A British crime writer who helped bludgeon her friend’s mother to death as a teenager and was the inspiration for Peter Jackson’s film Heavenly Creatures has died in Los Angeles, her publisher announced on Wednesday. She was 84.That comes from the Guardian newspaper, which goes on to explain that Perry (born Juliet Marion Hulme) “was 15 years old when she and her friend Pauline Parker, 16, murdered Pauline’s mother in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1954. Honora Mary Parker died after being hit with a brick about 20 times, in a killing that shocked and captivated the country. A trial heard that the two girls had plotted the murder in a bid to avoid being separated when Perry’s parents [who had announced they were divorcing] were planning to send her abroad.” Perry—who denied rumors that she and Pauline had been romantically involved—went on to serve a five-year sentence for murder, and subsequently moved back to Great Britain and adopted the nom de plume by which the world now knows her best.
Perry resided in Scotland for more than the next three decades, becoming famous for her fiction and staying quiet about her past. It was only because of the 1994 release of Heavenly Creatures that turned the spotlight of scandal back upon her. “Why can't I be judged for who I am now, not what I was then?" she later complained.
The author’s publishing career started in 1979 with the release of The Cater Street Hangman, a mystery set in London in 1881 and introducing Inspector Thomas Pitt and Charlotte Ellison. That pair would go on to marry and become the protagonists in a 31 additional novels, including The Hyde Park Headsman (1994), Brunswick Gardens (1998), Southampton Row (2002), and Murder on the Serpentine (2016). Her 16th installment in the series, Pentecost Alley (1996), was shortlisted for an Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel. In 1990, Perry launched a second Victorian-era series (my favorite, by the way), starring William Monk, a policeman turned London private investigator, who lost his memory in an 1856 coach mishap, but concealed that fact. Only Hester Latterly, a spirited Crimean War nurse (later his wife), was privy to his impairment. The Monk series began with The Face of a Stranger (1990), which eventually spawned 23 sequels, among them A Sudden, Fearful Death (1993), A Breach of Promise (1997), Dark Assassin (2006), and finally Dark Tide Rising (2018).
Those two series are most likely to define Perry for future generations of readers. But she also penned a succession of five dramatic novels set during World War I, opening with No Graves As Yet (2003); embarked, in Twenty-One Days (2018), on an early 20th-century series featuring Thomas and Charlotte Pitt’s lawyer son, Daniel, along with pioneering female pathologist Miriam Blackwood; and built a fifth series around Elena Standish, “an intrepid young photographer” working in pre-World War II Europe. (What’s presumably the final book in the Standish series, The Traitor Among Us, is due out in the States on September 12.) So prolific was this fictionist, that she managed as well to produce a couple of fantasy works, 20 short Christmas-related novels, a young-adult series, and briefer yarns, one of which (“Heroes”) won the 2000 Edgar for Best Short Story.
The New York Times explains that Perry “moved to the West Hollywood section of Los Angeles from Portmahomack, a fishing village in northern Scotland, in 2017.” Following a heart attack last December, she passed away at an L.A. hospital on Monday, April 10.
Anne Perry’s books fill a couple of shelves in my office. Most of them I’ve read, but fortunately, a few still await my attention. They’ll provide me with entertainment for a long time to come.
READ MORE: “Sad News—Anne Perry Just Died at Age 84,” by George Easter (Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine); “Anne Perry, R.I.P.,” by Martin Edwards (‘Do You Write Under Your Own Name?’); “Anne Perry, 1938-2023,” by Elizabeth Foxwell (The Bunburyist); “Anne Perry’s Advice to Me: Make True a Major Character,” by Charles Fergu; “The Mysteries of Anne Perry,” by Linda L. Richards (January Magazine).
5 comments:
It strikes me as odd that after all the tolerance allowed these days for people who, through their life-choices and actions are somehow excused, forgiven or even condoned by some current social standards, that Anne Perry's early transgression was emblazoned in the first sentence of more than one of her obituaries. She made something good and productive out of her life and her accomplishments should be in the forefront of all remembrances.
I totally agree with you, John.
I did not know of her death until now. I have read more of her Monk novels even through I have almost all of the Pitt and Ellison books. And a small correction: Monk was a policeman not a banker before becoming a private investigator.
I was so disappointed when I saw that obit headline - to be forever defined for something she did 69 years previously, when she was a child of 15 (now her name would probably not be published, at least in the UK), rather than her hugely successful writing career. I've always meant to read her books; I intend to make it a priority now. Funnily enough The Guardian is a paper I'd have expected better from rather than this shoddy sensationalism.
Dear Scott:
As Anne Perry made clear in her series, William Monk was mentored as a young man by Arrol Dundas, a banker who was eventually ruined financially and died in prison. Monk had once aspired to become a merchant banker himself, but went into policing instead.
Nonetheless, you are correct, that Monk was a copper immediately before becoming a private investigator, so I have changed the text to make that transition clear.
Cheers,
Jeff
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