The Perils Of Perry

When Anne Perry says that “courage, compassion and integrity are the three greatest virtues,” there isn’t much doubt she’s talking about the importance of these qualities in her own life.

Perry is the internationally known author of 20 Victorian mysteries, praised by critics and fans for their historical accuracy, attention to detail and explorations of the nuances of life in England when the sun never set on the Empire. The British-born author has been touring to promote her newest novel featuring Thomas and Charlotte Pitt, “Traitors Gate” and the paperback of the previous Pitt story, “The Hyde Park Headsman.”

But as she travels the country, she’s also squarely facing questions about the storm of publicity that broke last fall when a reporter revealed Perry was imprisoned in New Zealand 40 years ago for helping a young girlfriend commit murder.

“I really never thought it would come out,” says Perry, a tall and graceful 56-year-old. “I thought that after so long nobody would know or care about a couple of girls on the other side of the world. I was wrong. Now, I want to encourage others who fall flat on their faces to pick themselves up and never give up on themselves or anyone else. So often, young people who make a mistake are written off. There is redemption.”

Perry’s story, the inspiration for Peter Jackson’s film “Heavenly Creatures,” has been in all the major U.S. media. Most of the stories have been sympathetic, but she’s feeling bruised over what she describes as a mean-spirited article by John Darnton in the New York Times.

“It was an awful piece,” she says. “The writer kept harping on the fact I can’t remember the crime. Why would I want to remember?

“When you pay, you put it behind you. Repentance means living life as best you can. He wrote about how there were two Jaguars in my driveway. He didn’t say we’d had a good laugh about the fact that those cars are 9 and 16 years old.

“He made it seem as though I’m living the high life, but out of this whole thing (publicity about the crime) I’ve only made 100 pounds (about $150). That was paid by a television station who photographed my house during an interview, and I gave that money to a woman with young children who needs household help.”

In Darnton’s piece, Perry comes off as cold and unfeeling. She’s not; she’s pleasant, warm, interesting.

In the middle of a description of Victorian women’s fashions, for instance, she stretches in her chair and says, “Everything then was so elegant. I’d like to dress like that for a couple of days and come slowly down a winding staircase wearing a dress very slim down here (gesturing with both hands toward her hips), with a big, big hat.”

Perry was born Juliet Hulme in London in 1938, the year Hitler began his assault on Europe. Her father was a physicist and college administrator, her mother a schoolteacher.

“My mother, who lives a mile from me, is a woman of immense courage,” Perry says. “During the war she had breast surgery, my little brother was 6 months old, and I was not well. With her arm in a sling, she had to say goodbye to my father, who was traveling.

“We lived near an arsenal and we were bombed during most of the blitz. Almost every night we ran to the shelter in our back yard. I can still smell the damp earth and feel the cold.”

When Perry was 8, she developed chest complications, and the family moved to the friendlier climate of New Zealand.

It was during her confinement in a sanitarium for tuberculosis that Perry became good friends with schoolmate Pauline Parker. When the Perrys decided to leave the country, they offered to take Pauline with them, but Pauline’s mother refused. So, the 15-year-old girls decided to kill the woman.

Perry says she was under the influence of a drug, since withdrawn from the market, that impaired her judgment and that she remembers nothing about who hit the woman repeatedly with a brick. She refuses to see the movie but is especially angry at the film’s portrayal of a sexual relationship between her and Pauline, whom she hasn’t seen since their sensational trial in 1954.

Perry served 5 years at New Zealand’s maximum-security prison, incarcerated with women who’d been convicted of everything from performing abortions and prostitution to theft, embezzlement and crimes of violence.

She was 21 when she was released, and she returned to her family in the Northumberland area of England. In some ways, she felt as though she’d had no childhood because she’d been ill from 13 to 15 and then in prison.

“It was hard to get used to living in the outside world, and I was socially awkward,” she recalls. “But I was pretty well read, and I’d passed university entrance examinations in English, Latin, history and geography.”

Taking her stepfather’s name, Perry, she held a variety of jobs in retail selling, fashion and as an airline hostess. By 1967, she’d decided the United States held her future and got a job as a nanny.

She was in California when neighbors introduced her to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. With the Mormons, the young woman who was “basically raised agnostic” had found her spiritual home.

Free will and personal responsibility are themes that surface often in Perry’s conversation and in her novels, and these are qualities that drew her to the Mormon faith.

“Most Christian churches teach that the fall from Eden - the fall from innocence - was a tragedy and we are seeking to get back to that state,” she explains. “Mormons believe knowledge between good and evil is a necessity, that the purpose of life is not to get back to innocence but to progress until we know the difference between bitter and sweet and choose the sweet, the good, out of that knowledge.”

She links her faith to her own past in a simple way:

“Christ is the son of God and redeemer of this world. Because of the life He led, it is possible for us to repent and start over. I did that. I believe you have to understand why what you did was wrong, not do it or anything else like it again, and you have to forgive others.”

When Perry left her nanny job, she took all her possessions on a bus to Bakersfield, Calif., where Mormons Edmund and Peggy Welles made her one of their family. She still considers their home her American base.

By 1972 Perry had returned to England, and it was a conversation with her stepfather that finally set her to writing mysteries.

“I’d been writing steadily, mostly historical novels with plots that were in shambles,” she says with amusement. “That’s why I succeeded with mysteries. They forced me to write a proper plot structure instead of getting sidetracked on research that interested me but didn’t interest the reader.

“My stepfather had a theory about who Jack the Ripper was. I wasn’t interested in that, but I was interested in what happens to people under intense pressure, how they discover all the things they’d rather not know about themselves and others.”

Her exploration of how Victorians in a middle-class London neighborhood behave after a series of murders was the basis for her first Pitt mystery, “The Cater Street Hangman,” published in 1978.

Since then, she’s written 15 mysteries about Police Inspector Pitt and his smart wife, Charlotte, which explore timeless topics such as spouse and child abuse, back-street abortion, women’s rights, and incest.

Perry’s other five books, set in the 1850s, center on private investigator William Monk and his friend Hester Latterley, a nurse who served in the Crimea.

Perry’s Inspector Monk books, the first of which came out in 1990, are darker than the Pitt stories because Monk suffers from amnesia and his condition allows Perry to explore responsibilities, especially when the person can’t remember what happened. Although she doesn’t say so, there seems little doubt Inspector Monk is not far removed from Anne Perry, who can’t remember bricks descending on a woman’s skull years ago.

Although it took Perry 10 books to earn enough money to support herself, she’s recently signed a $1 million contract for eight books over three years, alternating Pitt and Monk stories.

She’ll write those stories in her stone house, the shell of which was built in 1813, in the village of Portmahomack, Scotland. When she isn’t working, she walks her three dogs, and in the evenings “I like to put my feet up and knit while I watch TV.”

She says her family, and the people in the village, have been wonderfully supportive since the news of her imprisonment came out. When a couple of reporters went door to door “trying to dig up dirt” about her, nobody would speak to them.

Perry’s labor of love is her forthcoming fantasy, centered on a woman in an alternative world who goes on a long and powerful spiritual journey to discover that “every human being is a child of God.”

Is this Anne Perry’s soul story?

“It’s a spiritual biography,” she replies, a smile lighting her face. “It’s the closest I get to writing from the heart.”

MEMO: This is a siedbar that appeared with the story:

Anne Perry’s mysteries “The Cater Street Hangman” “Callander Square” “Paragon Walk” “Resurrection Row” “Bluegate Fields” “Rutland Place” “Death in the Devil’s Acre” “Cardington Crescent” “Silence in Hanover Square” “Bethlehem Road” “Highgate Rise” “Belgrave Square” “Farriers’ Lane” “The Hyde Park Headsman” “Traitors Gate”

Featuring Inspector Monk and Hester Latterley: “The Face of a Stranger” “A Dangerous Mourning” “Defend and Betray” “A Sudden, Fearful Death” “The Sins of the Wolf”