Last month, the crime novelist Anne Perry left her home in Portmahomack for a promotional tour of English radio stations. Armed with copies of her new book, Dark Assassin, she travelled hundreds of miles, ate many M&S sandwiches and answered identical questions about Victorian police procedures in identical studios across England. Just an average February for a hard-working writer of historical mysteries.

Until one lazy but excitable presenter announced, live on air, that the notorious murderer Anne Perry, formerly Juliet Hulme — as played by Kate Winslet in the film Heavenly Creatures — would be on after the commercial break, discussing her book Dark Assassin, based on the story of her own life.

While the ads were on air, Perry calmly pointed out that Dark Assassin is set in 1863 and that the hero is a male river policeman with amnesia. These facts, easily garnered from the book’s jacket, enraged the presenter. “He was so furious that he ordered us to get out and called security. He made a first-class prat of himself.”

If there is any excuse for this hapless individual’s confusion it is this: despite having written more than 50 books, been translated into Greek, Russian and Korean, with sales exceeding 20m (most of them in the US), Perry is best known for her part in the murder that appalled New Zealand in 1954. Aged 15, she and her friend Pauline Parker lured Parker’s mother to a park, then bludgeoned her to death with a brick wrapped in a stocking.

Perry had been a sickly, lonely child with a peripatetic upbringing. She and Parker developed an intense friendship, although not the lesbian love the film portrayed. When Perry’s parents announced they were divorcing and sending Perry away, the girls pleaded for Parker to go with her. Parker’s mother refused. The girls’ response was to invite her for a picnic and then brutally kill her, beating her face to a pulp and severing one of her fingers as she tried to protect her face. The resulting trial was headline news across the world. The two girls were convicted and sentenced to hard labour in separate jails.

It may have been 52 years ago, but human nature dictates that radio presenters (and the rest of us, if we are honest) are more interested in the confessions of a teenage killer than a polite chat about the sewers of Victorian London. Despite the many merits of her books, Perry’s reputation is less about literature and more about bricks, blood and Winslet.

Until the release of Heavenly Creatures, in 1994, Perry’s strategy of quiet reinvention had worked. She left New Zealand in 1959, aged 21, when she was released from Mt Eden women’s prison and given a new name. After a life that took her from Rome to Beverly Hills and points in-between, she ended up in Portmahomack, a fishing village between the Moray Firth and the Dornoch Firth, in 1989. Her mother moved there next, followed by her brother, and Perry got on with writing, going to church (she is a practising Mormon) and converting a former piggery into a plush home.

“For the first five years I did think my past might come out,” she says from the squishy depths of a cream leather sofa. “But not after 45 years. Why would anyone be interested?” This is rather disingenuous coming from a writer who specialises in snappy murder yarns rather than, say, magic realism, but Perry is adamant she has put her past behind her and everyone else should too.

“I am not one for looking back. No one can alter what’s past, but you can cripple yourself by dwelling on it and you are not really helping anybody if you constantly beat yourself up over it. Does it undo anything? No, it does not. If you are thinking about guilt, are you not thinking about yourself? How about shut up about yourself and think about someone else?” The someone at the uppermost of Perry’s mind was her mother Hilda, who died in 2004. When Heavenly Creatures was released, the subsequent media firestorm left her mother badly scorched.

With Perry’s cover blown, it was clear her own story would colour everyone’s reaction to her fictional murders. As she had already established a reputation in America, she decided to protect her mother from the constant muck-raking. She would publish her books in the UK, but do nothing to promote them or draw attention to herself.

“I would not have an old lady of 90 having people on the doorstep, telephoning her, pointing long lenses into the bedroom,” she says, outrage causing her voice to rise.

“If she was still alive we would not be having this conversation. I would like to establish a proper literary reputation in this country, but not at that price.”

Since her mother’s death, Perry has decided it’s time to crack the British market. She knows all too well what this means. “If I stick my head above the parapet in another country and it gets shot at, I haven’t fouled my own nest,” she says, a New Zealand inflection creeping into the clipped RP.

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