risk being stained by the world in order to change it.