The Search for Anne Perry

by Joanne Drayton

  The doctors advised her parents not to let her play sport, so she wrote stories, read books, listened to the radio, made models and, once she was properly mobile, went with Wendy to Sunday School at the East Belt Methodist Church (in Fitzgerald Avenue). The Riepers were not an especially religious family, but Herbert and Honorah made a point of going to church occasionally.

  Things seemed to look up a little in 1946 when the family purchased a house in the central city at 31 Gloucester Street. Although now rundown, this had been a salubrious and sought-after area of big homes with elegant pillared porticoes and carriageways. Now many of them were either rental properties or had been divided into multiple flats.

  The Riepers’ plan for their sprawling, rather shabby house was to take in boarders to supplement Herbert’s wage from his job as manager of Dennis Brothers’ Fish Shop on Hereford Street. At the back of the Riepers’ property was Christchurch Girls’ High School. Girls would hang over the corrugated-iron fence and stare into the back yard, making rude comments about ‘the house with the rusty roof’.94 Christchurch Girls’ High School had status and history. In 1952 the school celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary — ‘Quite an achievement in a city of only a hundred and one years!’ announced the school magazine.

  How little we realize that in 1877, a girls’ school was almost unheard of — at all events there were very few, even in England. Many people were against a full education for women … But the vision of the founders was justified — and through the years, our school has built up a high reputation.95

  The staff, many of whom had masters degrees, wore black academic gowns. The tone was set by the headmistress, Jean Stewart, a strict, rather unforgiving woman. ‘We were young ladies, she thought, and that’s the way she liked it. She once told us that she preferred us to say Mundey, Tuesdey, Wednesdey, etc, because that’s how the Queen said it.’ Miss Stewart was ‘short, with attitude and had bunny teeth, not sticking out just large’, but it was Miss Milne, deputy headmistress and mathematics teacher for the top streams, who terrified everyone. Girls scattered and the corridors cleared at her approach. Eye contact was universally avoided, because it was like staring at the Medusa. Tall and gaunt, with stooped shoulders, she wore her hair in plaited coils over her ears and pince-nez glasses propped at the end of her nose. ‘She had bony ankles,’ former pupil Patricia Toon recalls, ‘and this with the black gown made me think that she probably parked her broom stick in one of the tall cupboards I once saw in the staff room.’96

  When Juliet discovered she was going to be taught by Miss Milne, she thought, ‘I’m dead, and that’s the end to the world — life as we know it has ceased’, but Miss Milne turned out to be a ‘brilliantly gifted teacher’. Henry had talked to his daughter about the elegance of quadratic equations, but it was Miss Milne who showed her how the magic worked. Her teaching was a revelation. ‘It was only a few weeks before I could say: “Yes, I know what you mean when you say that’s an elegant solution and that’s pedestrian. This one is witty and that one is ordinary” … That was a moment suddenly when all the lights went on … I was fumbling around and suddenly everything was clear.’ From then on Juliet felt very disappointed if she did not get over 90 per cent for mathematics. This was enormously encouraging after all the schooling she had missed. ‘I think Christchurch Girls’ High was a pretty damn good school. It was here that [I experienced] that sudden spark of the joy of learning and understanding. It’s still with me.’97

  The school year was under way when Juliet joined 3A, and class friendships were already established. Many of the girls knew each other from club and community groups and primary school. To the rest of the class Juliet ‘felt older’, although at 13, turning 14 towards the end of the year, she was not much older than most. Her sophistication was more than just a matter of age. ‘Juliet was party to a lot of adult conversations of high quality that she would participate in,’ remembers a classmate. Well-spoken and elegant, she had ‘beautiful posture and always stood very tall … and was far more confident than a lot of us girls in the class’.98 This confidence made her seem arrogant, aloof, even haughty. She had the poise and self-assurance to correct their French teacher, the infamous Miss Stevens, whose autocratic manner, nicotine-stained fingers and large frame would long be remembered.

  Juliet was the only one in the class daring enough to wear the brims of her summer panama and winter felt hats rakishly turned down, as she had when at St Margaret’s. She was given more latitude. ‘The teachers were impressed by her. She was the daughter to the rector of the university and, as they’d all been young women who had got to university, that was important,’ recalls a classmate.99

  The friendship between Juliet and Pauline began almost coincidentally. ‘When she first started she always used to have lunch with Diane Muirson and Helen Hinton and myself,’ remembers Marjorie Webb. ‘We used to sit and have lunch, and Juliet would be in our group, and then Pauline came into that group … mainly because Diane and I had met her … we did cooking classes together … and we went to the Methodist camp in the third form and we all tented together.’ Pauline, who preferred to be called Paul (though her family called her Yvonne), was ‘beautiful, she had this pure white skin … black curly hair and dark eyes, but she had no sense of it,’ Margaret Tyndall remembers.100 Although she spoke quietly and was extremely reserved, she had a sense of humour and a boyish ‘anarchic streak’ that made her well liked. Pauline was not an outsider, but she was the deep, brooding type who scowled portentously in the playground and especially in school photographs.

  It was a communion of minds and souls when Juliet and Pauline discovered each other in May 1952. ‘Shortly after [their] meeting, Juliet remarked “Mummy, I’ve met someone at last who has a will as strong as my own.”’101 In August that year, when the two girls went for a bicycle ride in the countryside, they shared a growing sense of euphoria. It was exclusive and comforting to have a best friend. After years of dislocating illness and isolation, their solitary lives were suddenly over.

  During their ride they stopped by the side of the road and went into a wooded area. There they removed ‘their outer clothing and ran amongst the bushes ecstatically. They were so ecstatic that they went home leaving these clothes behind … there was [now] an indissoluble bond between them. It would seem that two unusual kindred spirits had come together.’102 From this point on, their relationship grew more intense. Together, they created a richly imaginative fantasy world that found expression in an overwhelming urge to write.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I

  Anne’s tour of the United States, beginning in late February 1995, was more minutely planned than any before. Ballantine held ‘high-level meetings’ to ensure the best possible outcome, but there was nervousness as Anne began her visits to metropolitan bookstores around the country. Kim Hovey had tried, and largely failed, to moderate journalist John Darnton. ‘I would like to talk to you about your trip to Scotland to interview Anne,’ she had faxed him on 31 January 1995.

  I know you are anxious to go … early next week but I need to talk to you further regarding the timing of your story in The New York Times. I hope that we can come to an agreement on when it will run. It is important that you realize that both Ballantine and Anne’s agent, Meg Davis, have been extremely careful about what media interviews Anne has done since the news broke last [July]. Anne did a few select interviews in August and will be doing … more in late February and March when she is on her book tour for TRAITOR’S GATE.1

  Anne was facing her public for the first time as a murder-mystery writer who had committed murder herself. She was arriving on the back of negative commentary — just days after the publication of John Darnton’s article in the New York Times — and in the midst of Miramax’s publicity campaign for Heavenly Creatures. She was tired, and anxious. Would the bookshops reject her because of her past?

  But Anne was encouraged by what happened. ‘She’s had tremendous support from the bookstore community, e
specially the mystery stores,’ announced Kim Hovey in Bookselling this Week, ‘and I think that her fans are still supportive.’2 Not one bookstore Kim rang said ‘we don’t want Anne Perry’ and people like Mary Alice Gorman, of the Mystery Lovers Bookshop in Oakmont, Pennsylvania, and Barbara Peters, at The Poisoned Pen in Phoenix, Arizona, declared their support for Anne and her writing. ‘We know her personally, and we do care for her as a friend,’ said Mary Alice Gorman.3

  This was important affirmation, but the support of her readers was even more crucial. Her books had always been strongly moralistic. ‘I … expected some people to say “You hypocrite — you write stories with this ethical value to them, and look what you really are.”’4 But no one did. ‘People were so gracious and understanding,’ says Kim, who was present at many of Anne’s signings.

  We decided that for the first time she was out doing events that she would answer questions or speak to it. Because there were fans coming to every single signing and they wanted to know what she had to say … She spoke to her past and what happened — and she went on to show the world that you can have a second chance.5

  It was especially poignant, as Anne observed, ‘for someone who feels there’s no hope, to be encouraged; it doesn’t have to go on this way. There are more chances in the world than you might think. And compassion, too.’6 Some regulars doubtless stayed away because they felt what Anne had done was unforgivable, and others came because of the revelations. But her faithful readers were there in the usual numbers, and Anne spoke ‘eloquently’ and honestly about her youth and what had happened. Ballantine had decided that this tour would be the one and only time she discussed the murder and answered reasonable questions about it; after that they hoped the matter could be dropped.

  Nonetheless, the tour was not without its difficulties or distractions. Anne’s programme of interviews — strictly vetted by Kim to try to avoid tabloid ambushes — was still dauntingly full, and Miramax’s advertising campaign was in high gear. Anne faced a media gauntlet hungry to hear about the murder, and all this in the midst of what must have felt like hysterical praise for Peter Jackson’s film. When Heavenly Creatures hit the screens it was almost universally acclaimed by critics, who seemed as intoxicated by the teenage crush as the girls themselves.

  Richard Corliss of Time magazine wrote that the ‘obsession, when it takes hold, is not a fragrance but a lethal gas … [It is] the puppy love, say, that turns rabid as two souls merge in a toxic rapture.’ He commended the way Peter Jackson built ‘creepy excitement with urgency and great cinematic brio, while neither condescending to the girls nor apologizing for their sin’.7 Film critic John Griffin said it captured the ‘tuning-fork vibrancy of adolescence, its sliding-scale gamut of emotions and its purity’.8 Christopher Tookey in the Daily Mail observed that ‘it neither glamorized nor whitewashed the girls, but it makes them immensely sympathetic … [and while evoking the] stiff, ultra-conventional nature of New Zealand at the time [it] does not take the easy, over-familiar route of blaming society, emotional repression, or bad parents’.9 The film was praised for its direction, its clever use of special effects made possible by the newly formed Weta Workshop, and for its brilliant casting, especially of the largely unknown Reading-born Kate Winslet. Heavenly Creatures featured prominently in international film festivals, winning, among others, the Metro Media Award at the 1994 Toronto International Film Festival and a Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival the same year, and earning an Academy Award nomination in 1995 for Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen. It made the top 10 movies of the year list for Time, the Guardian, the Sydney Morning Herald and the New Zealand Herald.

  Although the success of the film did not affect Anne directly, she still had to deal with such headlines as ‘A Heavenly Trip Toward Hell’, ‘Obsession amid the gymslips’ and ‘Natural-born Culler’. There was also the impact of comments like Richard Corliss’s: ‘the sad creatures who Pauline and Juliet must have been in real life are alchemized [in the film] into figures of horror and beauty’.10 Although she seemed to have lost no friends, colleagues, bookstore support or readers, Anne was beginning to understand that each media outing of her story brought the expectation of ‘a fresh declaration of remorse’.11

  Anne’s people on both sides of the Atlantic waited anxiously to see how the tour would go. Meg Davis was relieved to hear from Ken Sherman in Los Angeles. ‘Anne and I are having breakfast this coming Sunday at 8:00 am at her hotel. We had a somewhat rushed chat last week and I gave her my home number in case she cared to vent due to the press which she said has actually been fairly respectful so far.’12 Sunday dawned warm and sunny, so they ate outside and discussed the progress of Anne’s film projects. ‘It would be great to be able to read the new Lynda La Plante script though Anne feels La Plante doesn’t understand the book/characters. We’ll see.’13

  Lynda La Plante, who optioned the Pitts in 1991, had let the rights go to the BBC when they lapsed in 1992 on the basis that she would be the principal scriptwriter for the series. The BBC, who commissioned the first three episodes from her, was not prepared to make a proper commitment without a workable script and series formula. When the BBC option period ran out in 1994, it was renewed and Lynda La Plante’s role as scriptwriter for the series given additional staffing support. ‘I was speaking to the producer yesterday. There are now 3 script editors attached to the project, but still no go-ahead from [BBC executive] Alan Yentob till he’s seen the first 3 scripts.’14 When Anne flew home from the States, she and her agents were still waiting to read the final drafts.

  Traitor’s Gate was a story about misguided loyalty and betrayal. ‘It’s impossible to read Traitor’s Gate without hearing Perry’s characters replaying versions of her own drama,’ said Toronto’s Globe and Mail.15 But not all critics saw this as positive or reviewed the book favourably. One described the plot as ‘slow-moving and padded with irrelevant scenes and repetitive speeches that are supposed to be conversation. There are so many murder suspects and they are so similar it is hard to keep them straight.’16

  It is remarkable that, in the face of such enormous stress and disruption, Anne kept producing books. The process of writing was familiar, and her stories offered a comfortable place to escape the anxieties which would roll in now that her identity had been revealed, weathering like high tides, wave by wave. But the continuing crisis had its effect. When Meg sent Don the manuscript for Pentecost Alley, the next Pitt, she described it as ‘unfortunately, a mess’.

  This is a measure, perhaps, of how badly I’ve spoiled Anne — the book is full of her typist’s mistakes and gaps where she couldn’t read Anne’s writing, so it is now absolutely covered with my scribbles. I’ve been torn between embarrassment at the unprofessionalism of handing something like this in to Leona, and the awareness of the pressure of time. The latter won out … I’ve been a bit concerned at the way Anne has bashed this out, but the book was thoroughly planned beforehand, and I feel it’s very much up to form. But of course we’ll both have our fingers crossed till we’ve heard what you think.17

  In spite of the state of the manuscript, Pentecost Alley was ‘selected by Book of the Month Club and the guarantee is raised to $30,000’, made the best seller lists of the San Francisco Chronicle and the Wall Street Journal, and was nominated for a coveted Edgar Award.18 The story revolves around the discovery of the body of Ada McKinley, a slum prostitute working in Whitechapel. The corpse has injuries that seem disturbingly ritualistic: the fingers and toes have been broken and dislocated, the boots are laced in a strange manner, and water has been poured over the body. Normally Pitt’s cases are rarified and political, but this one is sensitive. Items belonging to Finlay FitzJames are found in the room — a badge from a private gentlemen’s club and a pair of cufflinks — making it seem as though he is the last person to have seen Ada alive. A witness has also identified a man fitting his description leaving the room.

  On the back of the badge, in gold, are the words ‘Hellfire
Club’ and a date: ‘1881’. Pitt discovers that nine years ago, when Finlay FitzJames was part of a rebellious, hell-raising fraternity of rich young men who frequented the dangerous fringes of Victorian society, another prostitute was killed in exactly the same manner and Finlay was implicated in her death. Pitt is obliged to interview not only Finlay FitzJames, but all the members of the Hellfire Club, most of whom are profoundly embarrassed by the immature antics of their youth.

  At the Foreign Office he interviews Finlay FitzJames’s boss, Mr Grainger, who assures him that since the club was disbanded FitzJames’s private life has never given them cause for concern. ‘You understand, Superintendent?’ he says to Pitt. ‘There are parts of all our lives which fate usually allows us to bury decently. It is only when some other circumstance arises which compels us to face examination that they can be raised again.’ Pitt blushes at the thought of his own misdemeanours. ‘There was nothing in his past which was shocking — simply clumsy and extremely selfish, things he would far rather Charlotte never knew. They would alter the way she saw him.’

  The effect on people of information revealed is one of the themes of this book. It is not entirely new to Anne’s writing, but there is a rawness in its communication here that is compelling and personal. Pitt questions Reverend Jago Jones, a Hellfire member who is now preaching and doing missionary work in the slums. He admits to Pitt that when he was young he was indulgent and careless of other people’s feelings, just like FitzJames. He believes, though, that redemption is possible.

  ‘One cannot undo the selfishness of youth, but one can leave it behind, learn from its mistakes, and avoid too quick or too cruel a judgment in those who in their turn do likewise.’ Pitt did not doubt his sincerity, but he also had the feeling it was a speech he had prepared in his mind for the time he should be asked.