Anne Perry, who has died aged 84, was a prolific and bestselling historical crime novelist whose own dramatic criminal history came to light 15 years after her first book was published.
Perry’s debut Victorian-era mystery, in which the Scotland Yard inspector Thomas Pitt finds both the killer and an upper-class wife, was published in 1979. By 1994 she had written 13 more Pitt novels, along with five in another series set 30 years earlier, starring the amnesiac private sleuth William Monk and his wife, Hester Latterly, a former nurse in the Crimean war.
Also in that year Peter Jackson’s movie Heavenly Creatures was released, starring Kate Winslet as Juliet Hulme, a 15-year-old who helped her friend Pauline Parker kill Parker’s mother, Honorah, in one of New Zealand’s most notorious murder cases. The girls, too young to be hanged, each served five-year sentences and had taken new identities after their release. Journalists soon discovered that Juliet was, in fact, Anne Perry, living quietly with her mother in Portmahomack, a small coastal village north of Inverness.
“I knew nothing about [the film] until the day before its release, and all I could think of was that my life would fall apart and it would kill my mother,” Perry said. She claimed to have cut off relationships rather than risk revealing her past; now she discovered after the revelations that “not a single friend was gone” – something that “surprised the hell out of me”. In addition, the publicity and notoriety, if anything, increased sales.
She went on to have more than 100 books published, including 32 novels in the Pitt series and another six about Thomas’s son Daniel; 24 Monk and Latterly novels, and 20 annual novellas with a Christmas theme. Her first world war series, No Graves As Yet, grew from a short story, Heroes, which won an Edgar award in 2000. In all, more than 26m copies of her books have been sold worldwide.
Perry – Juliet Hulme – was born just before the second world war in Blackheath, south-east London, while her father, Henry Hulme, was working at the Royal Observatory in nearby Greenwich. He had been a prize-winning physics student of Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge, and while teaching in Liverpool had met and married Hilda Reavley, the daughter of an Anglican clergyman. At the age of six Juliet suffered from tuberculosis; with her father away working in the US on the Manhattan Project and her mother suffering from depression after the birth of her younger brother, Jonathan, as well as shell-shock from the London blitz, Juliet was sent away to relatives in the north of England.
After the war she was fostered in the warmer climate of the Bahamas and then, after her father became rector of Canterbury University College at the University of New Zealand (now the University of Canterbury), she was placed in boarding school on New Zealand’s North Island before finally rejoining her parents in 1948.
Her friendship with Pauline Parker began at Christchurch girls’ high school; they were bonded by ill-health, as Pauline had suffered from osteomyelitis as a young girl and both were exempt from PE classes. Though from markedly different social backgrounds they created their own intense fantasy world in a friendship that Perry later characterised as “obsessive”.
When Juliet’s mother, by then a marriage counsellor, was found by her father in bed with a client, Walter Perry, her father sued for divorce and was awarded custody of the children. However, Juliet was then told that she would be taken to live with relatives in South Africa, rather than returning to Britain with her father and brother. Pauline convinced herself that if her own mother died, then she would be allowed to travel to live with Juliet in South Africa, and so the girls arranged to attack Honorah while they were walking in Victoria Park in Christchurch; they used a brick, hitting her dozens of times until she died.
As soon as Juliet was indicted, her father left New Zealand with her brother, while her mother remained, selling her possessions to pay for Juliet’s defence. The girls’ sentences forbade them ever to have contact with each other. When Juliet entered Mount Eden prison in Auckland, her mother and Walter Perry moved to Britain and eventually married, settling in Northumberland, far from her father, who was by then heading the British hydrogen bomb project at Aldermaston. After her release, Juliet renamed herself Anne Perry. She worked as an air stewardess and then a department store buyer in Newcastle upon Tyne, and for five years in Los Angeles as a property underwriter. She converted to Mormonism before joining her mother and stepfather in Northumberland.
In her childhood diaries she had dreamed of being a writer; after six years of rejection her first novel, The Cater Street Hangman, was published in 1979. Her books were invariably concerned with issues of social injustice, drawing to some extent on the experiences that led up to her own imprisonment. “As a minor I wasn’t allowed to speak, and I heard all those lies being told,” she said. “Nobody bothered to talk to me.” Detectives in her novels often give voice to those who are otherwise ignored.
Although she admitted her guilt, she felt wronged by what had happened to her as a teenager, including allegations in court of a lesbian affair with Parker, which she always denied. She rejected most requests for interviews, saying in 2002 that “I have no interest in gazing on other people’s misery.”
Perry moved to Los Angeles in 2017 to help sell her stories for television and films. She suffered a heart attack in 2022, from which she never recovered.
Her last novel, a Daniel Pitt mystery, was published a week before her death. In a 2006 interview with the Glasgow Herald, she asked: “Do you think the day will ever come when I am judged for my work alone? Will I ever be judged for what I am and not for what I was?”
She is survived by her brother, who had occasionally acted as her researcher.
• Anne Perry (Juliet Marion Hulme), novelist, born 28 October 1938; died 10 April 2023
