The Search for Anne Perry

by Joanne Drayton

  Connelly’s main series character, Los Angeles Police Department Detective Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch, is named after the late-medieval Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. On the wall behind his computer Connelly has a print of ‘Hell’, from Bosch’s surreal, demonic triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. Connelly treats his Harry Bosch, Mickey Haller and Jack McEvoy series like a panoramic canvas across which his people move, interact and collide. The series are open and interconnected, so main characters can move fluidly between them, propelling plots and casting fresh light on familiar figures like Harry Bosch. The layering of this approach appealed to Anne, as did the lateral thinking of Jeffery Deaver, who twists assumptions and turns clichés back on themselves, especially in short-story collections such as Twisted. His sophisticated integration of research also impressed her.

  Jeffery Deaver is brilliant at this. Recently Lincoln Rhyme, one of his series characters … investigated electricity supply to a large area of New York State, with great detail about electrical power, its strengths, dangers and vital uses. Do I care about electricity? Not really, not the technical details … Did I care about it in the story? Was it interesting? You bet!8

  In the opening decade of the new millennium, Anne began to see her series as increasingly fluid and layered, like Connelly’s. In Half Moon Street she had turned the spotlight on Grandmama Mariah, examining her unhappy past. She would continue along these lines with other characters, thinking back into their lives to help explain their actions and who they have become.

  Sometimes people need to step outside the everyday to get a perspective on themselves, and to a degree this is what Monk experiences after the obliteration of his memory as he recreates himself through the perceptions of others. He has been slowly piecing his life together. After A Funeral in Blue, released in 2001, there is only ‘the one thing more’, which is revealed in Death of a Stranger in 2002.

  The underlying themes in A Funeral in Blue are redemption through compassion, anti-Semitism and the significance of identity. The redemption in this story is Runcorn’s — and Monk’s, to a degree, for recognizing it.

  Runcorn, Monk’s acerbic former boss and longtime opponent, attends the funeral of Sarah Mackeson, a prostitute who had been found murdered in an artist’s studio, along with a surgeon’s wife. Monk is also at the funeral. As Runcorn stands by the grave, overwhelmed with pity, Monk realizes, ‘with a sharp savour of satisfaction’, that the other man is ‘embarrassed at having been caught in an act of uncharacteristic compassion. After all, Sarah Mackeson was a loose woman, the kind he [usually] despised.’ Initially Monk gloats over Runcorn’s softening, but betters himself by seeing the integrity in it.

  The theme of identity comes through in the storyline of Dr Kristian Beck. It is his wife’s body that is found alongside that of Sarah Mackeson, and during the investigation it is revealed that Kristian is not the good Catholic he has always believed himself to be, but a Jew. ‘His heritage, his very blood, was different. He was one of the people he had been brought up to think of as outsiders, somehow inferior, and yet a people who had given the Western world the core of its soul, and so much of its culture.’ However, it is Kristian’s self-discovery that fuels Monk’s burning desire to ‘know his own roots, the meaning of his identity that hung only in shadows and pieces in his own mind … What of the truth about himself … Where was his blood tie to the past?’

  Death of a Stranger opens with a prologue in which Monk reflects on the man he now is.

  In the past he would not have shared the core inside him with anyone, nor allowed someone to become important enough to him that her presence could make or mar his life. He was surprised how much he preferred the man he had become.

  He thinks also about how radically the revelations of identity have ‘over-turned’ the foundations of Kristian Beck’s life:

  If Monk were at last to know himself as most people do automatically — the religious ties, the allegiances, the family loves and hates — might he, too, discover a stranger inside his skin, and one he could not like?

  Monk pursues his former self against a curtain of murderous industrial intrigue. Katrina Harcus asks him to investigate her businessman fiancé to ensure he is not a fraud; at the same time, a railway mogul is found dead in a sleazy London brothel. The fraudulent fiancé and murdered magnate are connected, and so is Monk, or at least the old Monk. As his investigations proceed, Monk is confronted by evidence linking him to corruption and the wrongful trial and imprisonment of his old-life friend and mentor, Arrol Dundas. It seems that Monk was Dundas’s betrayer.

  As he reads more about the trial in newspapers at the library, memories begin to come back. There are flashes of vision, voices inside his head, ‘white faces twisted with grief’. He cannot explain the screams, the shouts, the children. ‘He was so tired he longed for sleep … but he was afraid of what horror might return to him the moment he lost control of his thoughts.’

  He worries again about how Hester will react. ‘It would be best of all if Hester were beside him, understanding everything and holding no criticism or blame, and that would be impossible. To do that she would have to be without moral judgement. And what use would she be then, what real person at all?’ He wonders how his terrible past will affect their future together.

  Monk is then implicated in the tragic death of Katrina Harcus, and connects together the terrible sequence of events, but at the end of the story he finds himself. Redemption does not come from his actions as a heroic protagonist or from the bringing together of his ‘selves’; it comes from the knowledge of how much he has changed. Full knowledge of himself gives him a vantage point from which to survey his recovery of compassion and humanity. Monk’s redemption is not celestial, but temporal and seated in the will to be better.

  Death of a Stranger took Anne to number 26 on the New York Times bestseller list. ‘At last,’ said the critic for the New York Times Book Review:

  The secrets of Monk’s past are dramatically revealed and the mystery of his identity conclusively resolved. After holding out for so long on this tantalizing puzzle, Perry might have made it the sole focus of her story. Instead she draws out the suspense with a parallel plot … As … her descriptions of these miserable streets and their wretched inhabitants still have the power to shock, so do her own unsentimental views on the appalling price of progress during the industrial age. Monk is not alone in his journey to enlightenment.9

  Ballantine’s Leona Nevler had thought that the puzzle of Monk’s identity might have lasted for three novels; it had continued through 13 books, sometimes to the frustration of critics who wished he would either find — or get over — himself more quickly. It was a powerful premise that Anne informed with her own experiences. As Hester’s brother Charles tells her in A Funeral in Blue, ‘One can never know another person as well as one thinks … Perhaps one cannot even know oneself.’

  The idea of a series set during the First World War appealed to both Anne and her agents. Anne was looking for a challenge, and Don and Meg were seeking a fresh market. ‘I want these books to have a strong moral dimension,’ Anne told Don Maass during their annual story summit. But the war had been well traversed by some of the twentieth century’s greatest writers. What fresh approach was there? Anne planned to use the character of Joseph Reavley from her short story ‘Heroes’.

  Don challenged her to think about the transformation of her character in this searing experience of death and destruction: ‘What is the thing that Joseph needs to learn? What is the practical application of searching his faith … What would be the sermon he would preach at the end of the war? What he would say: this is what I’ve learnt; this is how I’ve changed; and this is what faith means now?’

  Anne finally responded:

  You know, when it’s that bad, and when you’re in Joseph’s position, and all you can do is comfort the dying, and there’s nothing you can say that will … help their shattered faith at that moment. The only thing you can do … is what Jesu
s did, and say: ‘I will watch with you. I will be there for you.’10

  In 2001, Meg Davis and Anne made plans for an expedition to the medieval town of Ypres, in Belgium, to do some research in the fields and trenches where soldiers had fought and died. Since his return to the United Kingdom in 2000, Jonathan had become increasingly involved in the research for his sister’s books. Initially, he had considered going back into private practice as a general practitioner, but because he had been in Zimbabwe for so long he would have been obliged to sit extensive medical examinations, which he decided not to tackle. His interest in history made the role of research assistant to Anne very appealing, and he could see a value in it: ‘I regard it as investing in the family business.’11 Jonathan’s name was automatically added to the expedition list, and he was put in charge of the travel arrangements and the programme of events.

  Meg Davis decided that Meg MacDonald should also come: ‘I felt she had always made a big contribution to Anne’s writing’. She was aware, however, that the inclusion could well add stress to the situation, as Meg MacDonald and Jonathan did not always get along. In fact, Jonathan’s arrival in Scotland with his young family had created a degree of tension and realignment in Anne’s life. Meg, and her son Simon and his family, especially, had staked their claim both in Portmahomack and with Anne, as friends and family retainers. Jonathan and his family seemed like interlopers. On the other hand, Jonathan had felt compelled to leave Zimbabwe, and he had rejoined his mother and sister.

  It was a chilly day in November 2003 when Anne, the two Megs and Jonathan caught the EuroStar from Waterloo Station to Lille in northern France. ‘I fell out with Jonathan big-time,’ Meg Davis remembers. ‘It was a classic case of my training as an agent to organize every last thing in detail coming up against Jonathan’s much more relaxed but equally effective style. Fortunately, by the end of the trip we were good friends again.’

  On the train she asked him what size car he had hired. ‘And we get to Lille and sure enough, it’s tiny and the car-hire people don’t speak English and Jonathan doesn’t speak French.’ There was no chance of fitting themselves and four enormous suitcases into the little vehicle, and they did not want to take the massive and expensive Mercedes that seemed to be the only alternative. After much gesturing, and some rusty French from Meg Davis, they left Lille with elevated blood pressures and a suitable vehicle.

  ‘We finally have a car with all the suitcases in it,’ recalls Meg. ‘“So, Jonathan, where are you going to drive us to so we can look at famous battle grounds?” He has no map of Belgium! He’s got no maps; he’s got no guidebook. We are driving towards [Ypres] … and we don’t actually know how to find it. “So where the hell is this hotel?”’ He had no address for that either, but he did remember the name, which he felt sure would stand out immediately they arrived.

  They followed the road signs and their hotel was in the centre of town, and easily found. Nevertheless, the meticulously organized Meg — who had been reading books about the First World War for months — was still fuming over Jonathan’s relaxed approach. ‘I [swore and] slammed the … door in his face and stomped off to buy some maps and embarrassed myself by stomping into the bank instead of the information centre.’12

  It was cold at Ypres. When they arrived at the battlefields the next morning, the grass was blanched by heavy frost. There were no fences, no hedgerows; just a huge, seemingly endless expanse stretching as far as the eye could see. The old trenches are:

  all overgrown with grass now, but you can see some of the bunkers where they lived … you can kick around and find bits of shells. Jeepers, these were flying round in the air ninety years ago.13

  They stopped at the Menin Gate, a moving monument to 54,896 British and Commonwealth soldiers whose bodies were never recovered from the mire and the carnage in Ypres Salient, which was the site of some of the most appalling and costly battles of the war.

  The gate was originally an eastern entrance through the town ramparts and across the moat. Ypres, the last Belgian town outside German control, was a communication hub, crucial to keeping Allied supply lines to the Channel open. It was also the place where the troops began their journey to the front lines.

  Anne was deeply affected by the trip to Ypres and seeing the Menin Gate. The terrible loss of life, the sheer scale of that loss of life, would stay with her while she wrote and help her to re-construct the world of ‘one of the most noble people I have ever written about’, Joseph Reavley.14

  Although No Graves As Yet, published in 2003, was ‘dedicated to MY GRANDFATHER Capt. Joseph Reavley, who served as chaplain in the trenches during the Great War’, and the character bears his name, the book is not based on the man’s personal experiences. But the character of Joseph Reavley does have a special presence, and a sense of flesh and blood that is compellingly evoked.

  The novel begins at a Cambridge cricket match in late June 1914. It is one of those hot, cloudless, dazzling summer days. Joseph Reavley, lecturer in Biblical languages at St John’s College, is standing watching his students play when he realizes someone is behind him, and he turns to see his Secret Intelligence Service brother, Matthew. The news Matthew brings will change Joseph’s life: their parents have been killed in a terrible car crash, but there is a sinister subtext.

  The night before his death, their father John Reavley, a retired MP, had telephoned Matthew to tell him that ‘someone had given him a document outlining a plot so hideous it would change the world we know, ruin England, and everything we stand for, for ever … He said it reaches as high as the royal family.’ The authorities decide that the cause of their parents’ car accident is human error, and when Matthew and Joseph search the family home for the document there is no sign of it. Was John Reavley wrong? Is this a fabrication?

  Joseph, who has in his study a ‘bust of Dante … that genius of poetry, imagination, the art of story, and above all, the understanding of the nature of good and evil’, is a man who has known personal tragedy. He has swapped parish ministry for academic life because of a crisis of faith. ‘Joseph knew better than others how one can temporarily forget a cataclysm in one’s life, then remember it again with surprise and the renewal of pain.’ His wife and unborn child had died suddenly, and teaching has taken him away from the questions he found impossible to answer.

  Don Maass believes that Anne’s First World War series contains her ‘most brilliant antagonist’ — the Peacemaker, a twisted powerbroker high in the British machinery of state. His ambitions are good, but his means to achieve them are utterly despicable. He wants to divide the world according to two superpowers. The document the Reavley brothers so desperately seek is an unsigned treaty between Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and King George V of England, ‘the terms of which were shatteringly simple. Britain would stand aside and allow Germany to invade and conquer Belgium, France … Luxembourg, saving the hundreds of thousands of lives … In return a new Anglo-German Empire would be formed with unassailable power on land and sea.’

  Most of Europe would come under German control, and the British Empire would be bolstered by the alliance. The remaining continents and riches of the world would be divided between Germany and the United Kingdom. The man commissioned to pen the treaty and its duplicate is so appalled that he steals both copies and sends one to John Reavley, thereby sealing his and his wife’s fate. Although the murderer of the Reavley parents is revealed, at the end of the book the mastermind Peacemaker is still at large: ‘whoever it is, he’s brilliant, ruthless, and he’s still out there’.

  But war is the flipside of the Peacemaker’s ‘dishonourable peace’, and in Shoulder the Sky, the next novel in the quintet, the story resumes in the trenches at Ypres. It is like a scene from hell: the filthy food, the stench of decay, the sound of bombs and the ‘grotesque ruin of no man’s land, the mud, the ice-rimmed craters with the limbs of dead men poking up as if in some last, desperate hold on life’. But Anne’s brilliant twist — and the irony of the series — is
that all this killing and human despair can have more dignity and hope than peace itself. It is a premise that challenges readers to think differently — to see goodness and truth as fluid, fragile and sometimes contradictory.

  Joseph is now chaplain to the young men he knew in his Cambridgeshire village of St Giles, and he must minister to them as they are slaughtered in the killing fields of Ypres, while knowing that the Peacemaker has another solution. But there are other tests for Joseph. This is Anne’s favourite book in the series, perhaps because of the complexity of the trials Joseph must face.

  Eldon Prentice, a grasping, insensitive war correspondent, is found dead on the battlefield. It quickly becomes apparent that he is not a casualty of war but a murder victim. Prentice was so dangerous a person that Joseph might almost have killed him himself, and when he tracks down the killer, he finds it is someone he both loves and admires. Joseph’s calibre as a man and as a priest are equally tested when he travels by troopship across the Aegean Sea to Anzac Cove on the Gallipoli Peninsula. He is on Secret Service business for his brother, but on the beach he cares for Australian and New Zealand soldiers:

  He helped medical orderlies, most of whom had little training. One was a veterinary surgeon from somewhere in New Zealand. He was skilled and worked with frantic dedication and an air of confidence. It was very reassuring to those who did not see his moments of panic as he reached for medicines and equipment he did not have, and fumbled now and then in human anatomy.

  When Joseph’s mission is completed, he escapes Anzac Cove and is on board a cargo ship when it is seized and scuttled by a German U-boat, and he and a war correspondent named Richard Mason are set adrift in a lifeboat. Mason is in league with the Peacemaker and plans to publish an article that will expose the shocking strategic miscalculation of Gallipoli and its unimaginable loss of life. ‘You preach your gospel, I’ll preach mine,’ he announces to Joseph. ‘You want to protect people from the truth, for what you think is the greater good. I think they have the right to know what they’re signing up for, what the battle will cost them.’