We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books
“THE SEARCH FOR ANNE
PERRY” by Joanne Drayton (Harper-Collins , $NZ44:99)
To begin this painful review, let me state unequivocally
some things I believe.
I believe that if somebody is convicted of a crime and
has served out a sentence, that person has the right to live a life unmolested
by journalists who want to keep revisiting the crime.
A grown and law-abiding woman, now in her seventies, who
has “paid her debt to society”, should not be pilloried endlessly for a crime
she committed when she was a teenager, no matter how horrendous that crime may
have been.
I further believe that if that woman, after serving
time, goes on to live a productive and
crime-free life, then it should be a matter for rejoicing, not for prurient
speculation. Even if too often our prisons are not places of rehabilitation,
isn’t that at least what they aspire to be?
So far, I have said only what Joanne Drayton is
ostensibly saying in The Search for Anne
Perry.
Unfortunately, while it condemns sensation-hungry
journalists, The Search for Anne Perry
is really a book which has its cake and eats it too. The Search for Anne Perry would never have been researched and
written if the best-selling author Anne Perry had not, as a teenager, committed
murder. Surely this fact was what encouraged Drayton to pursue the project in
the first place.
This is signalled by the book’s very title.
Apart from being a commonplace title for books that claim
to tell the “true story” of somebody, “The
Search for…” also immediately suggests that there is some new and
sensational thing yet to tell us. (There isn’t.) The front-cover blurb promises
“The hidden life of a best-selling
author” and includes the familiar photograph of the teenaged Juliet Hulme, before she became
“Anne Perry”, leaving court with her partner in crime. The whole structure of
this book is built around a piecemeal revelation of Anne Perry’s version of the
crime. It is the centrepiece of the book.
Joanne Drayton’s protestations to the contrary, then,
this book does what those despised journalists have done. It titillates by
welding the best-selling author with her unbalanced teenage self. And, to make
matters worse, it fudges some of the detail concerning the crime and ends up
being very much the “authorised” version of events as Anne Perry now wants them
to be understood. A work of PR then, as well as of exploitation. Perhaps it is
worth noting that Harper-Collins, the publishers of this book, are among Anne
Perry’s publishers as well.
A few basic facts if you need reminding of them.
In 1954, when she was 15, Juliet Hulme, member of one of
Christchurch’s most respected families, helped her 16-year-old friend Pauline
Rieper (Parker) to murder Pauline’s mother by smashing the woman’s head in with
a brick. Being a case of matricide, the crime caused a sensation in the press,
especially as there were hints of a lesbian relationship between the two girls.
They were convicted and imprisoned (separately) for about five years each – a
remarkably lenient sentence by today’s standards. When they were released, each
disappeared into obscurity under a new and assumed name.
Literally dozens of sensational articles were written
about the case, as well as a couple of (now forgotten) novels, a play and a
number of books – including Glamuzina’s and Laurie’s tendentious and often
inaccurate Parker and Hulme – A Lesbian View in 1991. But it wasn’t until
1994, when Peter Jackson’s and Fran Walsh’s movie on the case Heavenly
Creatures was released, that journalists at last set about tracking down
and “outing” the two grown women who had once been murderous teenagers. Only
then did it become public knowledge that Juliet Hulme was now Anne Perry,
best-selling author of Victorian-era thrillers and detective stories, living a
single and unshared life in Scotland.
Last year there appeared Peter Graham’s So Brilliantly Clever, subtitled Parker, Hulme and the Murder That Shocked
the World. Despite the sensational subtitle, my review (Sunday Star-Times 16 October 2011)
judged it to be a scrupulous, methodical and well-researched account of the
murder, and I ventured to suggest it “could
well be definitive”. It was deservedly a finalist in this year’s New
Zealand Post Book Awards. Joanne Drayton began her research and writing before
Graham’s book appeared. However Graham’s book is listed in her bibliography,
and has presumably been consulted. But it is never mentioned or engaged with in
Drayton’s text – perhaps because in some important details it contradicts the
version that Anne Perry has told to Joanne Drayton, and that Joanne Drayton has
accepted uncritically.
As in thrillers, Joanne Drayton’s technique is suspense. The Search for Anne Perry opens with
Perry’s literary agent Meg Davis in 1994 receiving what she thinks is a “
ridiculous” phone call from a New Zealand journalist saying that Perry is the
murderer Juliet Hulme and asking for comment. Meg Davis is incredulous and
rings Perry, feeling there has been a silly mistake. Drayton writes:
“Meg’s words hit
Anne Perry like the first wave of an atomic explosion. She felt physically
sick. It had happened at last. The one thing in the world she feared most….”
(Pg.12)
The Search for Anne
Perry then proceeds to tell us about the sustaining power of Anne Perry’s
Mormon faith and sets about analysing Perry’s books and literary career. We are
told of how she broke into writing, of her working methods and rising sales and
publishers’ deals. Drayton accounts for every last dollar [or pound] in Perry’s
literary contracts. But this is all a matter of suspense as we wait for Perry
to be outed. Hence there are the references to Perry’s fear - inexplicable to her agent and associates -
of small things that might put her name or photo in the press.
Anne Perry has been a diligent and prolific writer. She
has written one long series of detective novels with a hero called Pitt, and
another series with a hero called Monk. She wrote a sequence set in the First World War, some
fantasy novels and a few other historical novels. Nearly sixty of her titles
are listed in the bibliography.
She sure can churn ‘em
out.
As a reviewer, I have read a few of Perry’s thrillers
(some before her original identity was known to me). They strike me as good
middle-brow stuff, often shaky in their historical details, their characters
usually caricatured and wafer-thin, but doing the formula business in terms of
presenting a crime story and providing a reasonable solution to a mystery.
However there is no way that they could be described as great, or even
seriously adult, literature. I therefore find Joanne Drayton’s claims for them,
and her pretensions to be writing a “literary biography”, more than a little
overblown.
Novel by novel, we are given synopses and words of
approval for Perry’s insights. Of Perry’s first published thriller, Drayton
writes:
“Anne Perry opens
with [a] powerful reflection on
friends and enemies, and continues throughout the novel to make searching and
powerful comments about human behaviour. She explores power and sexual
inequality, incisively giving the most misogynistic lines to the women who
police patriarchal boundaries….” (Pg.26)
“Make searching and powerful comments”?
Really? I don’t believe any of Perry’s novels do any such thing. At best, their
characters are sometimes vehicles for platitudes and for the type of judgements
on Victorian morality that are now clichés . Patriarchy, sexual inequality etc.
etc. may be condemned. But isn’t that what we now routinely expect in modern
formula novels with period settings?
Later, speaking of Perry’s most loyal audience, there is
the admission that:
“The real interest
in Anne’s Pitt novels still came from
the Anglophile North American market….. Victorian England was a territory
already extensively explored by British readers, and Anne’s perspective was not
fresh enough to convince commissioning editors that it set her work apart.”
(Pg.70)
Quite so. I am not at all surprised to find that
Americans are her most avid readers, partly because her novels give a Hollywood
version of foggy Victorian London and its mysteries. They play up to movie
fantasies of Victorian life. I could add that the great majority of
enthusiastic reviews of Perry’s work which Drayton quotes come from either
second-rank reviewers or from the Publisher’s
Weekly, which is essentially the house journal of the book trade and more
concerned with a book’s sales prospects than its literary merits.
It’s more interesting, however, when Drayton trawls
Perry’s books for what they reveal of Juliet Hulme’s past. Bizarrely (on
Pg.128), she quotes from one of Perry’s thrillers The Hyde Park Headsman to show how Perry may have drawn on her own
experience. Speculating on how a murder was committed, a character comments “Well it’s not very difficult to hit someone
on the head, if they trust you and are not expecting anything of the sort.”
Inevitably, this makes us think of the crime in
Christchurch’s Victoria Park. Inevitably, too, it makes us consider the ironies
of somebody who has committed murder now making her living writing about
violent crime. But then there’s always the possibility that being known for
having committed a murder could make an author’s murder mysteries more
saleable.
Only a little under halfway through The Search for Anne Perry [pg.148] does Drayton turn to the
circumstances of the 1954 murder itself. Her technique is to cut back and forth
between a narrative of 1954 and an account of Perry’s ongoing success as a
novelist. This creates a very skewed perspective. Implicitly we are being asked
to judge (benignly) the teenager who committed murder in terms of the grown
woman assiduously pursuing her craft as a writer. Implicitly, we are invited to
see negatively those people who made negative judgements on Juliet (and Pauline)
at the time.
I did not find anything about the 1954 murder in The Search for Anne Perry that I did not
already know from Graham’s So Brilliantly
Clever. Indeed, given that Drayton sticks so resolutely to Juliet-Anne’s
perspective, I found considerably less. Graham gives much, much more than
Drayton does on the context, the nature of the police enquiry, the various
theories that have been offered, the social impact in New Zealand etc.
One sentence in Drayton’s book made me gasp with
disbelief. Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme were both avid writers. Pauline
Parker’s diary, in which she detailed how the girls planned to “moider mother”, was one key piece of
evidence used in the case against them. Drayton writes blandly that “It is possible that Juliet kept a similar
record, but this was never found.” (Pg.178)
At this point I almost choked.
In So Brilliantly
Clever [Pg. 20], Peter Graham asserts that Juliet’s mother Hilda was quick
and astute enough to destroy Juliet’s diary and other of her writings before
the police could see them. The inference is that Juliet’s diary would have been
just as incriminating as Pauline’s. Graham provides no evidence for saying this
but, given the girls’ overheated emotional relationship and their shared habit
of writing copiously, I find Graham’s scenario convincing and plausible.
As this is such a key detail in the story, and as Drayton
tells us how often she interviewed Anne Perry, how can she possibly write “it is
possible that Juliet kept a similar record”? Didn’t she think to
ask her?
I think it’s perfectly reasonable for me to ask this,
especially as Drayton later boasts “I was
probably the first properly informed person to whom she had spoken about the
murder since the 1950s.”(Pg.362)
Where Perry has volunteered information, this book very
much takes her word for it – and after the best part of 60 years of
recalibrating and adjusting and smoothing off her “memories”, Perry is probably
not the most reliable witness. Drayton can say “It was a communion of minds and souls when Juliet and Pauline
discovered each other in May 1952.” (Pg.155) She can comment “Now each could share the hormone-driven
exhilaration of someone of like mind.” (pp.173-174) And yet she accepts
Perry’s word when Perry says “There never
ever was a sexual element to our friendship.” (Pg.251) We are told of
Juliet-Anne’s remorse, when she was in prison,
for what she had done [Drayton calls it an “epiphany”]. But this
expression of teenage remorse (Pg.257) is sourced to interviews Perry gave nearly
50 years after the event.
I can accept that life in Mt Eden Prison was grim in the
1950s and that it was wrong that young Juliet Hulme was never given any
psychiatric counselling. Drayton is right to note these things in some detail.
But, predictably, The Search for Anne
Perry plays up the “moral panic” notion of the New Zealand in the 1950s to
argue that reactions to the case were extreme and that therefore – by
implication – the girls’ actions and characters were not as bad as they were
interpreted.
If you want to know the detail of the 1954 Parker-Hulme
case, then Graham’s So Brilliantly Clever
is a far better, more detailed and more comprehensive book than this. If, on
the other hand, you want to believe that Anne Perry is a misunderstood literary
giant, then The Search for Anne Perry
is the book for you.
I revert to my first opinion – the woman has a right to
pursue her craft unmolested by intrusive journalists. But we as readers have a
right not to be fed what amounts to a PR job in the guise of an investigation.
