Anne Perry, who has died aged 84, was a writer of historical detective fiction whose books sold in the tens of millions.
espite her success, she never shook off the stigma of having been convicted — at age 15 — of the cold-blooded murder of her best friend’s mother. The scandal was later dramatised by Peter Jackson in his 1994 film Heavenly Creatures, with her character played by Kate Winslet.
Perry’s two series of novels were both set in Victorian London, one featuring Inspector Thomas Pitt and his upper-crust wife Charlotte, the other centring on an amnesiac called Chief Inspector William Monk.
In both series, Perry concerned herself with moral dilemmas and questions of reputation.
She sold more than 25 million books worldwide — most of them in the US and France, where she was better known than in her UK homeland.
The first of her 32 Pitt novels, The Cater Street Hangman (1979), was made into a television drama. Most drew their titles from fictional London locations.
She introduced her second series protagonist, William Monk, a darker character than Pitt, in The Face of a Stranger (1990). Her most recent Monk novel, the 24th in the series, was Dark Tide Rising (2018).
In 2003 Anne Perry launched a third series of novels, set during World War I. She also diversified into writing novellas on Christmas themes, as well as titles aimed at younger readers.
Before becoming a full-time writer, Perry worked as an airline stewardess and as a ship’s purser, and in her 20s, during a five-year spell in southern California, managed a furniture store in Beverly Hills.
The daughter of a physicist at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, Perry was born Juliet Marion Hulme on October 28, 1938 in Blackheath, south-east London. A bookish, sickly girl, she moved to the Bahamas to live with family friends after she contracted tuberculosis.
They in turn moved to a private island off New Zealand and when her father was appointed rector of the University of New Zealand in 1948, she joined Christchurch Girls’ High School, where she met Pauline Parker.
Theirs was an intense friendship.
The Parkers were not as wealthy as the Hulmes, and took in lodgers, but the girls became inseparable, with one contemporary recalling they shared what was known in schoolgirl parlance as “a pash”, though they always denied the relationship was sexual.
When her parents announced that they were divorcing and Juliet would return to England with her father, she and Pauline Parker were inconsolable, but Pauline’s mother refused to allow her daughter to travel back to Britain with her friend. Both girls began to plan Honorah Parker’s murder.
On June 22 1954, Juliet and Pauline stuffed a brick into a stocking, lured her to a lonely park — and together bludgeoned her to death, becoming, as newspapers of the time put it, “gymslip murderers”, whose youth alone saved them from the gallows.
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“It was violent and it was quick,” Anne Perry asserted in 2002.
In fact Honorah Parker was battered brutally and methodically around the head and her face beaten to a purple pulp. The coroner recorded 45 separate head wounds.
The girls initially claimed Mrs Parker had fallen. But Pauline’s diary made clear that the murder had been carefully premeditated.
“We discussed our plans for moidering [sic] mother and made them a little clearer,” she noted.
“Juliet rang and we decided to use a rock in a stocking rather than a sandbag. We discussed the moider fully…”
The convicted pair were sent to separate prisons and ordered never to communicate again. Juliet was incarcerated at Mount Eden prison in Auckland, then the most violent jail in the southern hemisphere.
For the first three months she was kept in solitary confinement, where she accepted her guilt and blamed her actions on drugs she was taking for her tuberculosis.
In 1959 — five and a half years after she was imprisoned — she was released aged 21 and given a new identity by the NZ authorities to conceal her past. After returning to England, Anne Perry (as she had become) then moved to LA. She worked in a variety of jobs before turning to writing.
As a successful novelist, Perry — who was unmarried — lived in a luxuriously converted barn in the Scottish fishing village of Portmahomack. In 1994 her past was revealed in the film Heavenly Creatures, in which the teenage killers were depicted as budding lesbian lovers.
“It seemed so unfair,” she told The Guardian nine years later.
“Everything I had worked to achieve as a decent member of society was threatened. And once again my life was being interpreted by someone else.
"It had happened in court when, as a minor, I wasn’t allowed to speak and I heard all these lies being told. And now there was a film, but nobody had bothered to talk to me.
“I knew nothing about the film until the day before release," she said. “I thought that it might kill my mother and my life would fall apart.”
Instead, she was surprised to find how “decent and compassionate” people could be.
“Not a single friend has gone,” she said with gratitude.
A Mormon for more than 40 years, Perry returned to California 2015, describing her move as presenting her with “immeasurably greater opportunities for work”.