I have always loved a good mystery story, whether the works of Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or many cozy mysteries, where cats or dogs help solve the crime and everything in between. I like mysteries that take you to exotic times and places, and ones involving caterers, priests and journalists.
More than once in my life I have toyed with the idea of writing a mystery. Like Agatha Christie, I find myself jotting down odd bits of conversation in coffee shops in the hopes of maybe one day using them in a mystery.
Many writers write about things they know or have experienced. Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, and Dashielle Hammet's The Maltese Falcon, come to mind. Agatha Christie disappeared for a few days in an event that drew headlines around the world, although never really written about by the author herself, it caused her to rise to fame.
Another mystery writer who I always enjoyed reading - and who recently died - was convicted of murder.
Anne Perry, a prolific British-born crime novelist of stories that explored the dark corners of the Victorian age, who also kept her own chilling secret for decades after serving five years in prison for murder in a teenage plot with her best friend, died April 10 at a hospital in Los Angeles following a heart attack in December. She was 84.
Many of Perry’s whodunits are set in the time of Jack the Ripper and a generation later after the turn of the century - with historical ambiance and attitudes as much a part of the narrative as the crime and clues. Social mores were rigid, especially for her female sleuths, and often guile and ambiguities were used in place of uncomfortable honesty and confrontation.
She told Publishers Weekly that many of her more than 30 books, beginning with The Carter Street Hangman in 1979, revolve around one key element: “How well do I really know anyone else?”
In 1998, Times of London named Perry, whose books sold more than 26 million copies globally, among its 100 Masters of Crime of the past century, on a list that included Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett and Arthur Conan Doyle.
In 1994, she was living a reclusive life in the Scottish Highlands just before the release of Peter Jackson’s true-crime film Heavenly Creatures. The movie chronicles the obsessive friendship between two schoolgirls in early 1950s New Zealand and how it led to murder.
Renewed interest in the case had journalists digging. Perry was eventually tracked down as a person of interest. She was one of those girls, known then as Juliet Hulme (played in the film by Kate Winslet in her breakout role).
Juliet had lived in the Bahamas with family friends to recover from bouts of childhood pneumonia and tuberculosis. At 13, she was reunited with her family in Christchurch, New Zealand, where her father was rector of Canterbury University College.
At school, Juliet met a classmate, Pauline Yvonne Parker (played in the film by Melanie Lynskey). They seemed an unlikely pair. Juliet came from a privileged background and had moved around the world. Pauline’s family lived in a ramshackle home and made ends meet by taking in lodgers.
Yet the girls became inseparable, building deep and intimate scenarios about interwoven futures. They became so close that Juliet’s parents viewed the companionship as bordering on “unwholesome.” (Perry later acknowledged the friendship was all-consuming but said it was never sexual.)
When Juliet’s parents split and made plans to send her to South Africa, the girls hatched a plot to murder Pauline’s mother after she apparently objected to her daughter joining Juliet abroad.
In Christchurch’s Victoria Park, the girls ambushed Honorah Parker, who was struck repeatedly in the head with half a brick wrapped in a stocking. The coroner recorded 45 separate head wounds. “It was violent and it was quick,” she told Daily Telegraph in 2002.
At the trial - Juliet was 15 and Pauline was 16 - the details of the ferocity of the killing sent shock waves around New Zealand. The girls’ relationship became the subject of sordid fascination and endless speculation.
The pair pleaded not guilty on the grounds of insanity, a plea that was rejected by the jury. They avoided the death penalty because of their age. (New Zealand carried out its last execution in 1957.)
Prosecutors treated Perry as the leader, according to her biographer, Joanne Drayton. The pair were separated - with Parker serving her five-year sentence - and ordered never to make contact again.
Perry, who had changed her name after leaving prison, never watched the movie, but it turned her life upside down, according to Drayton.
According to Drayton, the film “blew her evolved identity out of the water and she was absolutely terrified. Drayton spent days with the author during her research for the 2012 biography The Search for Anne Perry. Her onetime friend Pauline had reinvented herself as Hilary Nathan and was living in England, where she became deputy headmistress at a special-needs school.
In a 2006 interview with Times of London, Perry said she made a “profoundly wrong decision” to participate in the murder. She feared at the time that her friend would choose suicide if they did nothing.
“In a sense it’s not a matter - at the end - of judging,” Perry said in "Interiors," a 2009 documentary on her life. “I did this much good and that much bad. Which is the greater?”
She added: “It’s who you are when time’s up that matters.”
Anne Perry was born October 28, 1938 as Juliet Marion Hulme in London, the eldest of two children of Henry Rainsford Hulme, a prominent British nuclear scientist, and Hilda Marion Hulme, a marriage counselor.
After spending her teens in a Gothic-style prison in Auckland - including several months in solitary confinement - she left prison a changed person, determined to do good, according to Drayton. Perry received no formal education in prison, but she had a fierce intellect and was determined to pursue her girlhood dream of becoming a writer, according to Drayton.
She was crafting the ideas for stories as she bounced around a range of jobs including flight attendant, nanny, limousine dispatcher and insurance underwriter. She became a devoted follower of the Mormon Church, saying it helped stabilize her life after leaving New Zealand.
Her first novels introduced the character Thomas Pitt, a London police officer in 1881, and his future wife, Charlotte Ellison, an aristocrat who “lowers” herself by falling for a cop. They meet when an Ellison housemaid becomes the latest victim of a serial strangler.
Charlotte assists in her husband’s investigations, sometimes without his knowledge, using her highbrow social skills to open doors. Each book in the series seeks to shed some light on the era’s inequities, hypocrisies and the contrasting worlds of privileged grandees and street denizens such as brothel keepers, pickpockets and con artists.
In Silence in Hanover Close, Pitt is falsely charged with a crime, allowing Perry to describe the brutalities of a Victorian prison. In Farrier's Lane, the plot revisits how a Jewish actor was accused of a crime in a wave of mass hysteria and prejudice.
In 1990, Perry debuted a new series set in the early 20th century. In The Face of a Stranger, readers meet William Monk, a police officer who is stricken with amnesia and whose hunt for villains reveals hints to his past identity. He is aided by fictional Hester Latterly, a resourceful nurse who was a friend of Florence Nightingale.
Each novel in the series takes on a different social issue. In Defend and Betray, a well-respected military officer is exposed as an abuser. A Sudden, Fearful Death examines violence against women as a strangler targets female nurses.
Her latest novel, The Traitor Among Us, which features a female English spy, is set to be published in September.
She never married, saying she cut off relationships rather than risk revealing her past. She had lived for stretches in California after leaving prison and moved to Los Angeles full time in 2017.
In 2003, an interviewer for Sunday Mail asked Perry: “Who are you?”
How does she separate the hugely successful novelist from the misguided teenager who decided to kill?
“I am Anne Perry,” she replied. “I think of myself as Anne Perry. I have to.”
“I hope I have been punished,” she added. “I hope I have profited from the whole experience … to seek redemption, to devote the rest of one’s life to becoming a more compassionate, more just, less judgmental person. To atone.”
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