On April 10, in Los Angeles, Anne Perry Death, a well-known author of mystery novels who was born in Britain and had spent five years in jail for a gruesome murder she assisted in committing as a kid. 84 was her age. Meg Davis, her literary agent, confirmed her passing. According to Davis, Ms. Perry’s health had been deteriorating ever since her heart attack in December.
When Ms. Perry’s terrible history was made public in 1994, just in time for Peter Jackson’s movie “Heavenly Creatures,” she had already established herself as a successful novelist and was the author of more than 26 million books sold globally.
The movie, which was based on a terrifying matricide in New Zealand some four decades earlier in which a Christchurch mother was bludgeoned to death in a park by her daughter and Ms. Perry, who was then 15 and was known as Juliet Hulme, renewed media interest in the case. Journalists managed to find the author, who had relocated to Scotland and changed her name years previously.
Juliet’s parents consider the close bond that Ms. Perry’s character, represented by Kate Winslet, has with her best friend, Pauline Parker, to be “unwholesome.”When Juliet’s parents’ divorce and decide to send her to South Africa, the girls come up with a scheme to murder Pauline’s mother because she reportedly didn’t want her to travel with Juliet.
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The movie, which Ms. Perry never saw, “turned her life upside down,” according to Joanne Drayton, the biographer of Ms. Perry, who spoke with the press on Thursday. Drayton compared Ms. Perry to Angela Lansbury from CBS’s “Murder, She Wrote” in the mid-1990s, describing her as a conservative, matronly figure, and a fervent Mormon.
During her research for the 2012 biography “The Search for Anne Perry,” which, like many of Ms. Perry’s own historical crime novels, was a smash seller, Drayton spent days with the author. The movie “blew her evolved identity out of the water and she was absolutely terrified,” Drayton said.
The eldest child of Henry Rainsford Hulme, a well-known British nuclear scientist, and Hilda Marion Hulme, a marriage counselor, Juliet Marion Hulme was born on October 28, 1938, in London. Ms. Perry was a chronically ill youngster who, at age 8, was placed in a foster home in the Bahamas to recover from bouts of pneumonia and tuberculosis.
Later, she was relocated to a personal island off the coast of New Zealand. In 1948, her father accepted a position as rector of Canterbury University College in Christchurch, New Zealand. It was at this institution that Ms. Perry formed her tragic friendship with Parker, who was 16 years old when her mother was killed.
In New Zealand, where murders are uncommon, the killing, and its brutality in beating an unwary woman to death on a woodland path, sent shockwaves throughout the country. The jury dismissed the pair’s claim of insanity as an excuse for their innocence, but because of their advanced age, they were spared the death penalty. (In 1957, New Zealand executed its final prisoner.)
Ms. Perry admitted in a 2006 interview with the Times of London that it was a “profoundly wrong decision” for her to take part in the murder, but she also said she did so out of fear that her companion would commit suicide if she didn’t. According to Drayton, the prosecution viewed Ms. Perry as the adversary. The two were split up and lost touch after Parker completed her five-year sentence in a women’s prison.
She spent her adolescence in a Gothic-style jail in Auckland, where she served time in solitary for several months. When she was released, Drayton said she was a “changed person, determined to do good.” Despite Ms. Perry’s lack of formal schooling while serving time, Drayton said she had a sharp mind and was motivated to follow her childhood dream of becoming a writer.
While working a variety of professions, such as an air hostess, limo dispatcher, and insurance underwriter, Ms. Perry started writing her first novels in England when she was in her 20s. “The Cater Street Hangman,” her debut book, was released in 1979. around the course of her career, she released numerous novels and novellas and frequently showed up on bestseller lists all around the world.
September will see the release of her upcoming book, “The Traitor Among Us,” which centers on a female English spy. Perry never got married. Jonathan Hulme is one of her surviving brothers.
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