The Search for Anne Perry

by Joanne Drayton

  Three prevailing themes emerge from this novel. Slavery and racism, the power of obsession, and the revelation of Monk’s dark past and its impact.

  Anne refuses to take an uncomplicated position, even on the contentious subject of slavery. She challenges people to think beyond the stereotypes and reconfigure their morality. As Don Maass has noted:

  Her depiction of America at the time of the Civil War is really amazing, especially as they travel deep [into the country] in the company of [Philo Trace] a Southerner who expresses the Southern point of view in circa 1860 … and doesn’t make a case for slavery exactly but gives Monk and Hester a more nuanced picture of the South … She projected herself into somebody else and their way of looking at things — and an unpopular way of looking at things — and saw how a decent human being from the 1860s would see and accept their society the way it was: and she does that again, and again in her fiction.11

  Philo Trace explains to Hester and Monk that many holdings in the South are small, with one slave who is treated well because the farmer’s livelihood depends on him. Merritt and Lyman Breeland voice the abolitionist position, while Philo Trace enriches our understanding of an abomination that history remembers in more polarized terms.

  It is obsession that unites the book’s characters. Lyman Breeland is obsessed about civil rights to the extent that he sacrifices everything, including Merritt; Philo Trace is fixated on capturing the fugitive couple; Merritt is consumed by her passion for Lyman. The corrosive power of obsession is summed up by Monk:

  Perhaps [Merritt] was one of the world’s great lovers, but Breeland was not. He might be one of the world’s idealists, or one of its flawed obsessives, not so much a man who supported a cause, as a man who needed a cause to support him, to fulfil a nature otherwise empty.

  The dangerous power of obsession is something Anne knew about from her own experience with Pauline Parker. She understood Merritt’s motives especially: ‘she is passionate and willful and when she gives herself to something, or someone, it is wholeheartedly, and not always wisely’.

  As Monk’s past comes into clearer focus, he discovers that he worked with unscrupulous businessmen who made their money from the slave trade. He is tormented by the information he has uncovered, and fears that Hester will reject him.

  She smiled, but her eyes were filled with sadness. She reached out her hand and touched his cheek. It was a soft gesture. It did not dismiss what he had done, or excuse it, but it set it in the past.

  When Anne’s brother, Jonathan, returned to the United Kingdom in 2000, 88-year-old Marion was delighted. As she had got older, she had become less mobile and could not travel to see him. ‘I do miss Jonty desperately … and his two small children are very attractive & delightful,’ she had told family friend Nancy Sutherland in June 1995.

  Did you know that he married a Chinese nurse, & nearly rocked us off our foundations? … and now we have these darling [grand]children, [and] it is developing into a strong family with real bonds of affection … They have a little girl of 10 & boy of 6. She looks like a small exquisite Margot Fonteyn & is a dedicated Ballet Dancer!! He is a sturdy, well built young man, & I’m quite besotted with him.12

  Now Jonathan and his family were settling in Scotland, not far from Anne and Marion. After years of intermittent contact, long-distance communication and separation, they were finally living close together as a family.

  In 1954, aged 10, Jonathan had returned to England with his father. Henry Hulme’s job at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, near Reading, meant he was ‘in at the Golden Age of the development of the H-bomb, following of course the A-bomb. This was the mid- to late-1950s, and he was basically the chap who designed and sorted out the problems of the British H-bomb.’13 Jonathan boarded at Bradfield College, which was a 45-minute drive from Reading. At school he was a keen marksman, becoming captain of the shooting team and the first boy from Bradford College to get junior international colours. From there, he went on exhibition (a type of scholarship) to St John’s College, Oxford, where he studied medicine and philosophy and psychology. At Oxford he was a member of the university rifle team.

  In 1978, after working in hospitals around the south of England, he realized he wanted ‘to go somewhere else, so [he] decided to up anchor and went to Rhodesia’. There he was appointed to a position at a black African hospital in Bulawayo, Rhodesia’s second largest city. When a colleague was called up for military service over a long weekend and was reluctant to go, Jonathan, who had joined the local gun club, offered to replace him. It was at a referendum time, ‘where Ian Smith was saying: “Are we prepared to share power with the blacks? Specifically: Bishop Abel Muzorewa.”’

  Jonathan travelled with a reserve unit to Matabeleland North and discovered a new vocation. ‘I thought: Hang on, I’m enjoying this.’ He applied to join the army, becoming a medical officer in the Second Battalion Rhodesian Africa Rifles with his own small military hospital at Fort Victoria in the middle of Schonland, where his battalion was stationed. He took a parachute course and got his wings, and was in the army two or three years when ‘after transition to black power, things were getting politically very uncomfortable’. He resigned from the army and lectured in anatomy at a university medical school for another two years before going into private practice.

  What pulled Jonathan back to the United Kingdom was the political and economic turbulence in what was now Zimbabwe, and the educational needs of his family. He had met his wife, Sylvia, while on leave in Gloucester. They corresponded for a while, then he returned to England and convinced her to follow him to Rhodesia. ‘We got married in a little chapel on the edge of Lake Kyle … and we had the reception back in the barracks.’ They had two children, first Frances, then Henry, four years apart. They needed to go back to the United Kingdom before Frances turned 16, because she had to be in the country two years to be eligible to go to university at the standard fee. They spent a year planning their move to Scotland.

  What met them on their arrival was a shock. The climate, the flora and fauna, the landscape, the local school, which dumped the dimmest students in the art class — everything was dramatically different from what they knew. Frances was especially talented at art, and in Zimbabwe art was a privilege for the most able students and a disciplined endeavour. But it was a bonus to be close to Marion and Anne. Since the beginning of his schooling in the United Kingdom, Jonathan’s primary parent had been his father, and he had established a close relationship with Henry’s second family, especially the son of a similar age, Mike Ducker. For Anne, Marion had been a mainstay, especially since her move to Portmahomack. Until her eyesight failed, Marion read her daughter’s manuscripts, and Anne rang her every day and ‘often we would talk for ages’.14 There was piquancy to the relationship, an intensity that came from a mutual feeling of failure.

  Anne knew that she had brought the world down upon her mother’s head. She had made them both refugees — women without a past — and exposed them to vicious ridicule. But Marion carried her own burden of guilt. She knew that she had not been vigilant, or even aware. She was a clever woman who had miscalculated the situation. Her affair with Bill Perry, the end of her marriage and loss of social position had all been more important to her than her daughter. There had been tragic misjudgments on both sides, but mother and daughter were connected forever by history and a camaraderie forged by blame. They were both fighters, determined not to replicate the dysfunction of their earlier relationship. In her later years, Marion was the mentor to Anne that she failed to be in her youth, and Anne was as receptive and respectful a daughter as any parent could hope for.

  My mother was extremely astute … She was very canny. She had lovely turns of phrase … colourful … very wise, very good judge of a person, very politically aware, few people ever pulled the wool over her eyes, and she did an awful lot of voluntary work helping people. [She said of Prime Minister Tony Blair], when she first saw him, don’t trust that young
man, he’s got the eyes of a horse that would bolt.15

  Marion lived in her Portmahomack cottage with its stunning sea views for over a decade. The locals fondly referred to her as the Queen Mother, because she was elderly, overdressed and waved benignly while she worked in her English garden. Until the end of her life she served tea, and sherry after 4pm. Marion had an innate understanding of sexual politics. Women deserved equality and power, she believed, but men had it, so the male world attracted her. She was also a woman of her time. When Denis Healey retired from politics, she said: ‘he was the last of those who served in the forces and we have now lost the sense of team spirit. Now, it’s everyone for themselves. The loyalty that that generation had is gone.’16

  In 2002, a severe stroke left Marion hospitalized and ultimately bed-ridden in a rest home. Anne rang the hospital for regular updates and visited Marion almost daily. Her mother loved flowers, and in the summer Anne would arrive with new bunches from her garden. The feelings of guilt and anger came back, but there was also relief. ‘They can’t make my mother suffer now,’ Anne told a reporter for the Glasgow Herald, in March 2002, ‘she’s 90 and in hospital after having a massive stroke. But they did make her suffer terribly … I don’t run away; I’ve faced the worst and survived.’17 It was an emotionally draining time. Anne had always abhorred being left, but this parting would be the worst yet, because it was permanent and it would not be an easy farewell between two untroubled souls.

  Anne had the support of Jonathan and his family, who were becoming increasingly significant in her life, and there were also Meg MacDonald and her family. Meg was happy to visit, because she got on well with Marion. When they had first met, Meg did not know what to call her. She thought ‘Mrs Perry’ was too formal, but she was not one to call an older woman by her first name. ‘How would “Mother Perry” suit you?’ she suggested, and Marion replied, ‘That’s perfect!’ One day she gave Meg a gold chain. She put it around her neck and said: ‘While you’re wearing that you’ll always be safe.’18 Meg has never taken it off. She did not go into town without ringing Marion and offering her a ride. ‘I’ll have my boots on,’ Marion would say, and she would be waiting at the door. They would drive around town and chat. One hot summer day they went for a walk to the Tarbat Ness lighthouse.

  It was a beautiful, absolutely beautiful day and there was a little mouse that walked towards us and we both stopped and looked at it cleaning itself … We went a bit further along and we sat down on this knoll and all of a sudden a little stoat or a weasel came out and started playing round on the grass in front of us … and we watched this for quite a while and then it scuttled off … She said: ‘All we need now, Meg, is a pod of dolphins.’ And I said: ‘Mother Perry, if you look over your left shoulder you’ll never believe what’s in the sea below you.’ There was a school of dolphins close enough for her to see because she was getting a bit blind at this stage.19

  When the reviews for Slaves and Obsession began appearing, there was a trans-Atlantic whoop of delight from Anne’s agents. It was first on the Booksense and Livres Hebdo bestseller lists, the main selection for the Mystery Guild and number 10 on the Publishers Weekly bestseller list. ‘This is one of her best,’ wrote reviewers for both the Chicago Tribune and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The New York Times Book Review agreed, and the critic for Booklist wrote: ‘The best element in this novel is Perry’s depiction of the excitement preceding and the butchery during the Battle of Bull Run, reminiscent of Thackeray’s unflinching portrait of Waterloo in Vanity Fair … A remarkable addition to the Perry canon.’20

  Along with critical accolades came Anne’s first major award: an Edgar for her short story ‘Heroes’, which was reproduced in The Penguin Book of First World War Stories in 2000. Named after Edgar Allan Poe, Edgars are coveted awards given out every year by the Mystery Writers of America for mystery writing in fiction, non-fiction, film, television and theatre. Edgars for short stories have been awarded since 1951. What thrilled Anne most about the award was its affirmation of a new possibility for her writing. ‘Heroes’ introduced First World War chaplain Joseph Reavley, who would reappear in a series of books that she was already thinking about. ‘Heroes’ was accompanied by another short story, ‘A Dish Taken Cold’, linked in plot and characterization to the stand-alone novel The One Thing More, also published in 2000. The book’s title came from Marion. When Anne was asked by a reporter to comment on society’s judgment of murderers like the killers of two-year-old James Bulger, she replied, ‘My mother always says, “Don’t judge yet. If only you knew just one more thing about that person’s life …”.’21 This seemed a fitting title for her novel about the French Revolution, which she had worked on intermittently for years, but with more focus since her trip to France with Meg Davis in November 1993.

  France was an avid market for Anne’s work. Her agent in Paris was the dynamic, American-born Lora Fountain, who was the partner of Gilbert Shelton, creator of Fat Freddy’s Cat, and represented artist, illustrator and musician Robert Crumb. Over the years Lora and Anne had developed a close working relationship with Emmanuelle Heurtebise, the commissioning editor for 10/18 (Dix/Dix-huit). The company had published Anne’s books in English and in French translation from the early Pitt days, and Emmanuelle had become a staunch supporter and friend. When Anne came to France for research trips, book signings and media interviews, the pair would take time out to shop and have a meal together.

  Emmanuelle’s fiancé was an Irish-born mathematician, and over dinner he and Anne would become engrossed in conversation. He turned her mathematical universe upside down when he shattered the ‘incontrovertible’ rule that ‘the sum of the interior angles of any triangle has to be 180 degrees’. This had been a fact for Anne until he challenged her. ‘You are thinking of Euclidian geometry, aren’t you? That’s plain geometry on a level; imagine it on a curve.’ She was profoundly impressed and liberated by the idea that even mathematical rules could be bent.

  It was as if he had suddenly blown the universe apart and reassembled it for me … Suddenly I thought how much else is there that we assume has to be written in immutable laws that it has to be so, because of something we don’t know … It’s so exciting … all sorts of wonderful things … Maybe there are all sorts of other things that don’t have to be the way we think it’s set … It just broke the idea that certain things have to be.22

  When the news of Anne’s identity broke, Emmanuelle was shocked like everyone else, but it did not change her regard for Anne. She did, however, need a strategy. ‘I decided I wouldn’t mention anything [to the media] … as it was not pertinent.’23 So in France there was silence about Anne’s background until one day when Emmanuelle received a telephone call from a prominent French journalist. ‘He had just discovered it,’ she remembers.

  He was angry with me because I never told him … He was a journalist from the Left Party, supposed to be very, very open-minded … So [we] had a fight and I was blacklisted by that journal for a long, long time, and he published some very bad words about me … because of my ‘censorship’.24

  The next time Anne made a major promotional tour of France, the same journalist was quick to ring up the 10/18 offices and make an appointment to see her. When Emmanuelle spotted his name on the media list she told her assistant either to ‘cancel him or he has to promise he won’t put the subject [of the murder] on the table’. The same day Emmanuelle was attending an exclusive Parisian cocktail party when she ran into the journalist, who was furious. ‘You can’t write the questions for me!’ he shouted. With equal determination, she shouted back, ‘If you take this approach, we will cancel the meeting!’ The journalist agreed to cancel the meeting, then stormed off, and Emmanuelle was left surrounded by concerned colleagues, who were supportive of her stand. ‘It’s not usual for me to be so very angry, I never shout at people, but it was very tense.’25

  The journalist wrote for an influential magazine, and although it was difficult to say no to the coverage, Emmanuell
e knew his approach would be damaging. She was proved correct when his article finally came out, under the headline ‘I kill, thus I write’. He had written a cruel exposé of Anne. The piece discussed Pauline Parker without revealing her where abouts, but told readers that Anne lived in Portmahomack. It also attacked Emmanuelle once more for her censorship.

  Lora Fountain rang Emmanuelle immediately. ‘Have you seen the article?’ She had, and was furious. ‘You could hear it down the phone,’ Lora remembers.26 She was imagining Emmanuelle’s ‘face bright red with steam coming out of her ears’. They sat in their respective offices, stunned. Lora called it ‘yellow journalism’, and Emmanuelle described it as the publishing of ‘dirty details’.

  10/18 has sold over 3 million copies of Anne’s books. The appeal, Emmanuelle believes, is their exoticism. For French readers the Victorian period is foreign and removed from the familiar flavour of their own history. How, then, would this Anglophile French audience react to The One Thing More? There was an additional complication. ‘In France people don’t like foreigners wanting to write about their … history, so it was tricky with the journalists,’ Emmanuelle remembers.

  But the readers who loved Pitt and Monk still bought it … They know she can be trusted with her research about history, so they were comfortable with that … It’s not astonishing that she picked this part of French history. [There were] a lot of echoes [from it] around the world.27