The Search for Anne Perry

by Joanne Drayton

  We feel it’s essential to retain the wording from the PARAGON WALK agreement that gives us a period of ninety days after acceptance of the final manuscript before we have to exercise our option. As we all know Anne is an extremely prolific writer, and we need at least the breathing space between submissions that the PARAGON WALK contract provides.46

  This arrangement suited St Martin’s, but every time Anne packaged up a manuscript to send to Janet Freer, she knew she not only had to allow time for Janet to edit and work on it before forwarding it to St Martin’s, but also for a further anxious 90-day wait before she knew whether it would be published. Writing for her was not a fulfilling hobby: it meant her economic survival. If St Martin’s chose not to publish, she was in serious trouble. Then there was the issue of the world rights. The immediate, if relative, success of Anne’s books suggested she might become something of a phenomenon. Certainly her standard was consistently high and her rate of production prodigious. There was now an uncomfortable realization at MBA that they were missing out on money and the opportunity to control the global expansion of Anne’s books. ‘I’m afraid I’ve made one bad, basic mistake about Anne Perry,’ Janet Freer wrote to Nancy Colbert.

  I allowed St Martin’s Press world rights. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time, because Anne had written about ten previous books, none of which had found a publisher, and it was very much a take it or leave it situation with St Martin’s. What nobody could have possibly known at the time was that Charlotte would take off.47

  As a result, in March 1982, Janet Freer asked Nancy Colbert to help them find someone new. ‘Both Anne and I agree that it is, perhaps, about time that she and St Martin’s parted company … Anne has asked me to say that while she is in Canada she would welcome the opportunity for any promotional book signing or lecturing.’48 Janet herself was planning to return to Canada, and her departure from MBA would coincide nicely with Anne’s next trip.

  Two months later, in early May, Anne was settled in a tiny bedsit apartment on 303 Davenport Road, in the centre of Toronto. It was sunny, comfortable and five minutes’ walk from Nancy’s office and two doors away from where Janet was staying. ‘I am now roughly settled in and everything is going very well indeed!’ Anne wrote to Diana Tyler:

  I have met with the most extraordinary kindness all over the place! I have been lent: sheets, pillows & blankets by Nancy: tape recorder & radio by the man who is head of public communications for the Church for the whole of Canada.49

  Anne loved her time in Toronto, and it began to feel like a second home.

  When she returned to England she was introduced to Christine Park, her new agent at MBA. ‘It really was a pleasure to meet you today,’ Anne wrote in early October. ‘I am most encouraged and will get to the Revolution as soon as I can — I hope within 2 or 3 weeks.’50 Anne was working on manuscript revisions of the next Pitt novel, Rutland Place, and a stand-alone historical novel set during the French Revolution. She had been mulling over the latter idea for some time, but her priority at this stage were her bread-and-butter novels. ‘I have now had a chance to go over the revised manuscript for RUTLAND PLACE,’ Hope Dellon wrote to her in November, ‘and I want to thank you for all your good work; I do think you have made the book considerably stronger.’51

  Anne’s setting for Rutland Place is a signature aspect of the series. As in her previous Pitts, the story is located at a specific site on the London A–Z, where a small community is closely connected in a matrix of relationships that incorporates the upstairs-and-downstairs strata of the grand houses, and usually stretches out to the slums. The murders, the suspects and the villains — plus more than a few red herrings and plenty of greed, ambition, lust, hatred and fear — are all contained within this topographical concentration.

  By narrowing the setting and confining the number of characters, Anne creates a world not unlike that of the English ‘cosy’. Her square, walk or place functions like a village within a metropolis. The ‘cosy’ form was defined in the work of such detective doyennes as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and, more recently, PD James. The trick with their stories, as with Anne’s, is to try to guess the perpetrator of the crime before the detective. The difference between Anne’s work and that of Golden Age crime fiction is that in the 1920s and 1930s there were limits to what society felt comfortable discussing. Protocols existed in life and in fiction, and some depravities were simply out of bounds for a popular novel. The criminal operated in the same moral paradigm as the detective. Reading a murder mystery with a port after a Sunday roast was more about solving an intellectual puzzle than venturing into the darkest reaches of the human psyche. Modern readers, however, demand stories that pierce institutional veneers and probe individual psycho-sexual behaviour.

  Rutland Place deals with the inflammatory subject of incest, which is possibly easier to cope with because of the historical frame. Although Anne’s books are set in the nineteenth century and the dress and demeanour of the characters separate them from present-day life, the issues she deals with have an authenticity that ensures they resonate with contemporary readers. If she had not managed this, she would probably never have been published. Stories involving major social taboos are difficult to tell.

  In Rutland Place, Charlotte’s mother, Caroline, is disturbed by the fact that she has lost a locket containing a picture of a man she admires who is not her husband. She feels perhaps it has been taken and that someone is watching her. This is the sad story of a Peeping Tom who meets an ugly end because what she discovers means she cannot be permitted to live.

  But it is in the deepening maturity and complexity of Pitt’s character that the novel offers its greatest satisfaction. Pitt is beginning to demonstrate an incisiveness and empathy that make him more sophisticated and compelling. Murder quickens his interest, but he also understands that it is an awful ‘double tragedy — not only for the victim and those who cared for her, but for the murderer also, and whoever loved or needed or pitied the tormented soul … [For] society was cruel; it seldom forgave, and it never, ever forgot.’ Pitt thinks his methodical way through the minutiae of investigation, but also through ethical issues and dilemmas that are sometimes Aristotelian.

  The backdrop to these activities is his socially unequal but loving marriage. It troubles him that he has brought his wife down in the world and altered her forever. ‘Now that she had moved from Cater Street and left her parents’ home,’ he thought:

  she had absorbed new beliefs … she had forgotten many assumptions that used to be natural to her as they still were to her parents. She had changed, and he was afraid that she had not realized how much — or that she had expected them to have changed also.

  The guilt he feels, and his perceptive understanding of Charlotte, adds another dimension to him as a sympathetic character. It is hard to imagine Lord Peter Wimsey, Albert Campion or Roderick Alleyn being as sensitive or attuned to their wives.

  II

  As usual, the manuscript for Rutland Place arrived in Watford for Marion to read. The scripts of Anne’s books were 500 double-spaced pages long, so proofing them was a minor marathon, but Marion was relieved to see her daughter had found her calling. Marion always checked the dedication page: Paragon Walk had been ‘for my mother’; Resurrection Row ‘to MEG for all her help’; and Rutland Place ‘with love to my father … [and] gratitude to the city of Toronto’. She was pleased with the unspecified dedication to herself, but concerned about Anne’s growing public profile.

  ‘Have you ever considered that you are perhaps being too adventure-some?’ she would say occasionally.52 There were publicity photographs of Anne in circulation and biographical snippets that might link her to the murder in New Zealand, such as the entry in the index of contemporary authors that gave her stepfather’s surname, her birth date and her mother’s name as Marion Perry (née Reavley). All this had the potential to cast the media spotlight once more on Anne, Bill, Marion and her ex-husband
, Henry — and the mere thought of this froze her to the core.53

  Marion recognized in the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt relationship something of her first marriage to Henry Hulme, but theirs had had the social inequality without being a union of souls. She was born Hilda Marion Reavley on 30 January 1912, in the village of Alnwick in Northumberland, and was raised in that self-possessed, straight-backed English sensibility that belongs not to place or financial standing, but to class. She had ancestors with a local manor house that dated back to the fifteenth century. Her father was a Cambridge-trained Presbyterian minister, and the life she led was one of perfect diction and style. She trained as a teacher, but was brought up for marriage and its attendant social rounds.

  By comparison, Henry Rainsford Hulme was the son of a trader, a Lancashire fine leather goods merchant. Born on 9 August 1908 in the village of Ormskirk, not far from Southport, he was a child of prodigious and electrifying intelligence. Educated at Manchester Grammar, he matriculated at the age of 13 with a scholarship to Cambridge, where he became a brilliant mathematician. He graduated with honours in mathematics from Gonville and Caius College in 1929, received his PhD in 1932, and went on to study for a year at the University of Leipzig under renowned quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg. From 1933 to 1938 he was a Fellow of Gonville and Caius, and from 1936 to 1938 he lectured in mathematics at the University of Liverpool.

  When the two met, Henry was tall and almost waif-like, with an absent-minded, bespectacled stare that was redeemed by his unexpectedly clever, offbeat sense of humour. Despite his tinder-dry manner, he had a social range that allowed him to be ribald in male company and erudite and refined at a conventional gathering. Hilda had the confidence he lacked. Glamorous and sophisticated, she was able to inculcate in him the correct behaviour and the right values, and introduce him to her set. She had the pedigree and he the intelligence, and when they married in 1937 it seemed a perfect pairing.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I

  In January 1983, Anne received the exciting news from Hope Dellon that the reprint rights for Rutland Place had been sold to Fawcett, which the previous year had been bought by Ballantine, a division of Random House, the biggest English-language general-trade book publisher in the world. Fawcett’s list was transferred to Ballantine Books and Fawcett became the official arm of Random House’s mass-market mystery programme. As a result, Anne was offered a new deal: an ‘advance of US$5000 against royalties of 8% to 125,000 and 10% thereafter’.1 Although this was promising, Nancy Colbert’s machinations in Canada to get another publisher had produced nothing. And, more seriously, a manuscript had gone missing.

  Anne was frantic, and her floor-pacing anxiety was transformed into a lingering sense of frustration when she discovered what had happened. The manuscript, which she had left with Nancy Colbert to look over before leaving Canada the previous August, had never been forwarded to St Martin’s Press. Nancy, acting as her agent, had held onto it with a view to soliciting new interest. She did not see this as a problem, as Hope Dellon had told her that the books were arriving at a rate they could hardly handle, anyway. The hiatus, however, was too long for Anne. It interrupted her cash flow and her momentum with St Martin’s. In March she sent a letter finishing their arrangement:

  I feel that the problem of communicating over such a great distance is making our working relationship too difficult to be happy for either of us, so after Bluegate Fields I would prefer to work directly through MBA in London, where we can speak to each other so easily on the telephone, and I can go in person for consultations from time to time. Thank you for the work you have done on Rutland Place, and for your personal friendship while I was in Toronto.2

  This did not end Anne’s difficulties, but it lessened the opportunity for mix-ups in the future. She was still precariously short of funds. There seemed no resolution to the problem of finding another publisher, so, taking up the reins as Anne’s principal agent once more, Christine Park set about improving her conditions with St Martin’s. She had three main strategies.

  In September she wrote to St Martin’s with the intention of increasing the availability of Anne’s books, especially in Canada where her popularity seemed to have taken off.

  I understand from Anne that Diana Cooper-Clark, who teaches English and Humanities at York University, Toronto, would like to include Anne’s work on this year’s syllabus but is being blocked by the lack of availability.3

  This was followed by another letter, sent the same month to Hope Dellon, tackling the matter of Anne’s upfront income. ‘[Anne] has always earned out her advance and at times done considerably better than this.’ Christine felt she needed more encouragement from the publisher, and she recommended an ‘increase in the advance for BLUEGATE FIELDS to $4,500’.4 Christine’s next move was more radical still. Anne had recently returned from a second self-funded promotional trip to the United States and Canada. While in New York she had met Hope Dellon and talked of launching a parallel detection series. She had returned to Darsham in ‘buoyant spirits’, believing Hope was as committed to the proposition as she was. As soon as she could, she sent Hope some exploratory writing. It was Christine’s job to follow up and close the deal.

  Anne is happy to do some more work on it, indeed whatever you suggest, but is very eager understandably to get this second series off the ground, using as you suggest a pseudonym. Also the next in the Charlotte series is in the office, let me know when you would be ready for me to send it over.5

  It was hard to see Hope Dellon’s response to their initiatives as anything other than negative. St Martin’s had no intention of reprinting hardcover editions of The Cater Street Hangman, now that the paperback was widely available through Fawcett. This had been explained in August, and St Martin’s had no intention of budging. Also, St Martin’s did not like anything that had been sent to them other than the Pitt titles. In January 1984, Hope Dellon turned down Anne’s latest historical manuscript, ‘Most Violent Ways’, and her new detection series with detectives Digby and Ridgeway. ‘I thought the idea of this series had considerable charm,’ Hope explained to Christine, ‘but I’m afraid the book didn’t quite work for us … In the end, we didn’t honestly feel we could launch the new series with the kind of enthusiasm it deserves.’6

  St Martin’s did increase the advance for Bluegate Fields by $500, but confirmation that it would publish Bluegate Fields arrived after the 90-day period had elapsed, and the advance was slow to arrive. Christine reminded Hope by letter that Anne was desperately short of money and requested she send the advance ‘with due speed’.7 When it arrived she forwarded it immediately. ‘Received the cheque today,’ Anne replied. ‘Very necessary — Thank you.’8

  Hopes for a second historical novel — the one set in the French Revolution — were also dashed, as were Christine’s efforts to find an English publisher. She sent out the Revolution manuscript, titled ‘Lower Than the Angels’, with reservations. ‘My own feeling is that it would need some re-working and re-shaping perhaps in the balance less detail and more story. But it is, finally, an intelligent and thoughtful book and it would be lovely if you felt it was something you could encourage.’9 But there was little encouragement for the manuscript or interest in publishing Anne in Britain.

  It was a difficult year for Anne. The stepfather she admired, Bill Perry, whose chronic bad health had brought her back to England, was now close to death. ‘He was a fine man. The last officer to leave Dunkirk, they say … he was one of the bravest men I ever met,’ she remembers.10 Anne never told anyone at MBA that Bill was her adopted rather than her natural father. She would not tell lies, but she left things deliberately unclear. Explaining the relationship and their surname might have exposed deep hurts and dangerous information. His death would leave a huge hole in her life. She was genuinely fond of him, and he was more of a soul mate and companion to her mother than any man had ever been, standing bravely by Marion through her most terrible moments.

  Diana Tyler worri
ed about the impact on Anne of Bill’s death. While Christine was away from the office she had fielded a telephone call from Anne that worried her. She left an explanatory note:

  Her father is very ill which is making life very depressing for her. On looking at the contract for BLUEGATE FIELDS I see that the second half of the payment has not arrived and I’ve written to St Martin’s accordingly (letter attached).11

  Anne’s spirits seemed so low that when the staff at MBA had not heard from her for an uncharacteristically long time, Christine wrote to Anne’s next-door neighbour, Maggie Elliot, in July:

  Just a short note from Diana Tyler and myself … We wondered if you would be good enough to give the agency a ring, just to reassure us that [Anne] is quite alright and nothing untoward has happened. One cannot help being a little concerned. Perhaps she is just away on holiday or there is some other very simple explanation.12

  Anne did prove to be away, with a friend and her children who were visiting from the United States, so this was reassuring, but MBA was still concerned and so was relieved when September brought some encouraging news. ‘The cheque for BLUEGATE FIELDS has arrived at last,’ Diana wrote, ‘which I’m sure will be a great comfort to you. I do hope things are a little better … and that there will be some good news soon.’13