The Search for Anne Perry

by Joanne Drayton

  Stolid, steady Darsham was cultural whiplash after Los Angeles. Her winterless Californian life was swapped for four distinct seasons, at least one of which brought driving wind, rain and sometimes snow to a rustic residence that never completely excluded the weather. The thick walls were damp and full of holes, the plumbing and wiring precarious, there were no stairs, mice rustled and squeaked audibly in the thatched roof, and you could send a cricket ball from one corner of the room to the other simply by placing it on the floor — it would be ‘travelling at quite a speed by the time it got diagonally across’.9 She camped on-site for months, spending her nights in a sleeping bag and doing most of the renovations herself. Fox Cottages was far from perfect, but it was hers, and so was the meagre unearned living that accompanied it.

  Los Angeles had enchanted Anne as a child, and later she had loved it for its gaiety, its licence, its anonymity — and for its crazy, irrational investment in the American dream — but it was not conducive to writing. In five years she had composed just a few short pieces from ideas that had never taken root. In Darsham she could write for the best part of the day and do part-time and occasional work to eke out her allowance. This, she felt, was her last chance, and she was determined to take it.

  Ironically, for someone who treasured anonymity, Anne was a conspicuous newcomer in this out-of-the-way place. A globe-trotting ex-Londoner, with precise upper-class diction and arresting good looks, she stood out in Darsham. At 34, she could turn heads with her elegant, long-legged gait and thick, rich, shoulder-length auburn hair. Her features, if not refined enough to be those of a great beauty, were made inconsequential by her eyes. Grey-blue, aquamarine, they changed in colour like the sea, and they could pierce a person with their astuteness while remaining fathomless.

  And then there was her manner. Trivial conversations either made her glaze over or try too hard to appear interested. On the other hand, she was apt to turn a casual chat into a high-flying philosophical discussion. Intense, intelligent and covetous of brilliant facts, she stashed away historical information and aphorisms to bring out later in clever conversation. She was widely read, with a disarming propensity to quote from memory unnaturally long swathes of GK Chesterton, James Elroy Flecker, Rupert Brooke and Shakespeare. Her capacity to judge the moment and the audience was not always perfect, though.

  If Anne Perry was a little aloof, sometimes distant even, away in her imagination, she was nonetheless sincere. But it was a larger-than-life sincerity, bigger than any normal situation required. If she had shared more of herself with people, they would have seen that her earnestness was consciously adopted and was galvanized by pain.

  There was something fleet of foot and fearful about her. She never talked about her past or opened up about the stockpile of childhood memories that form such an important part of friendship. A direct question about her background could freeze her like a deer, before she bolted under the cover of some vague response. She was more than just different; she was downright mysterious. But this was accepted.

  Perhaps Anne Perry might have been more of a known quantity if she had not been a Mormon in traditionally Church of England Darsham. She arrived in the village with her community of Latter-Day Saints close by. In fact, they lived and worshipped at Lowestoft, just a few miles up the East Suffolk line. And the Mormon Church supported Anne again when she moved to Darsham: living proof that every Mormon soul counted.

  In fact, the Mormon Church in East Anglia had been anxiously counting souls since its shaky beginnings in the 1840s, when its progenitor and great patriarch, Thomas Price Smith — a short, stocky, zealous man who walked 112 kilometres between villages and slept rough in all weathers in barns and under trees — began spreading the word. He was a fervent campaigner for God, but God was just as ambitious for him.

  Thomas Smith climbed both the earthly and the sectarian ladders of success, beginning as a poor farm labourer earning just 10s to £1 a week, and finishing as a wealthy and cherished father of the Mormon Church in Utah. After a short time, in his early twenties, as a labourer in Norfolk, Smith became a preacher in the Wesleyan Church. Not long after his wife died in 1835, he broke away from the Wesleyans, taking 550 members of the congregation with him to form the United Brethren. In 1840 he encountered the Church of the Latter-Day Saints and led enormous numbers of the United Brethren to convert to Mormonism.

  This may seem an unbroken, almost corporate, rise to glory, but it was not without its setbacks. As Ron Larter has written in his biography of Smith, his ‘effort to take the restored gospel to virgin grounds … was beset with personal challenges, physical suffering and emotional anguish’. His wife died, as did some of his children, and there was an unsettling degree of local hatred towards this upstart sect. The progress of Smith’s church was jealously watched by the ministers of other denominations. He was accused of being a false prophet, a fake turned flock-rustler, a stealer of souls. There was suspicion and hostility, too, from other laities. Crusading zealots from ‘true churches’ took delight in disturbing the Mormon peace. ‘Meetings were sometimes disrupted with banging, bell ringing, rattling tin kettles, jeering and shouting. Stones were thrown at the door of … meeting places and small riots rose up.’10

  But the Saints marched on, and so did Thomas Smith, to Utah in 1851. It is out of this history that the Mormon Church at Lowestoft sprang. And it was here that Anne found sanctuary and a spiritual home.

  The port and resort town of Lowestoft is the easternmost point in the United Kingdom. Its name, tempered over time, comes originally from marauding Vikings, for whom this coast was their first sight of land. And while the sea has brought foes, it has also nurtured livelihoods. The fishing industry was a huge employer, and, even after those jobs declined, its sandy beaches brought tourists; and beneath its waters, in the seabed, was the hidden treasure of North Sea oil.

  However, it was not fishing, tourism or oil, but the naval base that brought Invergordon-born Meg MacDonald to Lowestoft. She was following her husband, and the journey — first to Devon, then to the open sunlit lowlands of Suffolk — was something of an escape from the grey, dour intensity of the Scottish Highlands, her adventure having begun when she left her working-class family home at the age of 17. Meg was pretty, with blonde hair and large blue eyes, and had a generous, forthright personality that was appealing and could be charismatic.

  In spite of a hole in her heart and other congenital health problems, she married young and had five children in quick succession. But the sudden, unexplained death of her third child, Peter, when he was just a few months old, tore her apart. She could not cope with the cruelty of it, and her husband had no answers. They fought, argued and became strangers. Meg MacDonald would find the answers she sought in the beliefs of the Mormon Church, and there she met Anne. In many respects they could not have been more different, yet they shared an essential need to cope with grief, and to find a friend.

  Anne wrote relentlessly. It was something she felt compelled to do, and the process so consumed her and filled her imagination that she barely noticed the days and the seasons roll by. She wrote manuscript after manuscript. There was one that recreated early medieval England using Arthurian legend; there were stories about the Crusades, the English Civil War, the French Revolution; there was a science-fiction thriller, and an allegorical fantasy that kept shape-shifting in various incarnations between her head and the page.

  This last was a religious allegory about the journey of the spirit. She forced it into the fantasy genre, but because it was really a philosophical, emblematic tract containing the ethos and beliefs of the Mormon Church, it refused to gel as a piece of fiction. In fact, nothing gelled. She received one rejection slip after another. Each time a publisher’s letter arrived thanking her for sending them her manuscript and regretfully declining it, the disappointment was numbing. She would telephone her mother and stepfather for consolation.

  The other thing that kept her going was her faith. Deeply embedded in Mormonism is
the buttressing puritan belief that good things will come to those who work for them, and that rewards will materialize in God’s good time. So she worked on. Two things gave God a helping hand, or perhaps they were part of His mysterious plan. A repeated criticism from publishers was Anne’s lack of a good plot. The writing was rich and sensual, and the characters often evocative and convincing, but the plots were flabby, ill-defined and endless. The solution, which came from her stepfather, was astonishingly simple: ‘Why don’t you write a murder mystery set in the time of Jack the Ripper?’

  The Ripper story had fascinated people the world over since 1888 with its entrée into the macabre mind of a murderer and the compulsions of serial killing — and the fact that the identity of the killer remained undiscovered. Then there was the potential for nineteenth-century costuming, the Victorian detail and the romantic allure of the period: it was a perfect fit for a history buff like Anne. But it was the plot-trimming strictures of the detective form that Bill recommended which would give crucial definition and shape to her writing.

  Had she not been in tiny Darsham, Anne might have missed the second thing that changed her life. Writing was isolating her, but her absent-minded detachment from ordinary village life was no mystery for Maggie Elliot, a writer who had moved in next door. She understood the loneliness, the dedication it took to write, and the deep depression that followed rejection. She made a suggestion. Anne had been making her own approaches to publishers, but Maggie knew of a very good literary agency in London. Why didn’t she approach them? So, in late January 1977, Anne penned her first letter to Diana Tyler, the senior partner of MBA Literary Agents Ltd:

  I enclose herewith the manuscript of a science-fiction/thriller novel which I hope you will consider handling on my behalf. I have your name from Maggie Elliot, who is my next-door neighbour; I believe she is writing to you under separate cover. I look forward to hearing from you favourably, but if you are unable to handle it, please return it to me at the above address.11

  She was accustomed to disappointment and did not expect much. The answer that came back was mildly reassuring, her first ray of hope. Under instruction from Diana Tyler, Anne’s case was picked up by Canadian-born Janet Freer, a young writer who was making ends meet by doing agency work. ‘Let me say at the outset that I do think it needs cutting,’ Janet wrote back:

  but on the other hand, I enjoyed it and feel that it is certainly publishable. I am very much in two minds as to whether it would go better as a thriller or a Science Fiction novel. Instinctively, I feel it is more a thriller, because the Science Fiction element isn’t really all that strong.12

  Janet Freer resolved to send Anne’s manuscript to Elizabeth M Walter, the Crime Club editor at Collins.

  Hopeful now of making progress, Anne worked on and completed a new project that was the incarnation of Bill’s good advice. The relationship with MBA was still new and formal. ‘Dear Mrs Tyler,’ Anne wrote on 1 June 1977, ‘I enclose the manuscript of another thriller, this time late Victorian, with quite a bit of romance in it. I hope you will also feel able to handle this.’13 MBA liked it and was quick to move. Janet Freer telephoned Anne, full of positive comments. ‘Dear Ms Freer,’ Anne wrote in response, ‘Thank you for your telephone call today, it encouraged me greatly and I feel like working hard again.’14

  This second manuscript that Anne Perry submitted to MBA was The Cater Street Hangman. ‘I don’t have a character unless I have a face for them,’ Anne has said.15 She might almost have been looking in a full-length mirror when she found the face and physical appearance of Charlotte Ellison. In Charlotte’s long auburn hair, grey-blue eyes, pale skin, tall statuesque figure, and ample and often proudly displayed bust there is more than something of a match for Anne.

  Thomas Pitt is another matter. On his visits to the home of the upper-class Ellison family in Cater Street, Charlotte eyes him sideways with the same contempt Anne might well have felt. ‘He came into the morning room, filling the doorway, coat flapping, hair untidy as always. His affability irritated Charlotte almost beyond bearing.’ His tatty scarf is wound once too often around his neck, and his pockets bulge with a provision kit of essential detection hardware that includes a length of string and two marbles. Pitt is from the wrong side of the tracks, or rather the estate, because his father is a gamekeeper — and one unjustly accused of poaching estate game and deported to Australia.

  This history provides Pitt with two things: a posh accent because he has been educated with the son of the house, and a drive to right injustice. It was an ideal combination, perhaps, for an ambitious working-class man in a late Victorian English police force that was changing from a hierarchy dictated by nepotism and privilege to a professional organization.

  Anne had her two main characters, and she would set her story in London and build her plot around a murder within a family. The family is Charlotte Ellison’s, and the victim is her older sister, Sarah. The Ellison household is ruled over by Charlotte’s papa, Edward, a true Victorian patriarch. She can steal only glimpses of the newspaper, because it is considered inappropriate reading for a young lady. This means she must either flout the house rules by appealing to Dominic, Sarah’s husband, or discreetly slip into Maddock’s pantry and read the newspaper there.

  The news, as always, is terrible. It is 20 April 1881 and Benjamin Disraeli has just died: ‘Her first thought was to wonder how Mr. Gladstone felt. Did he feel any sense of loss? Was a great enemy as much a part of a man’s life as a great friend? Surely it must be. It must be the cross thread in the fabric of emotions.’ Anne Perry opens with this powerful reflection on friends and enemies, and continues throughout the novel to make searching and profound comments about human behaviour. She explores power and sexual inequality, incisively giving the most misogynistic lines to the women who police patriarchal boundaries. Class difference and poverty, and lack of education and opportunity are considered, too. She shows how greed and callousness may cause human deprivation, but also how this is maintained by those who turn their backs or live in unfeeling ignorance.

  Anne is most cuttingly critical, however, of the hypocrisy of established religion. There are few characters more abhorrent than the pompous Reverend Prebble, who is called on to minister to grief-stricken friends and family after a series of apparently random garrottings of young women whose flesh and clothes are ripped in a sexually perverse manner. Prebble, who believes that women and sexuality are evil, is callous and inhumane. His poor wife, Martha, convinced by his fundamentalist reading of Genesis, is filled with self-loathing and hatred.

  Initially, the murderer selects victims from the downstairs staff, then from among the daughters of gentry, including Sarah. Her death catapults the Ellisons into a new world of revelation and suspicion. Pitt’s investigations uncover secrets that will leave no one unscarred. It is an agonizing process, and Pitt feels for the family.

  In conducting his interviews, he finds himself increasingly attracted to the independent and forthright Charlotte, who is waking up from a protracted infatuation with her brother-in-law, Dominic. Suddenly Charlotte finds herself suspecting Dominic and even her father of her sister’s murder. At first she openly despises Pitt, but she comes to realize that his slovenly working-class persona is only superficial, and that it is the person inside who counts. This epiphany is the beginning of her maturing as a character. And at the end of the novel she agrees to jump the social divide and join Pitt in penury as the wife of a detective.

  After sending all Anne’s manuscripts to Thomas J McCormack, president of St Martin’s Press in New York, Janet Freer received this response in October 1977:

  I confess that in going through the other scripts here we have not yet come across any that ignite us the way that CATER STREET did. Perhaps rather than keep you and the author waiting any longer, we should simply make an offer on CATER STREET alone at this stage.16

  He suggested an advance of US$3,000, 7.5 per cent for the first 5,000 copies and 10 per cent thereafter, and
an 80/20 split; St Martin’s would hold world rights. He offered to send a contract immediately.

  His message of confirmation was warm and reassuring:

  I’m sorry to say that THE CATER STREET HANGMAN remains the only one on which we can offer a contract. This is not nearly so discouraging to us as it sounds because I realize that CATER STREET was the last manuscript that Ms. Perry completed and I like to think two things: First, that the writing of the earlier manuscripts taught her her craft and the second, that she has also discovered her genre — and possibly the historical era at which she will be most comfortable.17

  Janet Freer was delighted. She was so relieved that Anne had a contract at last that she did not think to quibble over terms. She had already discussed with Anne the unlikelihood of St Martin’s taking the other scripts, so neither of them was surprised by the outcome. Besides, Tom McCormack was right: Anne had honed her skills on her failures and she had found her genre. Janet Freer asked him to return the rejected manuscripts, and added enthusiastically: ‘Anne has reached Chapter 4 on the sequel to CATER STREET and is talking of completion around the end of February … she is using the same characters as in the first book and she tells me she has ideas for three or four more.’18

  Before the book came out, Anne supplied St Martin’s with an author photograph for the back cover. She had some shots taken professionally at a studio. It was a new experience, she was anxious, and the photographer did nothing to make her feel at ease. While she waited for the pictures, she saw a film on television about Edith Cavell, the English nurse who was executed by a German firing squad in the First World War.