The Legacy of Anne Perry (1938-2023)
By Luisa Perkins
“Crime must be paid for, but not all sins or mistakes need be made public and explained for everyone to examine and remember. And sometimes victims were punished doubly, once by the offense itself, and then a second and more enduring time when others heard of it, pored over it, and imagined every intimate detail.”
Writers occasionally glimpse the future as they work, prophesying on the page, whether knowingly or not. The paragraph quoted above is from Anne Perry’s novel Bluegate Fields, first published in 1984. Ten years later, the release of Peter Jackson’s film Heavenly Creatures made public a dark past that Perry had worked hard to put behind her.
Perry, born Juliet Marion Hulme in London on 28 October 1938, suffered from tuberculosis as a child. At the age of 8 at the end of WWII, she was sent to the Bahamas in the hopes of improving her symptoms. At age 13, she reunited with her family, who had moved to New Zealand. However, her health struggles continued, and she divided the next two years between a convalescent hospital and Christchurch Girls’ High School.
At the latter, she met Pauline Parker, a slightly older girl. The two developed an intense, exclusive friendship, bonding over the creation of intricate fantasy worlds and maintaining their connection through frequent letters whenever Juliet was hospitalized. They hoped one day to be famous novelists and move to Hollywood together.
In June of 1954, the girls’ dreams took a nightmarish turn. Juliet’s parents decided to divorce and told Juliet they were sending her to live in South Africa with relatives. Desperate not to be separated, and convinced that Pauline’s mother Honorah would never let Pauline accompany Juliet out of the country, the girls came up with a plan. On 22 June, in a secluded section of Christchurch’s Victoria Park, Pauline and Juliet killed Honorah, hitting her on the head repeatedly with a brick wrapped up in a stocking. They thought a single blow would suffice to kill her; it ended up taking more than 40.
Too young for the death penalty, the girls were sentenced to prison terms of indefinite length. Both served a little over five years—Juliet in Auckland’s Mount Eden women’s prison, where she spent time both in solitary confinement and doing hard labor. Once she was released, Juliet moved to England to be with her mother, who had remarried. Juliet changed her name to Anne and took her stepfather’s surname, Perry, as her own.
In her late twenties, Perry encountered the LDS Church while living in California and was baptized in 1968. She held various day jobs through the years, all the while working on her fiction. Her first novel, The Cater Street Hangman, was published in 1979 when she was 40 years old. From that point on, Perry steadily built a solid audience and a successful career, publishing two to three books—Kirkus Reviews calls them “finely wrought and entertaining mysteries”—per year.
Her latest book, The Fourth Enemy (Book 6 in the Daniel Pitt series) came out 11 April, the day after she died, and The Traitor Among Us (Book 5 in the Elena Standish series) is forthcoming this September. In a starred review, Publisher’s Weekly recently wrote, “Four decades after her debut, Perry shows no signs of losing steam.”
Indeed: in all, she wrote more than 80 novels, along with many short stories and Christmas-themed novellas. She was awarded an Edgar and the Premio de Honor Aragón Negro; none of her books has ever been out of print; she has sold more than 26 million copies worldwide. She spent many of her writing years in a remote village in northern Scotland, enjoying the company of family and a close circle of friends. In 2017, she moved to southern California, where she died on 10 April from complications following a heart attack.
I met Perry almost ten years ago, after she delivered a stirring keynote speech at a 2013 writing conference. She was reserved but gracious. During a long conversation, she asked me to send her a copy of my most recently published novel. Writers can survive a long time on such kindnesses, and I was delighted to have been the recipient of her encouragement and solid advice.
It wasn’t until I got home from the conference that someone mentioned Perry’s past to me. When I read all about it through the magic of the internet, I was struck by two things. First, according to our shared faith, Perry’s sins had been washed away in the waters of baptism. Second, though the Lord may remember them no more, we mortals have a hard time letting go of past griefs and scandals.
In 1954—nearly seven decades ago—Perry was a young teenager in the throes of a passionate friendship; her family was on the verge of dissolution; to treat her tuberculosis, she was being administered isoniazid, a drug now known to cause psychosis; as a minor, she was not allowed to testify in court on her own behalf. In interviews in the years after the release of Heavenly Creatures, Perry repeatedly acknowledged her guilt and expressed deep regret for her crime, but also wondered whether society would continue to define her by the worst thing she’d ever done. Will we?
Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme in 1954