The Search for Anne Perry Page 4
Sister Perry was converted to the Church while living in California twelve years ago. She has now returned to England where she lives in the country twenty miles from Lowestoft. She teaches Sunday School and holds the positions of Cultural Refinement Teacher in Relief Society, and the Cultural Arts Activities Adviser for the ward.32
No detail was given on her early life, childhood or education; no parents or partner were mentioned. It was as if Anne’s life began with her conversion in California, and this was not entirely a deception. Her private life in Darsham was centred on the Church.
The Relief Society for which she was a cultural refinement teacher was the official women’s organization of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It began in Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1842 when a group of women met in Sarah Kimball’s home to establish a society to sew clothes for the workmen building the Church’s local temple. The group fostered fellowship among women members, and after ‘the Relief Society was revealed to the Prophet Joseph Smith as a fundamental part of the gospel’ it became a symbol of female collaboration with the ecclesiastical arm of the Mormon Church.33 The society retained its conventional, rather saccharine views of women and motherhood. Meetings promoted liturgical and cultural education as well as service projects, but the core concern was the Mormon family. Marriage and homemaking were primary, and visiting teachers gave lessons in home craft and home management. The society’s motto is ‘Charity never faileth’, and it is to the credit of the Lowestoft branch that they found a place for two not-so-conventional women. Anne shut herself away and wrote at least eight hours a day, six days a week, about murder, rape, sexually transmitted diseases, and devil worship, and about strong women defining themselves in a male-dominated world. Meg was a single mother who surrounded herself with a hurly-burly of children and animals.
Despite their close friendship, the tension Anne radiated made Meg wonder if there was more to her than she was letting on. Her instincts were confirmed by Anne’s explosive reaction during their Bible studies to the story of King David sending Uriah the Hittite into battle so he could abscond with Uriah’s wife Bathsheba. Uriah carried the treacherous letter from David to Joab, the commander of his army, that said ‘set Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retreat from him, that he may be struck down and die’ (2 Samuel 11:15). To Meg, it seemed a strange thing to get upset over, given all the malevolence and glorious death, destruction and dry bones described in the Old Testament. But David’s betrayal of the principled Uriah, who refused comfort and rest while his fellow soldiers lived in tents, was one of the most conspicuous cases of white-collar crime in the annals of Judeo-Christian history. David used his power and authority to kill an honourable man so he could take his wife. The hypocrisy stung her. Anne’s universe was far from black and white over ethical issues. In fact, if she had a mandate at all it would be to encourage the acceptance of complexity and diversity, but she drew the line at the double standard that allowed David, an ancestor of Jesus Christ, to be depicted as one of the greatest leaders and most righteous holy men of the Bible — and be a murderer as well. The action might be robed in kingship and obscured by battle, but to Anne it was simply an act of violence motivated by lust. It might have made a perfect murder-mystery plot, and in Anne’s writing it would become one. But what justice was there in any theological perspective that condoned it?
And as it happened, God agreed. He sent the prophet Nathan to reprimand David. At the end of a tricky conversation about rich men and poor men and flocks of sheep, David saw and accepted his guilt and Nathan pronounced God’s punishment. David’s life was graciously spared, but the child he had conceived with Bathsheba in adultery was struck down with illness and died, and his remaining years were marred by war and the infidelity of his wives. Perhaps David found his consolation in the visionary and sometimes confessional poetry of the 73 psalms attributed to him:
I acknowledged my sin to You,
And my iniquity I have not hidden,
I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,’
And You forgave the iniquity of my sin. (Psalm 32: 5, 7)
The more Anne tried to explain to Meg how the story of David and Uriah made her feel, the more red-faced and upset she became. Then it just came out: Anne told Meg that when she was 15 she and a friend had murdered her friend’s mother. It was a tragic, stupid mistake that she would do anything to change. She had accepted her guilt and been punished for her crime, and now she just wanted to move on and write. The Mormon Church had helped her to forgive herself by promising God’s forgiveness, but it also made another miraculous pledge: it had guaranteed the entry into the Kingdom of Heaven of her victim. The assurance is that anyone who has been baptized and accepts the message of the Gospels is certain of salvation. If either one of these conditions has not been met in life, it can be conferred by proxy at a Mormon temple after death.
Although Anne’s confession to Meg was cathartic, she was also frightened of how it might change their friendship. Would Meg see her differently now? Could the trust between them survive? How would Meg feel about Anne being around her children? Her friend’s humane and reasonable reaction came as an immense relief to Anne. Meg thought about the woman she had come to love and admire, and knew that person had not changed. She felt she could not hold Anne responsible for the crazy, unhinged act of a teenager; she knew exactly how twisted and strange that time could be — ‘There but for the grace of God go I’. There was, though, a lingering sense of curiosity and she would have liked to ask more, but Anne was so visibly distressed that she could not.
The Cater Street Hangman, which came out in August 1979, Callander Square, published in early 1980, and Paragon Walk, put out in 1981, had almost immediate success. Alfred Hitchcock Magazine offered Anne the accolade that ‘she had no peer’; Ashbury Park Press called Callander Square ‘a novel that is immediately gripping and holds the reader’s interest to the final sentence’. Anne’s writing was described as ‘witty, shocking and compassionate’, and in May 1980 the Pasadena California Star News commented that ‘we could use more Inspector Pitt stories from Anne Perry. They are as enlightened as they are entertaining.’34 If there had not been so many failed attempts to get published, Anne might have been lured into the false belief that she was an overnight success.
Critics and readers alike relished her ‘juicy soap opera’ approach, along with her meticulous descriptions of dress and period. You could all but hear the swish of silk and smell the stench of the rookeries (London slums) in her writing. Anne could make both the workhouses and the grand houses come alive. A few mildly dissenting voices felt there was ‘rather too much gore and sin (black magic too) implausibly crammed into a single street’, but even that critic thought her ‘blend of social comedy and murder mystery seems to be firming up quite nicely indeed’.35
The triumphs continued. Janet Freer received notification from Hope Dellon that they had sold the Italian rights for The Cater Street Hangman to Mondadori for a flat fee of $2,683.20. Anne was thrilled. She had jumped the divide into a foreign language, and Italian was a language she had made a considerable effort to learn in her youth.
Now Anne felt she could not afford to stop. In fact, her punishing work ethic was accelerated by success. She worked on a fourth book in the Pitt series, and refined a structure for her religious allegory. The response to her outline by Nan Talese at Simon & Schuster was remarkably insightful:
With women in the Mormon Church now objecting to their silent role, with their wanting more authority and recognition within the Church, I think the main character could slowly come to realize her own need to be heard. Then COME, COME YE SAINTS could be the saga book intended, incorporating the story of the founding and persecution of the Mormon Church in America (a fascinating story!), but by making the heroine grow in her own assurance and awareness of what she can contribute to society and the Church, Ms Perry will have a book of splendid character and story as well as one that speaks to the conte
mporary mind … The problem with the proposal is there are so many characters, not one of whom really stood out, and the plot was so complex that it was very difficult to become involved.36
When Hope Dellon read the manuscript of ‘Come, Come Ye Saints’, she was similarly disposed, but less charitable. Anne’s Mormon novel, as she called it, ‘still doesn’t work for us; despite all the drama of the material, it seems to fall a bit flat, with heroes and villains too sharply delineated’.37
St Martin’s liked the balance of characters and trajectory of the Pitts, however, and wanted to keep these books on its list. For Paragon Walk, it had given Anne an advance of US$2,000, but both author and agent now found this insufficient in view of Anne’s success. The publisher’s new offer was ‘an advance of $3,500, payable half on signing and half on publication, against royalties of 7.5% on the first 5000 copies and 10% thereafter’.38 There was considerable debate, however, over how many Pitts St Martin’s was prepared to publish annually. Anne found the income from one book a year almost impossible to live on and she was capable of producing more, so Janet Freer began pushing for a commitment to two a year. ‘Nothing definite from Hope Dellon yet,’ she wrote to Nancy Colbert, a literary agent based in Canada; ‘her problem seems to be that Anne is too prolific (we should all have such problems) and I’ve spent hours on the phone to Fawcett, because books are just not to be found anywhere’.39
It was a classic case of a clash of interests. Janet Freer, acting for Anne, wanted to increase her client’s income and her own commission, but St Martin’s was reluctant to flood the market with Anne Perry titles. Janet Freer firmly believed ‘when Tom McCormack first bought CATER STREET he said he was thinking in terms of two books a year’.40
But 1981, with the publication of Paragon Walk and Resurrection Row, was the only year that this happened while Anne was with St Martin’s. Resurrection Row was one of Anne’s gorier journeys into the depths of the human psyche. The plot revolved around the digging up of month-old dead bodies and their deployment and discovery at various locations around London. Lord Augustus Fitzroy-Hammond’s cadaver makes its first appearance bent over the reins of a hansom cab.
Swathes of thick, sulphurous fog swirl around the theatre district as an excited audience pours out of The Mikado, a new Gilbert and Sullivan opera (and a favourite of Anne’s). Sir Desmond and Lady Gwendoline Cantlay have left their carriage at home, deciding instead to take a cab. Their elation from listening to wonderful music is rapidly dissipating in the bone-chilling evening air and they cannot wait to get home. Sir Desmond steps out onto the street to hail the first cab that looms out of the mist. The horse appears head-down and directionless, the driver is slumped in a high-collared greatcoat. As this aimless vehicle comes alongside, Sir Desmond pulls at the driver’s coat and is mortified as the figure spills onto the footpath at his feet. Asleep? Drunk, more like. But on closer inspection he finds the man is dead, and, worse still, has been so for a disgustingly long time. ‘Even more dreadful than the livid, puffy flesh was the sweet smell of putrefaction, and a crumble of earth in the hair.’
Lord Augustus is reburied but then exhumed once more to make another posthumous appearance at St Margaret’s Church, this time on a bench seat. Lord Augustus’s second wife, daughter and irascible, poisonous mother arrive early for the Sunday service. In living memory no one but a Fitzroy-Hammond has ever sat in the family pew, so the old lady is furious when she spots an interloper slouching in a coat with the collar flicked up. She raps her stick on the floor and demands that her daughter-in-law, Alicia, intervene. When Alicia touches the man he falls sideways, revealing Augustus’s decomposing face staring blindly up at her from the wooden bench.
Working down the social ladder, Lord Augustus’s death-defying performance is followed by those of William Wilberforce Porteous and Horrie Snipe. Resurrection Row’s storyline is shallower and more bizarre than Anne’s insights and rich, evocative writing deserve, but the detective novel is a popular form that easily encompasses a spot of strategic sensationalism. Once again Anne uses a palatable, appealing genre to deal with an uncomfortable subject. In this book it is the plight of the desperately poor, and especially the children, who make up a quarter of London’s population.
A liberal-minded political lobby group led by Somerset Carlisle and including Charlotte’s brother-in-law, Dominic Corde, is working to improve conditions for the poor. The latter is taken to see the squalor at Seven Dials, one of the city’s worst slums:
The room was large and low, gaslit; one stove burned in the corner. About fifty or sixty men, women, and children sat unpicking old clothes, sorting rags, and cutting and piecing them together again. The air was so fetid it caught in Dominic’s throat, and he had to concentrate to prevent himself from vomiting.
Child literacy and improving the lot of the poor would become constant themes in Anne’s writing.
Initially, Pitt considers whether Lord Augustus’s body might have been dug up by resurrectionists — grave robbers who sell bodies for medical research. This is unlikely, though, because cadavers are now legally available. Then he debates the idea of necromancers, Satanists or perhaps someone with a terrible grudge. Or is it a ruse to cover a killing? It is Dominic Corde who considers what motives might be strong enough to make someone commit murder, and here Anne gives her own insight: ‘Actually to kill someone, you have to care desperately over something, whether it is hate, fear, greed, or because they stand in the way between you and something you hunger for.’ Anne’s insights in her novels frequently offer vistas of her own life and psyche. In The Cater Street Hangman, Emily concludes, concerning her father’s infidelity, that ‘one can overlook one mistake, especially if it happened a long time ago. One cannot forget something that has been repeated over and over again.’ This is how Anne saw things. She took solace from never committing any kind of crime again, and by living an almost monastic life defined by Mormon law and driven by the will to achieve as a writer. Such an approach allowed her to see the murder she had committed as a distant, aberrant act, and to see the woman she had become as the person she really was.
In Paragon Walk, Emily muses on comments made by the evil-mouthed narcissist Fulbert Nash: ‘Perhaps they were old secrets he was referring to; everyone had something of which they were ashamed, or at least would very much prefer to keep from their neighbors.’ Anne had thought about murder from every angle, and she knew well its destructive potential. Her life had been dismantled by it. She knew that the secret she kept from all but a handful of people could blow her world apart.
In the summer months of 1981 Anne undertook her first author’s tour, to the United States and Canada in June and July. It was largely self-funded, but a small contribution did come from St Martin’s, which had booked her a two-night stay at New York’s Gramercy Park Hotel for the nights of 1–2 June. From there, she was to take a bus up to Toronto, where Nancy Colbert had booked her into the Windsor Arms in the centre of town. ‘How delightful that you are coming to Toronto!’ wrote Nancy in April 1981.41 It was in Toronto that Anne had the great pleasure of casually seeing a woman buy one of her books. The other ambition fulfilled on this trip was to ‘cover the Mormon trek to Salt Lake [City]’.42
For a publisher, Anne was a dream author. She was uncomplaining, ardent and enthusiastic about the detection genre and the stories she wrote, and had a remarkably empathetic, human touch. She approached her bookshop visits with the same focus she brought to her writing, signing books willingly and listening to those who wanted to talk about why her writing was important to them. She had the stamina for early morning starts, and because of her Mormon ‘dos and don’ts’ never suffered from hangovers after a night in the bar. When she spoke publicly she was highly articulate, and her moral world appealed to North American readers. Regardless of the degree of degeneracy, corruption and occasionally even decomposition she created or dug up, there was always an ethical solution reached via a pathway of principled decisions.
In the
United States and Canada, Anne’s Englishness had some of the exotic appeal contained in her books. Her readers loved the snobbish, abject Victorian England she re-created. This was the Old World many of their ancestors came to the New World to escape, and it was with some satisfaction that they read about the horrors of workhouse slums and an unimaginably turgid class system. A review of Paragon Walk, published in the San Diego Union not long before Anne left England for her tour, summed up why people bought her books and came to see her as a celebrity.
The Victorian era, with its surface virtues, submerged vices and wall-to-wall hypocrisy, is a fascinating field for the novelist and no one tells it better than Anne Perry … As usual, Perry captures the texture of the times and the flavor of its people expertly and provides us with a suspenseful thriller in the bargain.43
Anne’s North American trip was followed weeks later by a tour to Europe. She found the travel and meeting people energizing. Although she was reserved, Anne had a gregarious aspect to her personality that craved human interaction and social energy. Writing was a solitary and confining task and one she was accustomed to, but she relished the chance to break out of it for a while. ‘It took about 6 weeks after her return to England before she touched ground,’ wrote Janet Freer to Nancy Colbert in September 1981:
Now, of course, she can hardly wait to get back. I think what she was not expecting was that there would be people in North America who actually knew who she was and the fact that she was lionized came as quite a surprise, so coming home where nobody has even heard of her is something of a letdown. Trouble is, she wasn’t really there long enough to get used to [the downsides] with being a celebrity, so she hasn’t really come round to appreciating her contrasting Suffolk village.44
It was not long after this, however, that Anne came down to earth with a crash. The consequences of extensive travel on a limited budget were dire, and MBA always seemed to be chasing St Martin’s on her behalf for payments. She had waited and waited for the rest of her royalty advance for Resurrection Row. There were a number of letters between MBA and St Martin’s written on her behalf, including one from Janet Freer in June: ‘Please could you forward us the money immediately since Anne will be desperate for money when she gets back.’45 Anne’s income lurched between feast and famine. Lump-sum cheques came in, but payments were not consistent or regular like a salary, and St Martin’s insisted on keeping the 90-day stand-down period between manuscript submission and their taking up the option. Hope Dellon was unambiguous about their position: