Perry wrote a series of political articles for Penthouse UK in 1984.

In 1991, Perry was commissioned by the Weekend Australian Magazine to write a feature about an Australian syndicate attempting to raise the treasure from a sunken galleon off the coast of Guam. He returned there with a film crew to make a documentary entitled The Raising of a Galleon’s Ghost.

Perry worked for three years part-time on his first book, a fictional thriller, Program for a Puppet, which was first published in the UK by W. H. Allen in May 1979 and then Crown in US in 1980. Newgate Callendar in The New York Times called it ‘altogether an exciting story...an exciting panorama.’ Publishers Weekly (US) said: ‘In a slick, convincing manner, Perry welds high-tech with espionage.’

In an interview on Sydney radio a decade after the publication of Program for a Puppet, Perry spoke about learning more from the negative reviews for his first fiction book than the good reviews: ‘Some were a bit cranky; some were patronising,’ he said, ‘but they were all in some way instructive. One thought the writing was “too high mileage.” Another spoke of a “staccato” style. I recall another mentioning that it was, at times, like a film script. One reviewer thought I had two good thrillers in one, which had merit. I did meld two big themes that may have been better separated. But you don’t really know what you are doing on a first fiction. I did all the heavy research, “forty ways to pick a lock,” that sort of thing.’

The author’s second novel, Blood is a Stranger was set in Australia's Arnhem Land and Indonesia. This covered the ‘issue’ of the misuse of uranium mining and dangers of nuclear weapons, a theme in Perry’s early writing and documentary film-making. Stephen Knight in the Sydney Morning Herald wrote: Blood is a Stranger is a skilful and thoughtful thrillerwith a busy plot and some interesting, unnerving speculations about what might be going on in the world of lasers, yellowcake (uranium mining and manufacture) and Asian politics...things that most people prefer to ignore in favour of more simple and familiar puzzles.’

Roland Perry returned to fiction and a pet theme...the evils of nuclear weapons...in his third novel Faces in the Rain (1990). Set mainly in Melbourne and Paris, he used the first person to expose the nefarious activities of the French in testing and developing nuclear weapons in the Pacific.

The author’s second book followed up on a factual theme in Program for a Puppet...the way the American public was manipulated into voting for candidates by slick computer-based campaigns. Entitled Hidden Power: The Programming of the President it concentrated on the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. The book explained how advertising techniques had been superseded in elections by more sophisticated methods, including marketing and computer analysis. It was published in 1984. The book, as much narrative as analysis, told how the two key campaign ‘pollsters’ steered their candidates. It was not critical of President Ronald Reagan, but was seen by the Republican campaign as hostile to him.

In the UK, the book received wide coverage. The Economist opined that it had a ‘frightening message: the pollsters with their state-of-the-art computers, which keep a finger on the pulse of the electorate, hope they can manipulate almost any election and have ambitions to control what the people’s choice can do in office.’ Oliver Pritchett in the London Sunday Telegraph thought the book’s main concept was ‘an alarming idea, and the author...plainly intends to give us the shivers.’

Communist journalist, Australian Wilfred Burchett died in Bulgaria late 1983, and Perry wrote a book about him in 1988. Perry based the book on Australia’s biggest defamation trial, when Burchett in 1974 sued Jack Kane of the Democratic Labor Party for calling him a KGB agent.

The Fifth Man

For his seventh book, published in 1994, Perry set out to discover the identity of the ‘Fifth Man’ in the "Cambridge Five" Cambridge University spy ring. All members of the Ring worked for the Soviet Union’s KGB and were run by Russian Master Spy Yuri Ivanovitch Modin. He claimed to have a strong base of contacts within British intelligence, especially MI6, members of which he claimed had assisted him on detail for his first novel and information for articles on espionage.

After initial research he presented a 20,000 word evidentiary statement to Sedgwick & Jackson UK’s William Armstrong, who had published various books on espionage, notably by British journalist Chapman Pincher. Armstrong had been caught up in circumstances surrounding the MI5 agent Peter Wright, who published Spycatcher. The Fifth Man was published in 1994, during an avalanche of spy book collaborations. Knightley instead edited a book The Philby Files by Genrikh Borovik.

The book named Lord Rothschild, the Third Baron, as the fifth key member of the KGB-controlled Ring. The other four were Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, and Sir Anthony Blunt, the Queen’s art curator. The media and press were split between positive and negative reaction to The Fifth Man. The Irish Times reviewer Kieran Fagan said: ‘This book by an Australian journalist is very unusual.....Few writers on espionage achieve the page-turning fluency of Roland Perry.’ The Weekend Australian reviewer Richard Hall said ‘it only takes a couple of phone calls to establish that the Rothschild operation had been pretty small beer for a long time.’ In contrast, Norman Abjorensen in The Sunday Canberra Times wrote: Perry makes a plausible case that the Fifth Man was...Rothschild...even from the most critical viewpoint it has to be conceded that the circumstantial evidence pointing to Rothschild is compelling.’

Recent non-fiction

After this run of sports writing, Perry turned wrote a biography of Australian General Sir John Monash, a military commander of the First World War. Monash won the Fellowship of Australian Writers' "Melbourne University Publishing Award" in 2004, with the judges describing it as "a model of the biographer's art."

Roland Perry next chose an American spy, Michael Whitney Straight, as the subject of his 19th book, Last of the Cold War Spies, published first by the US’s Da Capo Press. According to Perry's work, Straight, the scion of a super-rich Anglo-American family, had been recruited by Anthony Blunt into the infamous Cambridge University Ring.

After covering the Western Front through the biography of Monash, Perry turned to the Eastern Front for his 23rd book. It covers the dual biographies of Australian General Sir Harry Chauvel and T E Lawrence (‘Lawrence of Arabia’), which are the vehicles for his tome: The Australian Light Horse to be published in October 2009.

Perry turned to his love of cricket for his book, The Don, a biography of Sir Donald Bradman published in 1995 again by Macmillan in Australia and William Armstrong at Sedgwick & Jackson in the UK. Perry consulted with Bradman for six years and four books resulted: The Don; Bradman’s Best (Random House, 2001); Bradman’s Best Ashes Teams (Random House, 2002); and Bradman’s Invincibles (Hachette, 2008). According to Perry, he and Bradman discussed the latter's thoughts on a compilation of a best-ever dream team. The book, Bradman’s Best (Random House) was published in Australia and the UK in 2001. The UK Observer’s Norman Harris noted in his column that the book ‘containing the 11 precious names will be guarded like gold bars.’

Warwick Franks reviewed Bradman's Best and said, referring also Perry's overall work on Bradman, "Perry's reverential approach turns the process into Moses bringing down the tablets from Mount Sinai. To Perry, Bradman is without spot or stain so that much of his writing, as in the earlier biography, takes on the air of hagiography". Franks criticised Perry for depicting Bradman as an all-powerful influence and prescient when it came to strategic successes as a administrator and leader, but when a dubious selection such as the omission of a leading player who had angered Bradman occurred, Perry blamed Bradman's administrative colleagues. Franks also criticised the large number of factual errors in the book, such as in the profile of Don Tallon. Gideon Haigh has been criticised Perry's biography in The Australian, saying that he was guilty of "glossing over or ignoring anything to Bradman's discredit". The 2002 Wisden Cricketers Almanack called it an "over-hyped stew of leftovers cooked up by the Don's faithful amanuensis" and called it a "perfect example" of "Sir Donald Brandname", the commercial exploitation of Bradman's legacy. The 2002–03 Wisden Cricketers' Almanack Australia said that the Bradman's Best series was an example of an "outpouring of exploitation, disguised as mourning" in the wake of Bradman's death in early 2001. Aside from agreeing with other cricket analysts' views of Perry's attention to accuracy by calling the book "shoddily written, mistake ridden", Wisden Australia went on to question whether the selection was authentically Bradman's or whether Perry had fabricated or guessed Bradman's thoughts and passed them off in order to produce material that would make the most of the upsurge in interest in Bradman following his death. The reviewer, Jamie Grant said that Perry's claim of authenticity was "less than plausible" and lamented that "Bradman, unfortunately, is not here to account for the choices Perry has attributed to him". Grant argued that as Bradman usually had only four specialist bowlers in the teams that he led or selected in real life, including those in which he batted, it was hard to believe that he had actually chosen five specialist bowlers and entrusted Don Tallon to bat as high as No. 6. Tallon often batted at No. 8 in teams captained by Bradman.

Lynn McConnell of Cricinfo criticised the book for being repetitive, self-overlapping and being "formulaic". McConnell reviewed Bradman’s Best Ashes Teams the following year, and pointed to a number of factual errors. He said that the book revealed little new material as many of those Bradman picked were already in the world team and as such their mini-biographies repeated the same material and that the format made "for tedious presentation". In giving the example of a passage on Jack Hobbs, McConnell further criticised Perry's habit of apparently imagining the mindset of long-dead cricketers with whom he had no personal contact and presenting this as fact—no source was given for such information. McConnell decried Perry's incessant use of superlatives, including "all-time best-ever", which he dubbed "the triple tautology of the year". McConnell also criticised Perry for not using interviews to generate original insights into the living members of Bradman's selections.

In 1997 Perry wrote a biography of Shane Warne: Bold Warnie, after his story on the leg-spin bowler’s dominance of the 1993 Ashes. Bold Warnie was published by Random House in 1998. Perry followed this with Waugh’s Way: Steve Waugh...learner, leader, legend (Random House 2000); and Captain Australia, A History of the Celebrated Captains of Australian Test Cricket (Random House, 2000). The 1999 Wisden Cricketers' Almanack Australia said that Bold Warnie "does its subject less than justice. The title is this book's best point; it is a pun of Ian Healy's repeated cry "Bowled Warnie!". Wisden Australia criticised Perry's general technique of writing books by summarising the scorecard and statistics of the matches that the subject played into, saying, "no real sense of Warne as either a cricketer or human being is conveyed".

Captain Australia covered every Australian skipper (except for Ricky Ponting) since Test cricket began. Each chapter carried a mini-biography of the 41 leaders. Robin Marlar, wrote in The Cricketer International: "Perry is a prolific, stylish writer...What lifted this book for me was the 24 page prologue on a fascinating character, Charles Lawrence, the immigrant from England who took on the embryonic Australian establishment and brought the first, if not quite the only team of Aboriginals to England in 1868."

Gideon Haigh was critical of Perry's book Captain Australia...a book on Australia's Test cricket captains...claiming that Perry had "... a disquieting tendency to, quite casually, mangle information for no particular reason" and "...  there are assertions whose origins are, at least, somewhat elusive." Referring to Perry's biography of Bradman, he said "the book-shaped object of Roland Perry, had "access" [interviews with Bradman], and used it to mainly unenlightening, and sometimes tedious, effect".

In 2005, following the death of Keith Miller, Perry wrote Miller’s Luck, The Life and Loves of Keith Miller, Australia’s greatest all-rounder.

The book was heavily criticised by leading cricket historians. The historian David Frith said of Miller's Luck, "Perry's work here is anything but confidence-inspiring. He is an opportunist author, Don Bradman, Shane Warne and Steve Waugh being among his previous subjects, together with a book on Australia's captains [Captain Australia] which gave the world nothing that the painstaking Ray Robinson had not already dealt with [in On Top Down Under], apart from the update".

Frith said "the book is strewn with errors that undermine confidence in the work as a whole". He pointed out that Keith Johnson the cricket administrator was not the father of Australian cricket captain Ian Johnson, that Army cricketer JWA Stephenson was not the colonel who became the Marylebone Cricket Club secretary. Frith also noted that an error when Perry wrote that Cyril Washbrook took a run after being hit on the head it was not a bye, under the laws of cricket it would be a leg bye. He also noted that George Tribe was not a leg spinner. Tribe was a left-hander and leg spinners are right-handed. Frith also noted that Wally Hammond was not dropped for the final Test of 1946—47, but that he was out of action because he had fibrositis.

Of the same book, Ramachandra Guha said that Perry had done little except reword Miller's autobiography Cricket Crossfire. He said that "conversations are invented, thoughts imputed, motives intuited — without any directions as to their source or provenance". Guha also criticised Perry for mistakenly claiming that Lahore is in North West Frontier Province—it is in Punjab—and for referring to Indian batsman Vijay Merchant as "Vijay Singh". He also criticised Perry for claiming that Miller and his Australian Services cricket team saw Merchant as a cheat when Miller himself called Merchant "one of the finest sportsmen India has produced".

Martin Williamson, the executive editor of Cricinfo, labelled the Miller biography as one of the two worst cricket books of the year, describing it a one of two "which polluted 2006". He said that its "lack of attention to details made its unsavoury dredging of Miller's private life even less palatable" and described the book as those with the "sole aim of getting you to part with your money on the basis of a glossy cover and a famous name".

Perry turned again to sport and cricket for his 20th book, The Ashes: A Celebration. It was mainly an anthology of the author’s essays on the game.

In 2008, Perry wrote Bradman's Invincibles to coincide with the 60th anniversary. Writing for Wisden, Haigh dubbed it "a prolix and repetitive account of Australia’s 1948 Ashes tour, as flat as it is thick. This is a Timeless Test of a book: a long slog for no result." He went on to add that had Bradman decided to retire before the tour, as he had been contemplating, "at leastmankind would then have been spared a book like Bradman’s Invincibles". Haigh gave the book zero stars.

Perry stayed in the sports genre for his next biography Sailing to the Moon, which told the story of West Australian Rolly Tasker, the world champion yachtsman and international businessman.

Noel Annan, Baron Annan, in reviewing The Fifth Man, Perry's book accusing Victor Rothschild of being the fifth spy working for the Soviet Union of the Cambridge Five, cast doubt on whether Perry had actually interviewed Rothschild's relatives or whether he had made up material in his book.