The Search for Anne Perry by Joanne Drayton

The Search for Anne Perry: The Hidden Life of a Bestselling Crime Writer by Joanne Drayton --- 352 pages, including End Notes, Bibliography and Index.

In 1994 film director Peter Jackson established an international reputation with his breakthrough film, Heavenly Creatures, a dramatic story based on a notorious real life murder in his native New Zealand in the 1950s,

The two teenage girls convicted of murdering one's mother, served five years in prison before being released, given new identities, and allowed to leave New Zealand. Both girls disappeared into new lives.

Fast forward forty years, to the day when best selling Victorian crime writer Anne Perry's agent receives a call from a New Zealand reporter announcing that she has identified Perry as one of the two adolescent murderers. This is the scene that opens Drayton's literary biography.

Drayton traces Perry's painful personal odyssey of self-redemption by juxtaposing her unhappy childhood and feelings of abandonment by and alienation from her parents with her solitary struggle to establish a new identity and find redemption through her writing. She is clearly sympathetic to Perry's situation. At the same time, although she acknowledges that Perry and her closest associates agreed to extensive interviews and provided access to personal materials, Drayton insists that this is not an "authorized" biography. Perry did not review or approve the book before publication; in fact, Drayton says to her knowledge Perry has never and most likely will never read the book.

As a fan of Perry's two best known mystery series, the Thomas and Charlotte Pitt series and the William Monk series, I found this book interesting, although not as vivid in recreating events and people as an earlier work, Anne Perry and the Crime of the Century, by New Zealand author and attorney Peter Graham. Graham also did a better job of presenting the story of the other girl convicted, Pauline Parker, the daughter of the murder victim. The biggest weakness in Drayton's book, I think, is that she gives short shrift to Pauline and her unhappy family.

Click HERE to read a New Zealand review of the book.

Click HERE to read a Canadian review, and HERE to read an American review.

Anne Perry and the Crime of the Century by Peter Graham

Anne Perry and the Crime of the Century by Peter Graham --- 341 pages

The true story of two teenage girls who murdered the mother of one of them in 1954 in Christchurch, New Zealand. It became New Zealand's most notorious crime and subsequent trial, at which the girls were both found guilty, even though they were minors at the time and despite the efforts of their legal counsels to convince the jury that the girls were mentally ill and needed psychiatric care, not punishment.

Peter Graham, a child at the time of the murder, became fascinated with the case when he qualified as a barrister in 1972 and went to Christchurch to work as an assistant to the man who had been part of the defense team for one of the girls, Juliet Hulme. There he had the opportunity to hear about the case firsthand from several barristers who had been engaged in both the defense and the prosecution of Juliet and her friend, Pauline Parker. It was Pauline's mother who the two girls bludgeoned to death, because they thought she was trying to separate them. He decided he would someday write a book about the crime, although it was over thirty years before he finally did so.

The murder and the subsequent trial became New Zealand's most famous crime. Public interest peaked when it became the subject of New Zealander Peter Jackson's first internationally acclaimed film, Heavenly Creatures, in 1994. At the time of the film's release there was intense media speculation about what had become of the two girls, who had been released from prison after five years and had subsequently dropped out of sight.

Pauline Parker, discovered living under a different name in a small town in Kent, was so unnerved by the renewal of public attention that she retreated to a remote island in Scotland, where she lives a reclusive life, refusing all contact with the outside world. Juliet Hulme also re-invented herself, but in a very different way. As a result of the Jackson film, the world learned that Juliet Hulme had become the best selling author of psychological murder mysteries set in Victorian and Edwardian England, Anne Perry. Also, coincidentally, living in Scotland, about one hundred miles away from her former friend. The two women, to the best of all knowledge, have never met since they left the courtroom as convicted murderers so many years ago.

For fans of true crime and fans of Anne Perry, this is a riveting tale.