‘Why not?’ Hester said furiously.
But the underlying message of A Sudden, Fearful Death is not one of despair. Prudence Barrymore never wasted time on pointless regrets, and nor does Monk as the memory of his ugly past continues to reconstruct itself in his mind. As he advises his client, Julia Penrose, ‘we all try to forget what hurts us. It is sometimes the only way we can continue … You have a fearful situation to deal with. Don’t look back — look forward, only forward.’
In October 1992 Don Maass finalized a US$1 million contract with Ballantine ‘for 3 each of the “Pitt” and “Monk” series, plus one fantasy novel and one historical novel. This will take Anne up to the end of the decade (Millennium!). It’s very nice to have this level of commitment from the publisher,’ Meg wrote to Ken Sherman.62 It was a gratifying result after months of negotiations. The bargaining between Don and Leona had got so intense that Leona ended up calling him a ‘jerk’ behind his back, which secretly thrilled Meg because she knew that meant Don had taken Leona to the wire. The new million-dollar contract prompted a heightened level of engagement from Ballantine.
Anne toured the United States twice in 1993. ‘**WELCOME HOME, STAR!!**’ Meg Davis’s letter began after her April trip. ‘It’ll be lovely to speak to you on this side of the water again — but not till you’ve caught up on your sleep! You’ve certainly earned it, after all that hard work.’63 The September – October tour was equally successful. ‘Anne rang me yesterday and says the tour is going very well indeed … I’ve just come back from my brother’s Buddhist wedding in Toronto, which certainly woke up the dustier members of the family. And so into the maelstrom of Frankfurt [Book Fair]’, Meg wrote to Leona.64 Ballantine’s decision to develop Anne’s reputation meant her name was becoming increasingly well established. They invested in publicity so that the queues at book signings got longer and longer.
The dynamic Kim Hovey — who after numerous tours had become a personal friend as well as Anne’s publicist — went with Anne to the New York bookstores. She remembers a very elderly woman in ‘the village’ (Greenwich) who would greet Anne each time with a bunch of flowers and sit in exactly the same chair, then have her books signed at the end of the session. When, suddenly, she did not appear, they guessed that she had died or become too frail to come. Kim remembers people saying often at Anne’s talks: ‘your book got me through a difficult time when my mother died’ or ‘it was your books that kept me going when my son was ill’.65
While Anne was in Los Angeles she met Ken Sherman to talk about the recently concluded Lynda La Plante deal and the option terms the BBC were trying to negotiate. ‘Anne was very pleased to see you last month, by the way,’ Meg wrote to Ken in November 1993.
The tour was highly successful, she was absolutely lionized and a lot of copies were sold. She and I go to Paris for a couple of days next week to research her espionage novel about the French Revolution. (I’m going as interpreter, although having been brought up in Montréal; my French puts me on a par with Algerian riff-raff in Parisian eyes.)66
Anne’s biggest foreign-language market after Germany was France. She was published there by Dix/Dix-huit (10/18) and was a close friend of its commissioning editor, the flamboyant but scrupulous Emmanuelle Heurtebise. It made sense to publish a book set in France, and this was the long-overdue tightening of ‘Thou With Clean Hands’.
After returning from Paris, Meg told Don that she had become something of a ‘bore on the subject of the Revolution’. She had a sneaking suspicion that Anne’s book on the subject, now being rewritten, was ‘deviating from the plot as hammered out among the three of us’. Nonetheless she was optimistic, because Anne expected to take longer over editing the book than she did with her detective novels. To Meg’s chagrin, Anne ‘seemed to waste a lot of time in Paris’, particularly in fabric stores and knitting shops. Her eyes lit up when she saw one, and it was impossible to drag her past.
She skipped over all the interesting relics from everyday life in the museum — like masses of really crappy dinner plates with Revolutionary motifs, which everyone must have bought fast in order to be Politically Correct. Neither would she actually stroll through the section where all the Revolutionaries lived, much of which (unlike the rest of the city) is still intact … We only spent 5 minutes in Notre Dame! … sometimes she’s still a mystery to me.67
Meg was reading Traitor’s Gate, Anne’s next Pitt. ‘It’s well up to standard, and has some great background on how Europe was carving up Africa at the time.’68 This topped off a good year and an astonishing period of success since the publication of The Face of a Stranger. Anne had begun to make bestseller lists all over the world. In New York she had been guest of honour at the annual Malice Domestic Convention and had been presented with the Romantic Times Career Achievement Award.
Her million-dollar contract with Ballantine was followed by a six-book deal in England with Headline. Meg had negotiated, or was negotiating, contracts for the translation of The Face of a Stranger into Japanese, Italian, German, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Czechoslovakian, Russian, Dutch and Polish, and sales for some of Anne’s titles were now in the hundreds of thousands.
As well as this, she had a new principal British publisher, HarperCollins. To begin the relationship, Meg and Anne met managing editor Nick Sayers and other HarperCollins staff in June. ‘We’ve had a tip-off that the whole of New Zealand seems to be celebrating their anniversary of women’s suffrage. As this is the main burden of BETHLEHEM ROAD, you may wish to give an extra push to your exports there,’ Meg wrote to Nick in July.69 By August they had reached an agreement over Farriers’ Lane and Anne’s next title, and in December Meg sent Nick the contracts. Her plan was that they meet him and editor Imogen Taylor, who was a keen advocate for Anne’s titles, in the New Year. ‘Anne and I are very pleased you’ve taken her on, and look forward to a splendid Future together.’70
II
The tip-off from Meg Davis to Nick Sayers probably came from Anne. She knew New Zealand was inordinately proud of its suffrage history, being the first country in the world to give women the vote. It was in New Zealand as the young Juliet that she received her first formal schooling after 14 months of barefoot truancy in the Bahamas and the Bay of Islands. It is doubtful that this was intended when Hilda and Henry bade their eight-year-old daughter a tearful goodbye at the airport in 1946.
Juliet travelled alone to Nassau, on New Providence Island in the Bahamas, to stay with expatriate friends, the Browne family. It was a long, frightening flight with multiple stopovers, and it ended with an emergency landing after two of the engines failed. Although the light, hot, tropical paradise of the Bahamas offered emancipation from the leaden deprivations of post-war London, her time there also meant disorientation and disturbance for Juliet.
Life in the Bahamas was completely alien, and Juliet felt abandoned. She felt she had been exiled, sent thousands of kilometres away from the people to whom she was most closely connected. There was no end to it either. No quick trip home for the holidays. Not even an easy telephone call. She was completely separated from all that she knew.
The addition to the Browne family of a sickly English girl, still fragile from a life of ration books and air-raid shelters, created its own tensions. Most of the time she was boating and playing with the two boys, but she could be cocky and determined, and her mere presence made things stressful between the parents. For Mr Browne she could do no wrong, ‘because I was the little girl he didn’t have’, and nothing right for his wife, who instinctively disliked her and the effect she had on the family.71
William was younger and Julian older than Juliet. ‘The younger one I got along with well, and the older one hated my guts and beat the crap out of me.’72 Mrs Browne’s favourite was Julian, who was barely tolerated at times by his father, a harsh disciplinarian who preferred William and now Juliet. The situation was volatile but not especially unhappy. When Anne shuts her eyes and thinks of a perfect place, it is the shimmering wh
ite sand, aquamarine seas and brilliant skies of the Bahamas that she sees.
After eight months, Juliet — a little taller and stronger, with thick, wavy blondish hair — travelled with the Brownes to New Zealand’s Bay of Islands, where she stayed for a further seven months on their private island. It was ‘real Swiss Family Robinson stuff’, a wild, outdoor existence, free from the routine but also the reassurance of school and family life.73 Juliet longed to see her parents again, so when she heard that her father had been made rector of Canterbury University College in Christchurch, she was ecstatic.
CHAPTER FOUR
I
The restoration of Anne’s stone barn was well under way at the beginning of 1994, although the project would take nearly six years in all to complete. She had chosen an Italianate theme that inspired a large feature fountain in a paved central courtyard, and warm Tuscan shades of yellow, pink, green and blue throughout the house. The dramatic exceptions, showing a Georgian influence, were a rich dark-red dining room, a strong green sitting room, and a vivid yellow drawing room. The grand entrance hall was light-filled and spacious, with double-height ceilings and two glorious chandeliers suspended over an expansive travertine marble floor. The outlook from the entrance hall was onto the courtyard, and a glass conservatory full of exotic plants. Off the hall on the lower floor were the drawing and sitting rooms, a guest room, the dining room, a large country kitchen, an office and a panelled library stocked from floor to ceiling with books.
Two small staircases in the entrance hall led upstairs to a vast master bedroom, with adjoining writing room — an intimate space with a section of antique carved wooden panels. On the level above that was a suite of offices for her typist, and storage cupboards for books and manuscripts. The views from Anne’s writing room were inspirational. She could lean back in her chair and see on one side the solitary magnificence of the Moray Firth and on the other Dornoch Firth, and, above, the wide ever-changing skies of northern Scotland.
When project manager Simon MacDonald and his contractors had started removing the old piggery, they found, underneath the jungle of brambles and nettles, that the land was polluted with refuse and asbestos. The site had been a dumping ground for agricultural waste, discarded concrete, engine bits, old baths, oil drums and rotting tyres. Nonetheless they cleared the land around the ruined barn to construct the house and courtyard, and laid out an extensive area of garden, with rose and flower beds edging a large lawn connected to a labyrinth of interlocking bowers, surrounding brick-paved areas and secluded seats. Anne loved roses, and during the long summer days trellised bowers hung heavy with myriad blooms. The renovation was manorial in scale. Having bought the property for £26,000, she invested an ‘estimated £500,000’ to realize her vision.1 To help establish and maintain it, she needed staff. So Alex, the husband of her typist Elizabeth Sweeney, became her gardener, she employed a housekeeper, and Simon was her driver and property manager.
Meg MacDonald still lived in Anne’s cottage across the lane, and helped to look after the property when Anne went on book tours. In true animal fashion, Meg’s and Anne’s cats and dogs often seemed to live between the two houses, taking advantage of the best on offer at each place. In her breaks from writing, Anne would often accompany Meg on walks with the dogs. The field adjoining Anne’s property was a large area of uncultivated set-aside land that had been left in clover. Set-aside land was an initiative introduced in 1988 by the European Union to reduce cultivated acreage, and with it the agricultural surpluses known colloquially as ‘the grain mountain’. While it was unfarmed, ‘the skylarks had come back, and there were owls, and the deer had come into the field … hawks were in, buzzards, there was all sorts of things that were coming into the field’.2 Meg was upset when she learned that the set-aside period had come to an end and the farmer could plough the land again. The fate of the skylarks particularly concerned her, because they were an endangered species.
Once she found out what was happening, Anne promptly went down to the bank, found that she had enough money to buy the field, and did so. She accelerated the regeneration and restocking that had already begun, by planting trees and digging and channelling a natural spring water supply. Ultimately, she had the land put in trust as a wilderness area for public use in perpetuity.
In spite of the people she employed for building, landscaping and planting, Anne was a relatively inconspicuous figure in the village. She often attended market days and village festivals, but as an observer on the edge, standing back. She was generous, contributing surreptitiously to charities and deserving cases by quietly seeking out those involved and making a donation. She had her local friends and associates, but she was a discreet, almost shadowy figure in Portmahomack.3
The only time people got an inkling that this tall, middle-aged, auburn-haired woman in her sensible classic clothes was a bestselling author was when she helped the local primary school football team get a new strip of land to play on. ‘She went to the trouble of contacting her publishers in the USA who sent 100 books. Anne did a signing session in the local Oystercatcher café and helped raise £300.’4
When Meg Davis received a letter inquiring about Anne’s life from a 15-year-old honours student writing a paper on a contemporary author for his English class at Canton High School in Connecticut, she answered him by describing the Tarbat Ness Peninsula, the sea views, the house and its lovely setting on the outskirts of Portmahomack.
Often it’s so beautiful she phones me to describe the scene to me in my office in the city. She has three dogs and two cats, and always has neighbours dropping in. This is probably just as well, since she works terribly hard. For relaxation she watches television, listens to opera, and knits sweaters of her own design.5
Life for Meg in the tough London book trade was less idyllic. She and Anne had their meeting with Nick Sayers and Imogen Taylor from HarperCollins at the beginning of the year, and things went well. ‘It was nice to see you again last week, and I thought Anne a terrific and unusual lady,’ Imogen wrote afterwards.6 Meg’s real worry was the ‘Tathyr’ manuscript, which they had sent to Ballantine and had heard nothing back on. ‘I phoned Leona regarding TATHYR,’ Don wrote to Meg on 31 January 1994.
She has no definite plans for the novel yet (pub. date, imprint, etc.) as she has not sat down and read the whole thing right through. She will now do that … I do think we should be grateful for any prayers anyone sends heavenward for the success of the book. In fact, I expect I’ll say a few myself.7
Leona’s response to ‘Tathyr’ arrived in March, and she seemed to dislike it intensely. The reader’s report from Deborah Hogan, which she included with her covering note, made equally gloomy reading. Leona had inordinate difficulties pronouncing the title, which came out of her mouth awkwardly hyphenated. ‘She insisted on calling her “Tat-teer” as if it were some childhood obscenity. She really did make it sound like “pee-pee”,’ recalls Meg.8 It appeared from Leona’s response and the reader’s report that the novel would never sell to Ballantine. A big part of the problem was that it did not fit the conventional form of the fantasy novel.
As Deborah Hogan outlined it, fantasy writing generally depicted a world to which readers wanted to escape. There were strong main characters, ‘maybe a reluctant hero, or a person larger than life or with a tragic flaw’, but whichever it was, it was someone readers identified with and wanted to be. The essential ingredient was magic; and the supernatural elements and the plot, which should build to a nail-biting climax, must be believable.
Anne’s ‘Tathyr’ seemed to belong to an older tradition of eighteenth-century books like Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas — a spiritual odyssey, a ‘journey of the soul’s search for truth’. It was beautifully written, with some rich insights and poignant introspection, but it felt contrived and distanced from reality, and the main character, Tathyr, felt artificial and too perfect to be real. It was more like a piece of theology than a spellbinding journey into the imagination. ‘Tathyr’ must b
e more convincing. Anne needed to ‘make the people feel real, with flaws and strengths — and maybe not kill so many off haphazardly for convenience. It makes them seem even more unreal to be so expendable. There should be more action, more danger, more passion, more moving towards an actual goal … more tangible magic.’9
This was almost the response Meg expected, although not one she wanted to hear. It was disappointing after all the effort they had put into the manuscript, and she worried that Anne might be bitterly disappointed at having to tackle a fairly comprehensive rewrite. Anne, however, remained philosophical. She was not an enthusiastic letter-writer and normally rang the office, so when a card arrived for Meg it made an impression. ‘Just a card to say how much I appreciate your time, your friendship & your brains! Thank you!’10
Meg was still waiting for the new, improved Lynda La Plante script to arrive. ‘Hope Lynda La Plante’s writing talent lives up to her reputation,’ wrote Ken to Meg in April. ‘Ex-President Nixon is being buried today which is good.’11 Negotiations continued over options on Anne’s books with the BBC, playwright Robert Sugarman was eager to produce a stage adaptation of Farriers’ Lane, and an independent film producer wanted to use Anne in a number of roles, including as presenter for a CD-ROM project on Macbeth. Meg agreed to an initial screen test. The other project he suggested, as Meg told Don Maass, was an interactive CD-ROM series entitled:
In the Steps of Anne Perry: Anne Perry’s London … using her detective novels … If Anne likes him, & he seems on the level, I’d like to pass him over to you … (Anne Perry’s London tickles the hell out of me. Yes, she was born in Blackheath, but it’s in danger of being In the Steps of Anne Perry: Great Wool & Fabric Shops of Our Time.)12
The Search for Anne Perry Page 13
