July Bonus Review: Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century
"Heavenly Creatures," Girl World, and filling negative space
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
From the Amazon landing page for Peter Graham’s book:
On June 22, 1954, teenage friends Juliet Hulme—better known as bestselling mystery writer Anne Perry—and Pauline Parker went for a walk in a New Zealand park with Pauline’s mother, Honora. Half an hour later, the girls returned alone, claiming that Pauline’s mother had had an accident. But when Honora Parker was found in a pool of blood with the brick used to bludgeon her to death close at hand, Juliet and Pauline were quickly arrested, and later confessed to the killing. Their motive? A plan to escape to the United States to become writers, and Honora’s determination to keep them apart. Their incredible story made shocking headlines around the world and would provide the subject for Peter Jackson’s Academy Award–nominated film, Heavenly Creatures.
The story
My three-star rating on Goodreads 1) is really more of a three and a half, and 2) doesn’t quite get at the ways a two-star book and a five-star one co-exist in Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century. I’ll unpack that in a moment, but let’s do the headline rec first, to wit: Graham’s prose is very readable, approachable, and not turgid. There’s the occasional “What the dickens does THAT mean?” that, while not always called for in accounts in the true-crime genre, works well for this specific case. Heavenly Creatures has, in my opinion, a far better ear for Juliet and Pauline and the world they built around themselves, thanks in large part to Melanie Lynskey’s perfectly discomfiting performance as Pauline, but Anne Perry is the way to go for a complete account of their lives leading up to, then away from Honora Parker’s grisly end.
But the book’s primary serious — if non-fatal — flaw is the very combination here of the completism and the “What the dickens does THAT mean?” Not tonally; Graham’s allowed to roll his eyes, as I certainly did several times at various overheated diary entries Pauline devoted to how much James Mason’s facility with playing evil characters turned her on…and as I would at my own diary entries from that age, but this is the issue, that there are aspects of the existence of a teenage girl, and of the collective existence of a pair or group of teenage girls, that not everyone who didn’t experience them can get their arms around. “Girl World” as I have explained it in the past is a facile rhyme that may suggest to the uninitiated a high-pitched and sexless gum-bubble of sparkly pink enthusiasm; it is not that. It is not homicidal, either, ordinarily, but the mutual wanting to be with and to become of mid-teen girlhood; and that it will burn off like a lit shot of Sambuca in time…you don’t have to have your Girl World passport stamp to write about this case and these young women.
But the post-trial analysis chapters do not have the benefit of the adult Pauline and Juliet’s participation — Graham is working off of newspaper accounts, interviews with Anne Perry (nee Juliet) about her books, and a documentary that Graham interprets as a longitudinal study of Anne’s narcissistic personality disorder — and the extended re-digestion of various possible diagnoses is a bit tiresome. This isn’t territory a teenage Graham would have glimpsed, and he’s not allowed over the border now, so he keeps circling the area and theorizing, instead of calling it a folie à deux of two probable borderline personalities. Ditto the lengthy passages describing Juliet’s father’s upward career trajectory, or the history of a house in which the Hulme family lived: I understand the impulse to include all the information one does have, to make up in a way for the information one will never have, and these passages are easily skippable to maintain reading flow. In the end, though, the preoccupation of Honora Parker’s murder isn’t the whats and wheres. It’s the whys of the whos. It’s why we continue to chew on the case. That a Petra Graham might have come closer in her translation of a couple of these unknowables isn’t a terminal problem, but that book might have felt more satisfying.
As it is, Anne Perry is diverting. Graham does a creditable job with the facts and the prose isn’t strained; I did wonder in passing if he shouldn’t have just made the book an analysis of this documentary, which underlines Graham’s periodic implications previously that Juliet/Anne is a sociopath, and is where Graham seems to feel most comfortable and engaged. The sense of a Kilgrave-type personality holding her employees captive is quite well done: “‘If Anne’s happy, we’re happy.’ Anne does not seem to be happy all that often. When the woman typing Anne’s latest book exclaims to the camera, ‘Never a dull moment!’ it seems like ironic despair.” But there is a gap, a void at the center of the narrative, and whether or not that void is the girls themselves, their lack of empathy, the Girl World particular to them that none of us can access because we aren’t character-disordered, Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century is an interesting exercise in writing to spaces. — SDB
There’s still time to vote for next month’s book! And thanks again for subscribing to Best Evidence.