The Search for Anne Perry

by Joanne Drayton

  On these weekends, they would sit around the cottage if it was wet and miserable outside, or, if it was fine, go on long walks together.

  We would talk about everything. She’d play me Mario Lanza records. We would talk about writing … it was almost like being teenagers again together … we would just really talk about everything.28

  Sometimes Anne came to London and met Meg at a restaurant close to the MBA office at 118 Tottenham Court Road. ‘Many thanks for a very happy and stimulating lunch; I hope your afternoon went off all right,’ wrote Meg to Anne in May.

  Meg lived with her English grandmother, and sometimes Anne would stay with them when she was caught in town or about to leave for an author tour of the United States, ‘because she couldn’t afford to stay anywhere else’. The fact that Meg’s grandmother fussed over Anne and ladled generous helpings of blackcurrant jam onto her toast in the morning was just fine, but Meg was horrified to find that ‘Nana had shown Anne my baby pictures, too, which definitely blurred the personal and professional’.

  In the early days they would occasionally meet up with Henry Hulme, who would take them out for lunch. ‘We always used to go to a place that had a good salad bar and good ice cream’, which was a ‘lifelong passion’ of Anne’s.

  We’d bring him up to date on how things were going with Anne’s writing, then he’d wait ’til she went to the loo, fix me with his piercing, pale blue eyes, and ask if I really felt optimistic about her career. I’d take a deep breath, because I felt that if we could just harness the power of Anne’s writing, she’d be successful. Then I’d say ‘Yes’. But it was always a scary moment, and I always felt that if I were wrong, I’d have him to face in the afterlife.29

  The highlights of their work together were the contracts they signed. After sending off a finished manuscript and waiting sometimes weeks longer than the three-month period, Meg would get on the telephone and ring St Martin’s. ‘Have you read it? Do you like it? Do you want to buy it?’30 St Martin’s would take a month or so more to make up its mind and come back to her with a ‘grudging offer’. Meg would negotiate the contract within ‘an inch of its life’. But in reality there was little room to move. St Martin’s refused to commission ahead, and needed to be chased up and courted at every stage, but Anne knew she was lucky to have found an Anglophile publisher in North America prepared to publish her work. Until there was an alternative to St Martin’s, there was little to bargain with.

  Meg was quick to explore any possibilities. She began by looking into the matter of world rights, hoping there might be some flexibility, but neither Diana nor John Parker was positive about her prospects. ‘Here as promised is the cheque for the St Martin’s royalties,’ Meg wrote to Anne in August.

  It’s a very depressing amount, especially since they’re keeping us waiting for the paperback money … I’ve discussed with Diana and John the possibility of asking St Martin’s to let us have the UK rights … I see their point, but all the same I’ve asked for a list of publishers [St Martin’s] have made submissions to — just to make sure they’re doing a proper job!31

  Meg’s next strategy materialized during a tea break in rehearsal for an orchestra she played in. She was halfway through a Bourbon cream when it hit her: the problem was Anne’s plots. ‘At that point [she] was writing one Victorian novel and one unpublishable historical novel a year.’32 The challenge was to tackle the way Anne structured the plots of the non-detective novels. So far as Meg knew, no one had sat down with Anne and given her detailed editorial notes about her writing. She explained her idea to Anne, who responded enthusiastically:

  Very good to talk to you — & to listen! Here is the chapter in which the Word is discovered & read — hope it moves you to tears — should have sent a Kleenex with it — in hope! Look forward to getting your notes so I can start with the re-work.33

  Unfortunately, the tears Meg shed in private were not always the sort Anne was expecting. With renewed hope Anne had resurrected her Mormon novel, with its gargantuan cast of characters, turgid morality and amorphous structure. To the staff at MBA it was the impossible project. For Meg it was the most dangerous part of dealing with ‘a horse called Sugar’.

  At Darsham, Anne’s time was greatly constrained by her work patterns. But there were visits from Meg Davis, and always the balance of Meg MacDonald’s family life if she needed it. ‘Meg Mac’s house at Lowestoft is a regular hospital ward! 5 of them ill’, Anne wrote to Meg Davis in December 1985. ‘Thanks for a lovely lot of conversation — & for trekking all the way out into the wilds!’34

  The MacDonalds were still in the council house, but by now far more had been done than just the garden and a spot of painting. When Meg’s ex-husband had inherited money from his mother, she wrote to him asking to borrow £1,000. With the money she put in new carpets, double-glazing, gas heaters and fires in all the rooms and fresh furniture. ‘We dolled the house up for his children, and when the year came up and he wrote me and said he wanted his money back’, Meg refused.35

  Towards the end of 1985, Anne began writing Cardington Crescent. After six novels, she once again set her murder in a family directly related to the Pitts. Lady Emily Ashworth, Charlotte’s sister, must have felt she was the unluckiest woman in London — first her sister Sarah murdered, and now, in Cardington Crescent, her beloved husband George falls victim. The story opens in the rambling ruins of St Mary’s churchyard in Bloomsbury. The rotund Mrs Ernestine Peabody has taken Clarence, her wheezing, wilful Pekingese, for a walk. He squeezes around a gate to relieve himself in the churchyard, only to discover a decomposing lump of human flesh wrapped in brown paper, tied up with string and dumped under a bush. The connection between Clarence’s grisly find and the Ashworths is one of the book’s compelling mysteries. Much of the rest of it is set in the elegant home of Eustace Marsh, located in salubrious Cardington Crescent.

  The cast includes: Emily and George; George’s great-aunt, Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould; George’s cousin-by-marriage Eustace, his slip of a daughter Tassie, his horrible mother Lavinia Marsh, his painter son William, and William’s siren wife Sybilla; and random guest Jack Radley. They gather like the opposing fronts of a perfect storm. The barometer of family integrity is Great-Aunt Vespasia. This is not her first appearance in a Pitt novel; she first makes an entrance in Paragon Walk, and would probably have been incidental if Anne had not kept giving her some of the best lines.

  To Pitt’s pleasant surprise she reappears in Resurrection Row: ‘he recalled how much he had liked her asperity and alarming candor. In fact, had Charlotte married above herself socially instead of beneath, she might have grown in time to be just such a devastating old lady.’ As the series progresses, Vespasia becomes a stalwart of detection, a political activist for child poverty and a supporter of women’s suffrage. She is the older woman Charlotte might become and the matriarch Anne would like to be. She defies gravity and age, growing younger and more significant as the series proceeds.

  In Cardington Crescent she is catapulted into a family crisis when her great-nephew George is murdered. George has been having an illicit affair with William’s wife, Sybilla. Emily, overcoming her sense of betrayal, takes on Sybilla, and seems to be winning when George and his faithful spaniel are found dead by the butler. Charlotte arrives immediately to comfort her grieving sister. She sits down on the bed, reaches out her hand to Emily, then slips ‘her arms round her and let her weep as she needed to, holding her close and rocking a little back and forth, murmuring old, meaningless words of comfort from childhood’. Anne’s mother had done this for her after the murder.

  Eustace and Lavinia decide that Emily is the murderer, and if they can manoeuvre things so she appears guilty of George’s death they will. Finding out who really killed George, and later Sybilla, is synonymous with exonerating Emily. The focus of this novel is the institution of marriage. Eustace, boorish, insensitive and rampantly virile, represents everything despicable in the Victorian patriarch. His lecherous eye lingers on
ladies’ breasts, while his unyielding opinions about the sexual divide leave women eternally subordinate to men. To him, marriage is for political advancement, procreation, continuance of the line and sexual gratification — male, of course. His wife, Olivia, Vespasia’s daughter, was pregnant so often she died of exhaustion. ‘Eustace, I told Olivia when she married you that you were a fool … over the years you have given me less and less reason to revise my opinion,’ Vespasia tells him.

  Eustace cannot work out what the fuss is about. As he explains to Vespasia:

  We raise great men precisely because our women preserve the sanctity of the home and the family … The fairer sex are designed by God to be wives and mothers; to comfort, to nurture and uplift. It is a high and noble calling. But they do not have the minds or the fortitude of temperament to govern, and to imagine they have is to fly against nature.

  Anne had great difficulty with Mormon attitudes to marriage. What position in God’s plan did this give her, or any woman who lived outside the conventional corsetry of a Judeo-Christian marriage, made even tighter by the donning of a Mormon garment? Cardington Crescent reminds readers that men are financially and legally responsible for women, but that cannot expunge the memory of smug, unlikeable Eustace, or forgive him his fornication with his daughter-in-law, Sybilla.

  On 11 November 1985, Anne sent a parcel to Meg Davis, with a note:

  Actually 11 AM too — Armistice moment! Dear Meg, Thank you very much for telephoning this morning — good cheerful start to the week … Here are the first 4 chapters — including all typos, spelling mistakes & general errors! As usual I look forward to receiving your advice & help to sharpen it!36

  These were pages of ‘Thou With Clean Hands’, her restructured, revamped historical manuscript set at the time of the Spanish Inquisition. The story was about a young woman to whom some sane, sensible, non-superstitious theology was revealed by God. Because of these heretical beliefs, she is thrown into prison, tortured and tried, and in the process falls deeply in love with the inquisitor, who feels the same way about her. The major problem Meg had with the story was that the heroine was burnt at the stake. All that emotional investment on the part of readers going up in smoke — it would make a better Verdi opera than a novel. Nevertheless, she responded with a raft of editorial notes: ‘I dipped a bucket into the well of my imagination and this is what I came up with. Looking forward very much to sparking off some ideas.’37

  In February 1986, Meg received the manuscript of Cardington Crescent. She did some editorial work on it before sending it off to St Martin’s, but felt the novel’s foundation was strong. Hope Dellon was away on maternity leave after having a baby girl, but her replacement, Lisa Leventer, replied to Anne directly:

  I’ve now had a chance to read CARDINGTON CRESCENT several times, and I’m happy to say that I agree with Meg Davis — I think in many respects it’s your best yet. Having a murder ‘in the family’ makes the book all the more compelling … we care on a personal level because Emily and Charlotte, with whom we sympathize deeply by now, are affected.38

  Anne came back to Meg with her revisions for Cardington Crescent, and through 1986 Meg sent out ‘Thou With Clean Hands’ and a manuscript she described as a ‘fantasy novel’ called ‘Sadokhar’. The latter needed substantial cuts, according to Arnold P Goodman of New York literary agents Goodman and Associates.

  The book is much too long and rather plodding in pace … Anne Perry has good credentials and it is apparent that she knows her business. But in deciding to write a totally different kind of novel from [what] she has been doing in the past, I think she may have taken a wrong turn.39

  Meg’s endeavours to find an enthusiastic domestic publisher were equally problematic. ‘Naturally we’re disappointed with Anne’s not finding a niche in the UK market the way she has in the States,’ she wrote to Goodman. She felt Hale, who had published the first two titles in the Pitt series in the United Kingdom, had been unimpressive in promoting Anne’s books. Meg pinpointed what she thought was behind their laissez-faire attitude: ‘I think the style and approach of the Charlotte series has a peculiarly American flavour: the English generally think differently about their own history.’40

  The real interest in Anne’s Pitt novels still came from the Anglophile North American market, in which St Martin’s was a leading publisher. Victorian England was a territory already extensively explored by British readers, and Anne’s perspective was not fresh enough to convince commissioning editors that it set her work apart. For the English, Victorian England was about as exotic as Great-aunt Gladys’s back room, with its disintegrating family albums and scrapbooks, chipped china, and musty-smelling trunk full of old shoes and dank best-suits. It was too familiar and genetically close to provide the comfortable escapism it gave North American readers.

  And Anne’s writing had a disquieting optimism that was not quite bleak enough to be British. Terrible things happen in Anne’s novels, but they always end with a sense of optimism. There is a prevailing justice and a belief that, in the archetypal struggle between good and evil, good will win. This New World positivism was based on an expectation of opportunity, enterprise and social mobility. Anne’s books did not communicate the nihilism, the pessimism, the blackness of an Old World controlled by class and convention. For as long as she could remember, Anne had admired America. She had grown up in the Cold War era of superpower envy, when the United States was a strong influence on youth culture around the world, but perhaps it affected her more than most because of her dislocation. Living with what she had done required optimism, but what drove her was a profound American-style belief in redemption through work, and in the integrity of the values implicit in what she wrote.

  However, if she wanted to convince British book publishers, she would have to dig into a darker, more psychologically complex place for her material. In response to Meg’s inquiries about what St Martin’s was doing to get Anne a British publisher, Valari Barocas wrote: ‘As you know, in September 1985, we submitted the last two books (BLUEGATE FIELDS and DEATH IN THE DEVIL’S ACRE) to 20 British publishers, but, unfortunately, there were no takers.’41

  Since 1984, Anne’s agents had been trying to sell the Pitt series to film and television studios. Diana Tyler sent one of Anne’s books to Frances Heasman at Thorn EMI.

  Firstly, I thoroughly enjoyed the Anne Perry … but have to say this is the stuff of television and not feature films. I see this as one in a series that Anne Perry has written and is perfect stuff for a television series. Have you thought of approaching Granada who did the period Cribb series? 42

  Christine Park had also sent books to Gerald Hagan and others in the film and television industry, with messages along the same lines: ‘it has been suggested to me that you might be interested in a television series based on Anne Perry’s celebrated Victorian crime series’.43 But there was no immediate interest. Despite positive responses about Anne’s work, nobody felt it incontrovertibly suited them. Meg took up the cause with a new zeal, making approaches with books she believed were better than ever before.

  Negotiating the arrangements with St Martin’s for Cardington Crescent presented its usual problems. It emerged that the planned publication date was March 1987, when Anne had worked furiously for a deadline at the end of 1986; she had even sent the proofed manuscript by express post. ‘She had obligingly dropped everything’ to complete it, Meg told Tara Hartnett. ‘This might have been avoided if St Martin’s had not taken 3 months to decide to buy the book.’44

  The delays at St Martin’s worried Anne and rankled with Meg. The stand-down period might have been necessary in the beginning, but now it tended to leave things hanging, allowing for mix-ups and confusion, and, perhaps most significantly of all, leaving Anne ‘feeling undervalued’.45 St Martin’s graciously refunded the cost of the express postage, stating in their defence that March 1987 had always been their intended month of publication.

  The stand-down seemed even more incongruous when
the largely positive reviews for Cardington Crescent began to flow in. ‘Perry carefully turns back the covers of Victorian society for readers,’ wrote the critic for the Knoxville Sentinel:

  showing them at the same time much about violent crime that is timeless — not only its gruesomeness but also its effect on the families of the victims. The only drawback in an otherwise excellent book is the obliqueness of the ending. It will be difficult for some readers to understand the motives of the murderer. For the most part, however, Perry writes with both clarity and sensitivity unusual in all but the best mystery writers.46

  After reading Silence in Hanover Close, Meg felt sure Anne was on a new and better track. She returned the manuscript with her notes:

  Enclosed is HANOVER CLOSE, which I must say I enjoyed very much. It’s a very good study of what love drives people to. It is, as we agreed, a darker ‘Charlotte’, but no less interesting or enjoyable. Also it’s very good to get a look at the other side — Emily ‘downstairs’, Pitt in ‘the Steel’ [prison]. And it does have a cracking ending … Please remember these are just my thoughts — if you don’t agree, ignore them.47

  The manuscript was submitted, and relief came eventually in the form of a telegram from St Martin’s accepting the book with a $4,500 advance.

  Silence in Hanover Close has elements of Foreign Office intrigue and political conspiracy, but what makes it work as a novel is what occurs in the private lives of its characters. There are two prisons in this book: one, the socially constructed confinement of widowhood; the other, the Steel. After George’s death, Emily’s widowhood has become unbearable. Not only is she incarcerated by the Victorian conventions that surround death, but she is beginning to see the shackling effect of privilege on women of her class. Nothing she does matters. Although she recognizes with some exhilaration that she is free of the power of an opinionated husband, an autocratic father, an ambitious mother and a dictatorial old mother-in-law, the cold reality is that time stretches before her empty and meaningless. She thinks of ‘all the bleak January days she might fill with needlework, writing letters, playing the piano to an empty room’. It is as if she has been buried alive in the family crypt along with George.