Few people can turn their lives around quite as successfully after committing murder as novelist Anne Perry.
The prolific author of crime fiction, spent five years in jail for her part in murdering her best friend’s mother in New Zealand when she was 16.
She would later become a familiar figure on the literary scene in the Highlands after she moved to Portmahomack, Easter Ross.
She was born Juliet Hulme in London’s Blackheath in 1938.
She suffered from tuberculosis as a child, and was sent to the warmer climates of the Caribbean, South Africa and New Zealand in an attempt to improve her health.
Eventually her father became Rector of Canterbury University College in New Zealand, and fatefully, Juliet was enrolled into Christchurch Girls’ High School.
There she met fellow pupil Pauline Parker and the two embarked on an obsessive relationship, full of elaborate fantasies.
Jail time
In 1954, Juliet’s parents were separating, and she was due to be sent to South Africa.
The pair hatched plans to go there together, but when Pauline’s parents stood in their way, they murdered her mother, Honora by bludgeoning her more than 20 times with a brick.
Both served five years in jail.
They were only spared the death sentence due to their age. Juliet was 15, Pauline 16.
The girls’ story was later made into the 1994 Peter Jackson film, Heavenly Creatures, starring Kate Winslet as Hulme, in her first feature debut.
Perry later said she had made a ‘profoundly wrong decision’ and jail was the right place for her to be, including to the first three months spent in solitary.
She emerged from prison as Anne Perry and embarked on a new life as a flight attendant, and living for a while in the USA where she became a Mormon.
“The world must just consider me an unnatural father,” was all he ever said about what happened with Juliet.
A career in writing for Anne Perry
Perry embarked on her writing career aged 41, with ‘The Cater Street Hangman’ followed by around 100 further novels, many in the historical detective fiction genre.
Her two main series each feature a male and a female protagonist.
Thomas Pitt is matched with his wife Charlotte, while William Monk is matched with Hester Latterly, a Crimean War nurse.
The Monk mysteries are set earlier in the Victorian era (1850s–1860s) than the Pitt books (1880s–1890s).
Meanwhile in 1992, Perry moved with her mother to Portmahomack where she produced a huge body of work from her home ‘Tyrn Vawr’.
The four bedroom H-shaped house had a spacious kitchen, library and sun room, grand dining room and conservatory looking out onto a courtyard with a pond and water feature.
Upstairs, Perry enjoyed soaring views of Caithness, Sutherland, Ross, Inverness-shire and Moray.
As a keen lover of wildlife, Perry protected the beautiful surroundings for future generations by buying up a neighbouring 17-acre field and creating a trust to ensure it isn’t built on.
The house was the perfect setting for Perry’s creative flow — and no wonder, she built it herself, practically from scratch.
“It was a wreck next door to the house I was living in,” she said.
“I heard they had got planning permission to make it into a shop that would mend motorbikes and lawnmowers and I thought, ‘Not next to me you don’t!’
“So I bought it in self-defence and then I looked at the ruins and thought it would make a marvellous house.”
Festivals and TV series success
In the Noughties, Perry was very active on the Highland literary scene, appearing in many local book festivals.
She lived a jet-setting life as her books were turned into TV series.
In 2008 she squeezed in a flying visit to Inverness to launch We Shall Not Sleep – the final book in her series of five novels set during World War I – in paperback.
Although she had launched books across the world, that launch was the first on her own doorstep.
She said: “It is the only venue I can fit in. I’ve just come back from the US and I’m off to France for a conference, and then off to Italy and Spain.”
In 2013 she joined Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Anne Perry and David Hewson in Cromarty to take part in the village’s first crime and suspense festival.
She left Portmahomack in 2017, heading to Los Angeles to promote film adaptions of her works.
She had a heart attack in December 2022.
Announcing her death on April 10, Perry’s French publisher 10/18, said Perry had died in LA.
They said she would be remembered for her “memorable characters, historical accuracy, the quality of her detective stories, and also for her exploration of social issues”.
Working to the end, her final novel, The Fourth Enemy, was published in the week before her death.
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