The Search for Anne Perry

by Joanne Drayton

  Being put out in the yard and refused a blind-fold and she was shot and she looked less scared and more composed than I did in those photographs. I thought: ‘This is dreadful. She looked better the second before she was shot’ … [I looked like] a rabbit in the headlights.19

  So she threw out the professional photographs and sent instead some amateur snaps, one of which appears on the front cover of this book.

  Anne, now 39 years old, had ‘waited so long to get published’, then suddenly, within a few months, her dream had come true.20 She was ‘absolutely delighted’.21 She had found a literary agent, a publisher and now, at church, a friend, for it was around this time that Anne met Meg MacDonald.

  Selling her manuscript would not greatly alter her financial situation. In fact, it did little more than replace the part-time work for which she now had no time. Her agreement was that St Martin’s would publish one book a year, but this would produce only slim pickings. So she was truly grateful to the artful Meg, who had a canny survivor’s intelligence and could make a little go a very long way. Meg remembers their family get-togethers:

  We were as poor as mice — poor, poor, poor. We had nothing, we had nothing. She would come on a Sunday and we’d have the one big meal of the week. The fire in the winter would be roaring up the chimney … We’d pool our food … to make sure we had one really big decent meal for the children — together — and we’d have a great day. She’d sit on the floor, and Lorna [Meg’s daughter] would brush her hair, hour after hour after hour … Lorna used to brush her hair forever … [Anne had] it up in a bun, she used to put it in a coil [which] she [would] loosen on a Sunday when she came home from church and then let the pins out and Lorna would just sit there and brush it.22

  Meg’s family life became Anne’s, and when Meg’s husband left she was ‘the children’s second mum’, a surrogate parent.23 She would get down on the floor and play with them, listening to their stories, sharing their plans and schemes. Few adults can re-enter the fantasy worlds of their childhood, but Anne seemed to do it effortlessly, as though the pathway back was undisturbed and the door never barred by adult concerns.

  Meg, on the other hand, was responsible for her children’s corporeal well-being. The marriage break-up was a time of emotional turbulence and change for the family in which their everyday world was turned upside down. Abruptly they had to shift into a council house, which was incredibly ‘grotty’. The children took one look at it and burst into tears, crying ‘We want to go home’, but Meg knew there was no longer a home to go to.24 So she created a new life that focused on the children, their friends, their pets, their play; Anne was the other adult in it; and its cornerstone was the Mormon Church.

  A worn, tired council house was transformed into something desirable by Meg’s practical skill. The inside was cleaned, painted and papered. Outside, she organized work parties to clear an overgrown wilderness of brambles and weeds. She planted trees and a kitchen garden, then stocked the place with a menagerie of animals. As well as chickens, ‘they had rabbits, they had guinea pigs, they had the dogs and the cats and the goldfish in the pond [inside], they had the other pond outside. They had everything they wanted … They had fun … They were warm, they were secure, they could invite their friends … it was a “safety” place for them.’25

  In a life centred on children, Anne was Meg’s adult company and she supported her through the acrimony and recriminations of the divorce. The Mormon Church saw women as mothers, homemakers and helpmeets to their husbands. Meg’s divorce broke a sacred covenant, and her self-sufficient female-dominated world defied convention. This sat uneasily with her, and probably would have with the Church if it had been tested.

  Meg’s ex-husband contributed little to the support of their children. Even though she grew their own fruit and vegetables, and Anne would drive over on Sundays in her beaten-up old car so they could pool their resources, finding enough money to cover expenses was always a battle. The salve was their friendship.

  Anne devoted every working hour to her writing. In the year-and-a-half since submitting The Cater Street Hangman to MBA, she wrote two more manuscripts. She was in a pleasant state of intoxication about her success, but also anxious to keep her focus: ‘Thank you for … being so patient with me,’ she wrote to her agent Janet Freer in May 1978. ‘About Mr McCormack’s letter, there is no need to send me any of it, unless you feel it is something I need to know and don’t; I would rather not hear, unless I require the information!’26 When things worried her she would talk them through with Meg and sometimes her mother.

  Anne’s breakthrough had caused a stir of excitement in the Perry household. Bill felt like the founding father of a writing revolution, and Marion took up her old role of copyeditor and casual critic with new fervour. In fact, she read everything Anne wrote chapter by chapter. ‘I called my mother, and she will probably finish Charlotte III this weekend. It is a good thing she read it carefully, because I had overlooked a few errors. She will post it to you immediately after.’27

  St Martin’s Press was pleased with the manuscripts it received, or at least pleased to know they were coming and with enough variety within the detective fiction formula to be compelling. This was the reassurance the firm needed to invest in Anne’s career: consistency in standard and supply. Tom McCormack was visiting London from New York, and Janet Freer contacted Anne to see if she would like to meet him. Initially she declined the invitation, but then had second thoughts. ‘I’ve decided to stop being so chicken,’ she wrote at the beginning of February 1979.

  I would like to know when Mr McCormack comes to London. If it’s possible I would like to meet him, even if only for a few minutes? He is the first person, after you, to give me a real chance, and it would be nice to say hello and thank you.28

  This was exciting enough, but nothing it seemed could top the arrival in March of bound galley proofs for The Cater Street Hangman, which was due out in August.

  However, by the time hardback copies of Cater Street were widely available on bookshop shelves, St Martin’s had already sold the paperback rights for this book and Callander Square, the next in the series, to Fawcett for an advance of US$7500 each. Hope Dellon wrote to Janet Freer with the exciting news: ‘this should give the series a tremendous boost, and I hope you and Anne will be as delighted as we are’.29 What they liked especially was the strong role in the stories played by Charlotte Pitt. On a visit to London, Hope Dellon said this to Anne, as she recounted to Janet:

  I mentioned to Anne at dinner that it might be a good idea for her to continue the series (either with a revised version of the third book I saw or with a new story — preferably one that emphasized Charlotte’s personal involvement in events), and the idea seems better than ever. Do you know if Anne has had any thoughts about this?30

  Feminism had generated room for a fully functioning female detective. In the early decades of the twentieth century, women were on the margins of the genre: wifely, like Dorothy Sayers’s Harriet Vane, Ngaio Marsh’s Agatha Troy, and Margery Allingham’s Amanda Fitton; elderly, like Agatha Christie’s gossiping sleuth, Miss Marple; or fashionably imprudent, like Christie’s Prudence Cowley of the Tommy and Tuppence series.

  These characters were traces of oestrogen in a testosterone-driven field. But by the 1970s the world had changed, and detective fiction needed to change, too. In 1979, the year The Cater Street Hangman was published, artist Judy Chicago completed The Dinner Party, a collaborative installation piece that was a massive triangular table with 39 place-settings for great women who had been the makers of myth and history over the centuries. Among the more contemporary spots were those for poet Emily Dickinson, writer Virginia Woolf, and artist Georgia O’Keeffe. The Dinner Party was a powerful symbolic statement at the end of a decade that had redefined thinking about the roles and place of women in Western society. Now women protagonists needed to drive plots and define action, not act as adjuncts, victims or shrews. It was a perfect pairing: Hope Dellon and St Mar
tin’s saw the market opportunity, and Anne created, in Charlotte Pitt, a female character who spoke to readers in the closing decades of the twentieth century, but lived in the twilight years of the nineteenth, and did so in a genre renowned for being straitjacketed. The Cater Street Hangman had at its core the explosive implications of murder on a family — the suspicion, the revelation of infidelity, the death, the grief, the shame — which were at the heart of Anne’s own story. She knew them intimately and could tap into them easily.

  Her first book burned brightly because of its immediacy, but subsequent stories would need a new central dynamic if the series was not to extinguish itself. Callander Square, the next novel Anne threw herself into, opens with the discovery of the bodies of two newborn babies. It is the long-shadowed end of a mild, misty autumn day when Pitt arrives at the small garden in the centre of the square. The crumbling hole, already begun by a pair of unlucky gardeners, reveals the bloody bones of one tiny corpse, then another.

  This sad discovery sets off the customary chain of events that involves the doctor, the ambulance, the morgue and an autopsy. This is infanticide, but everybody who lives in fashionable Callander Square knows that infanticide matters only when the mother counts. Gossip says that the mother is a servant girl employed by one of the grand houses, who has secretly killed her infants because she cannot support them, or because she fears the shame and retribution that pregnancy out of wedlock brings.

  Callander Square introduces a class-ridden world of political marriage, of young trophy wives frozen by icy convention in loveless matrimony to wheezing, desiccated old lechers, or to pompous, mendacious men who cheat on their spouses. But not every upper-class male is a cad. There is General Brandon Balantyne, whose ethics are as impeccable as his military résumé. ‘What the hell do you believe in, man? Have you nothing left but comfort?’ he asks of his morally bankrupt neighbour, Sir Robert Carlton. The exhumation of the infant bodies is followed by the revelation that, if the children had lived, they would have been destined to a life disfigured by disease. Their mother was infected with syphilis and the skull of one baby was horribly deformed.

  The story unravels in two strands. One is the official inquiry headed up by Pitt, and the other is an amateur operation directed by his inquisitive wife. Charlotte’s entrée into high society has been blocked by her impolitic marriage. She no longer moves in these circles. But her sister Emily does; in fact, after her marriage to George, she is now Lady Emily of the distinguished Ashworth dynasty. It is partly by feigning interest in war that Emily gets Charlotte a job copying out the centuries-long military history of the Balantynes:

  Actually warfare bored her to tears; but she must make some intelligent remark. ‘How very important,’ she replied. ‘The history of our men of war is the history of our race.’ She was proud of that, it was an excellent observation.

  Working as a secretary for General Balantyne will provide Charlotte with an ideal vantage point from which to detect suspect behaviour.

  Emily and Charlotte become a female detection duo that all but dominates the telling of this tale. It is Emily who finds the grotesque body of Helena, her mummified hands still gripping the ropes of an outdoor swing, and it is Charlotte and Emily who help Pitt reveal the murderer’s identity and the awful predatory selfishness of certain upper-class males. If they had today’s historical perspective, Charlotte and Emily would know that they were part of a phenomenon known as the New Woman. Their actions contravened the male-dominated strictures and rhetoric of late Victorian society, and they rebelled against discrimination and inequality embedded in law and convention.

  But with the exception of a little boredom, Charlotte and Emily are happy in their heterosexual ménages at opposite ends of the social scale. Pitt, especially, is a loving husband and he will make a caring father. The eagerly anticipated birth of their first child makes a poignant conclusion to this story of infant mortality. ‘[Pitt] thought of Charlotte’s face, full of hope for her new child, and prayed that it would be whole, perhaps even that it would be a girl, another stubborn, compassionate, willful creature like Charlotte herself.’

  ‘Charlotte III’, as Anne called it in her letter to Janet Freer, was titled Paragon Walk, and continued the theme of lasciviousness among the aristocracy, with a little of the occult thrown in. It opens with Inspector Pitt at the mortuary, affected by sour chemical smells and the sickly sweet odour of death, but overwhelmed by the sense of loss and waste as he stares down at the body of 17-year-old Fanny Nash. She is an upper-class girl who has been raped and murdered on Paragon Walk. What kind of rapist stalks this elegant, tree-filled area of Regency roads and parks? Whose instincts could be base enough to bring down an innocent? Or is she an innocent? These are the questions this inquiry must answer, and no one knows better than Pitt that investigations are not pleasant, things are never the same afterwards, and ‘there [is] always hurt’.

  Emily once again secures Charlotte’s crucial access to the world of upper-class murder. In the cut and thrust of polite conversation Anne demonstrates one of her great strengths as a writer. It is her use of conflict in social situations to create humour, venom and ritual cruelty that is so clever. The competition is as fierce as lawn tennis at Wimbledon, only the match is played with tea and cucumber sandwiches served on fine china. But Charlotte’s incendiary personality soon reveals the prejudice and pretence beneath the brittle etiquette. She is stunned by what she hears at an elegant luncheon:

  ‘Are you saying that Fanny somehow invited her attack?’ Charlotte asked frankly. She felt the ripple of amazement in the others and ignored it, keeping her eyes on Miss Lucinda’s pink face …

  ‘Well, really, Mrs. Pitt, one would hardly expect such a nature of thing to happen to a woman who was — chaste!’

  Not only does Miss Lucinda Horbury think Fanny provoked and therefore probably deserved her attack, but she assumes, as do her companions, that men have different sexual proclivities and therefore should be less stringently judged. Miss Horbury also suggests that Fanny’s rape and murder might amount to a disgrace or slur on her poor brother and his family:

  ‘Disgrace!’ Charlotte was too angry even to try to control her tongue. ‘I see it as a tragedy, Miss Horbury, a terror, if you like, but hardly a disgrace.’

  This sexually unequal world might be dominated by men, but in Anne’s stories disenfranchised women often use its power vicariously to disable and sometimes even destroy their female competitors. Sexual competition between women is a principal theme of Paragon Walk, as Fanny’s sister-in-law Jessamyn Nash and Selena Montague vie for the illicit attentions of a ‘beautiful Frenchman’, Paul Alaric. Their power lies in attracting and entrapping men by their sexual allure; their victory lies in telling people about it ‘preferably one by one and in the strictest confidence[.] Success without envy was like snails without sauce — and, as any cultivated woman knew, the sauce is everything!’

  As the investigation into rape, murder and sexual misconduct proceeds, it is viewed by a range of people acting and speaking from their positions in a rigidly hierarchical society sharply divided by class and gender. Anne’s detective seems to be an obvious exception. If Charlotte is a New Woman, then surely Pitt is a New Man, but he is also a man who has married above his class. Their class difference is time-honoured and profound in its effect on the balance of their relationship. Charlotte brings with her the knowledge of upper-class custom, along with the power and prestige of her family connections. If Pitt is not overtly grateful, then he at least knows the value of her contribution.

  Equally, Charlotte and Emily are less than purely altruistic campaigners for women’s rights. Their consternation begins with their own sense of frustration at being cosseted, shut away from the events of public life, politics and men. Charlotte and Emily are central characters but, unlike Pitt’s, their actions are not legitimized by established authority, so, although their motives may be blemish-free, their methods are highly suspect. They lie without a conscience
— and exceedingly well — and assume false identities and other people’s clothes with the least encouragement. Because they are breaking codes and conventions, their operations are more covert than Pitt’s and therefore sometimes more dangerous.

  Paragon Walk ends with a terrifying encounter with black magic. In a locked garden, broken into by Emily with a handy hairpin, Charlotte and Emily find a pentacle mapped out in stones. Black robes, green horns … this explains the monstrous apparition that Lucinda Horbury saw through the window. Neither wants to believe in such things, but they have the distinct feeling that others do. A second door to a rectangular room off the garden opens easily. Black carpet, black curtains, green designs, robes with scarlet crosses stitched upside down — this is a coven of devil worshippers and the source of at least some of the evil stalking Paragon Walk. The pair are rescued from a dark demise by the mysterious Paul Alaric. As they make their escape through the garden of ‘bitter herbs’, Charlotte asks him:

  ‘Is there no such thing as black magic?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ He pushed the door open in the hedge and stood back for them to go through. ‘Most certainly there is. But this is not it.’

  Anne was asked to send her agent a profile for publicity purposes. The winter of 1979 was unusually cold in Darsham. ‘I was going to type at least the magazine bit,’ she wrote to Janet Freer in February, ‘but the gales & the snow have cut off the electricity — so I’ve no typewriter!’31 She sent a biographical snippet that she had already written for a church magazine: