MURDERER. SHE WROTE.
A crime novelist with true grisly bona fides, Anne Perry has died aged 84. Perry worked her way through various mundane jobs before hitting it big with her series of Victorian detective novels. Her two most popular protagonists were Thomas Pitt and amnesiac William Monk, who had a combined 50+ novels between them.
This was all achieved in spite of a skeleton in her closet. One named Honorah Mary Parker. When Perry (then Juliet Hulme) was a teenager in New Zealand, she and best friend Pauline Parker were inseparable and indulged in a fantasy world. Hulme’s parents had separated and planned to send her to South Africa, which would split the besties apart. Hulme and Parker felt that Parker’s mother was the only obstacle standing in the way of them going to South Africa together, and bludgeoned her to death with a brick. The duo avoided the death penalty due to their young age, and instead both spent five years in prison.
Her teenage story was adapted into film with Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, in which Kate Winslet made her big screen debut playing the young Hulme. The movie’s popularity unveiled that Juliet Hulme and Anne Perry were one and the same, but given her subsequent decades of good behaviour her career was largely unimpeded. She continued to make a killing (on the bestsellers list that is) until her death, with her final books set to be released later this year. She was a unique for Here’s Who You Could Have Won, a team whose self-stated mission is “give DI interesting obits to write”, which was certainly achieved here!
Anne Perry
28 October 1938 – 10 April 2023, aged 84
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