The Search for Anne Perry

by Joanne Drayton

  It was just a few weeks after this that Bill Perry died. He bequeathed Anne a jade signet ring, which she never took off. She could share her grief with her mother, Meg MacDonald and a handful of others, but only Marion properly knew what his death really meant. ‘Very sorry to hear, via Diana, of your father’s death,’ wrote Christine. ‘Must be a very sad period for you … And not an easy period on the writing either.’14

  There was Bill’s death and funeral to face, and Anne was anxious over the outcome of Death in the Devil’s Acre. The manuscript had been with St Martin’s nearly six months and there had been no decision. She was worried at the very real possibility of rejection, and, while St Martin’s procrastinated, Anne’s agents were unable to offer the book to anyone else. ‘Thank you for your very considerate letter,’ Anne wrote to Christine on 23 October, ‘it is a hard time, one way and another — but let’s hope there will be a break soon.’15

  At the end of that month, Christine wrote a sharp letter to Hope Dellon expressing her frustration.

  I’m really rather surprised that you have let so very long go by without making a specific offer for Anne Perry’s DEVIL’S ACRE … I had understood that an offer was promptly to be on the way. Naturally Anne is getting anxious. Please can you reply to this as soon as possible, preferably by return of post … Anne has had a hard year with her father dying and one or two other set-backs and so if we can relieve the pressure on DEVIL’S ACRE that will help a little bit.16

  An offer for Death in the Devil’s Acre finally arrived at MBA in December. ‘What a very long time it has taken for them to come through … with an offer this time,’ Christine wrote to Anne, but she knew the news would lift her spirits and the money before Christmas would be gratefully received.17

  There was a growing market, even what could be called a developing fan-base, for the Pitt series in the United States and Canada. It was not hard to become hooked. Like a soap opera it was episodic and the main characters were consistent, but the subject matter was less banal and the intrigue more enthralling. Anne’s stories were a time machine. From the safety of their domestic worlds, readers could be transported to a place that was unimaginably foreign yet vividly experienced. In the popular framework of the detective fiction genre she could also challenge readers to think about difficult and morally testing questions.

  Bluegate Fields deals with two controversial subjects: homosexuality and child prostitution. The stench of human filth is almost overpowering in Bluegate Fields, and the discovery of a murdered young man in a sewer there nearly turns Pitt’s stomach. If it had lain in the drain any longer the barely post-pubescent body would have been consumed by rats. But this youth does not belong to the stinking sewers of Bluegate Fields. He is a child of privilege, his hands unsullied by work and his body untouched by hunger or poverty. His last meal had been ‘pheasant and wine and a sherry trifle’. What ravaged him in life was not poverty but the early symptoms of syphilis. ‘He [has] been homosexually used,’ the doctor tells Pitt after the autopsy.

  It is now five years since Pitt first went to Cater Street to investigate the murder of Charlotte’s sister, Sarah. Since then they have had two children — Jemima and Daniel, the latter just a few months old. Their home is a sanctuary. After the children go to bed, the Pitts eat a simple dinner around an old stove and share the quiet, contemplative end of a busy day. They have their memories and their plans. This is a communion based on sexual and social egalitarianism. But Charlotte knows Thomas is not a typical man of his time, and on occasion she tortures herself with doubt.

  Would he have been happier with someone who left him at heart utterly alone, who never really hurt him because she was never close enough, who never questioned his values or destroyed his self-esteem by being right when he was wrong and letting him know it?

  These questions reveal what lies at the heart of this book: the menace of power imbalance in relationships. If it is regarded as an atrocity when it occurs in paedophilia, why is it sanctioned in marriage and by the class system?

  Arthur, the murder victim, turns out to be the eldest son of the illustrious Sir Anstey Waybourne. This revelation thrusts Pitt into a social world where his occupation as a policeman makes him subordinate, ranking fractionally above a ‘ratcatcher’, ‘drainman’ or minion. Whereas social inequality rankles Pitt, it almost destroys the Waybourne family tutor and Latin master Maurice Jerome, who because of his position is ‘forced … to be always more than a servant and less than an equal, neither in one world nor the other … constantly and subtly patronized, one minute encouraged for his knowledge, his skills, and the next rebuffed because of his social status.’

  Jerome is wrongly accused of the sexual abuse of his young male pupils and the sodomizing and murder of Arthur Waybourne. His sour, self-righteous condescension towards Pitt, whom he regards as inferior, makes Jerome a difficult character to like, but his predicament is unenviable. He is arrested and will be hanged, sacrificed by an aristocratic family to escape the public disgrace of a police investigation. This is corruption, and once again it stems from an abuse of power. To find the murderer Pitt must expose the Waybourne family secrets, but he does so with sensitivity and an understanding of the long-term consequences that Anne understands.

  [Pitt] had seen the damage that the resolution of all secrets could bring; every person should have the right to a certain degree of privacy, a chance to forget or to overcome. 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.

  Arthur’s wasteful death has a parallel in the sticky end of rent boy Albie Frobisher, his polar opposite on the social scale. Both youths are sexually exploited, and their deaths are a result of the self-gratification of predatory older men. Sodom and Gomorrah are mentioned more than once in this book. However, the focus in Bluegate Fields on power and its abuse, rather than on homosexuality, leaves Anne free to imply that equal and consenting same-sex associations can have a place in a just and ethical world. Her views on homosexuality are liberal and inclusive. ‘Homophobia makes me really angry because of the really fine people I know who are gay, of both sexes … and they’re better people than most of the ones who go after them in many respects — intellectually and spiritually.’18

  The Mormon Church, however, believes that homosexuality should be condemned in the same way as adultery and fornication. Sexual relations can only legitimately occur between husband and wife, and a Mormon temple marriage is regarded as a union that lasts forever. But Anne does not apply the same criteria. It is part of her personal philosophy not to judge the particularities of people’s lives. How can she expect compassion herself if she takes the moral high ground? She also has a special sympathy for people whose lives have been affected by homosexuality, as her own has so indelibly been.

  Death in the Devil’s Acre, which came out the year after Bluegate Fields, is set in 1887, the year before Jack the Ripper’s Whitechapel slayings. But instead of women being ritually slain, it is four men, and their mutilations that will have Freudians rushing for their textbooks and the average male clutching his groin. The bodies of Dr Hubert Pinchin, Max Burton, Sir Bertram Astley and Ernest Pomery are all found in compromising locations around the Devil’s Acre with their genitals horribly disfigured. With the notable exception of Burton, these are seemingly honourable men who have been viciously castrated by something that appears to have clawed their flesh like a mastiff. Charlotte, however, is not convinced of their integrity:

  She had known plenty of ‘respectable’ people herself. All the adjective really meant was that they were either clever enough or fortunate enough to have maintained an excellent façade. Behind it there might be anything at all.

  In order to discover the perpetrator, Charlotte joins Pitt in an undercover operation that takes her on
ce more into the home of the steadfast General Balantyne and his dysfunctional upper-class family from Callander Square. She poses again as a single woman, and the gentle general, trapped in an empty marriage, falls in love with her. His sexually compulsive daughter Christina is also caught in an unfulfilling marriage she was forced into after an indiscretion with the family butler, Max Burton, who was dismissed and has become a high-class pimp. Prostitution is a key theme in Death in the Devil’s Acre.

  As Brandy Balantyne explains in a heated conversation with his icy mother, Lady Augusta, there are approximately 85,000 prostitutes in London ‘and some of them are no more than ten or eleven years old!’ It is not the prostitutes, however, who are under scrutiny here, but the men who use them and the veneer of respectability that disguises their sordid deceits. Christina is the perfect foil for the prostitutes in the novel, because her promiscuity is driven not by financial need but by a sexual addiction. Even her demise is treated with some sympathy, as is that of her unfortunate husband, Alan Ross, whose chivalry prompted him to marry a wife whose appetite he could not satisfy. This intricate story is woven together so each of the key characters’ situation and motives are explored, giving greater depth to a potentially shallow narrative.

  There was something more searching about both Bluegate Fields and Death in the Devil’s Acre. The hypocrisies and power relationships were less clichéd and melodramatic, and Anne was beginning to use her craft not just to mix a few aberrations and ethical conundrums into a mystery plot, but to deal more consistently and subtly with profound human concerns. Her framework was still Judeo-Christian, and the plot still a struggle between good and evil characters, but the personalities and themes were becoming more complex.

  Bluegate Fields was published at the end of 1984, and Death in the Devil’s Acre in 1985, and both were well received by critics. The Philadelphia Inquirer found that, in Bluegate Fields:

  Pitt’s compassion and Charlotte’s cleverness make them compatible sleuths, as well as extremely congenial characters. Thanks to Perry’s extraordinarily vivid sense of the period, we share the Pitts’ moral outrage as they investigate the Victorian social underbelly — the workhouses, the sweatshops, the match factories, the poverty, disease and prostitution. It’s all terribly squalid, but fascinating and ultimately moving because Perry has the great gift of making it all seem immediate and very much alive.19

  Critics applauded the authenticity of the worlds she created. In spite of the macabre and sometimes sensational nature of her plots, her Victorian London was real and her dialogue convincing. The special touch she brought was her exposure of hypocrisy and those grand Old World narratives of birth, bloodline and privilege. ‘Perry’s shrill tone of social outrage occasionally takes the edge off her penetrating views of London’s appalling slum conditions,’ wrote the Sun in Baltimore of Death in the Devil’s Acre. ‘But her sense of irony remains sharp and her drawing-room exposés of the hypocrisies and moral blindness of privileged Victorian society are still very keen.’20

  The reviews Anne received made her feel that the difficulties were worth while, but she tried not to involve herself in the politics of book publishing, which she found distressing and distracting. That was her agent’s job. Her strategy was to either avoid or slough off anything that upset her, and to learn from and enjoy the positive critical and personal responses to her writing. When encouraging letters from readers arrived, she answered them with gratitude. She saw that her reputation was growing in North America, but also knew that she was only ever as good as her last book. The effort of writing a book never translated into an adequate income, but she also knew there was nothing else in the world she would rather do. She told her friends there was no Plan B.

  Anne pushed forward, because she was driven to, and in the knowledge that success depended not on the inspired genius of an individual story, but on consistency and subtle variation within a repeated formula. When she was working she immersed herself in her writing. At times she became so consumed by it that Meg MacDonald had to instigate regular cottage-cleaning raids.

  My friend and I used to go over once a month because — being Anne — she was so busy writing she never saw the house around her, so we would go and blitz the cottage for her, spend the whole day cleaning around her and then come back, and she [would] come out [with us then] and we’d go home.

  In her snatches of time off, Anne would go out with Meg and their friend Patsy from church. ‘We’d laugh until we were sick, we’d go to the jumble sales — we used to do the stupidest things.’21

  Not only did Meg provide Anne with friendship and a family, but the overflow of dogs and cats from Meg’s menagerie-cum-animal-sanctuary began to populate Anne’s cottage, as she explained in a card to Janet Freer:

  My friend Meg has just adopted 3 kittens (mother had 7 & couldn’t cope!). They are about 31/2 weeks old and so beautiful they would melt your heart. She is over here today & has brought them with her. They need feeding every couple of hours! If I can get a decent photo I will! Love Anne.22

  This was the beginning of many long-term relationships with cats and dogs. Anne loved animals, and treasured being close to the natural world and to the rural rhythms of Darsham.

  Just when she thought things were beginning to settle in her literary career, Anne learned of Christine Park’s departure. Christine hoped to do some freelance editorial work, but was planning to concentrate on becoming a novelist. ‘After a very happy three years I will be leaving MBA at the end of February,’ she wrote to Anne. ‘Meanwhile, it has been a great pleasure working with you and getting to know you. And I believe firmly that the work that we have put in together will reap rewards in the long run, over the years to come … Diana and MBA have your good interests very much at heart, and I am leaving … with the confidence that you will be well looked after.’23

  Diana Tyler who, though slight of frame, was a commanding presence with her humour and hard-nosed intelligence, put her best efforts into finding a replacement agent for Anne. Her good judgement and a shrewd understanding of people led her to corral MBA’s newest recruit at the Christmas party and ask her whether she felt ready to take on her first client after nearly a year of taking notes, typing and doing the banking.

  At just 27, Canadian-born Meg Davis was raw and ambitious. She had been thrilled to get the position as Diana’s office assistant, and was hungry to succeed. Diana sensed her drive, but also knew that a period of apprenticeship was required. Anne seemed the perfect person to start with. As a 46-year-old book-a-year author, she was probably the agency’s steadiest client. ‘At that point nobody really expected she would do anything exciting,’ remembers Meg.

  Anne would be a really good place for a trainee agent to begin … It really is kind of like when you go to a riding stables and they give you the horse called Sugar, because the horse won’t bolt and there’s nothing you can do to the horse that will completely mess up its head — and there is nothing interesting that horse will do apart from just plod along and you can actually learn to ride that way.24

  Diana explained to Meg that Anne was unmarried and a Mormon, so did not drink alcohol or caffeine, or break other Church taboos, and, apart from being a little fragile and ringing rather too often because she was forlorn, worried or lonely, she was the safest bet they had. Anne’s books were as dependable as an annual monsoon. Demand for them was consistent, but was limited by St Martin’s decision to release just one title a year. ‘As Christine is leaving the agency, anything concerning Anne should now come to me — or, in my absence, John [Parker],’ Meg wrote to Hope Dellon in February 1985.25

  Their pairing seemed right, on paper, but how would the chemistry work in reality? Anne, with her permed auburn hair, was statuesque, a little grand, even formal, although her matronly appearance was at odds with her quirky personality. Meg, on the other hand, was trendy in a leather-jacket-and-jeans sort of fashion. Sharp of mind, she was small, dark-haired, fine-featured and agile. If Anne could be likened to a lo
ping red setter (and she was), then Meg was a quick fox.

  Meg’s father was an Englishman who, instead of becoming an Anglican monk, had married and settled in Canada. But Meg was even more of a mix of cultures than this would suggest, as she had done a degree in Russian and had visited there; but her passion now was London, and she was as keen to be an agent as Anne was to be a writer. Thoughtful and intense herself, Meg appreciated Anne’s philosophical approach. ‘Been thinking about our conversation about words,’ she wrote to Anne in February 1985, ‘you’ve got me started now! They’re not just actions, but also perceptions: the currency of the intellect.’26 This was her first client and she wanted to impress, and she took on Anne’s plodding caseload with quixotic zeal. ‘This fascinating, exciting writer, is all mine,’ she thought. ‘What are we going to do to be a really great success?’27 Diana, who had suggested they bond by spending time together at Darsham, was annoyed when she discovered that Meg’s first visit was just lunch, a quick chat, then back to London that night. Meg, on the other hand, was not so sure she wanted to relinquish her whole weekend for the visit.

  Her stays with Anne at Darsham, however, became an established pattern. The change at Ipswich, the rattling two-carriage trip across Suffolk in a draughty train, and the bitterly cold arrival at Darsham station on a Friday night, where Anne would pick her up.

  She would give me a salad — a very large salad — at the end [of the trip], and I would think, ‘Oh Anne, please, can I have something hot?’ But then I cottoned on to the fact that what I really ought to say is: ‘Anne this is a really colourful salad’, and then she’d be happy. I’d shovel down the sweet corn and beetroot … and think, ‘OK, well, hopefully I’ll be warm in bed eventually.’