The Pariah Author: Who Gets Forgiveness?
On murder, molestation, and the unwritten rules of literary exile
In 1994, a journalist named Lin Ferguson sat down to investigate a rumor. Peter Jackson’s film Heavenly Creatures was making the festival rounds, telling the true story of two teenage girls in 1950s New Zealand who’d murdered one of their mothers with a brick wrapped in a stocking. Kate Winslet was luminous as Juliet Hulme, the posh, tubercular dreamer whose friendship with Pauline Parker had curdled into something lethal. Ferguson wanted to know what had happened to Hulme after her release from prison.
She found her living in a converted stone barn on the Scottish coast, writing Victorian murder mysteries under the name Anne Perry.
By 1994, Perry had published fifteen novels. Her Thomas Pitt series was a bestseller. Her agent, Meg Davis, had no idea her client had beaten a woman to death at age fifteen. When Ferguson’s story broke, Davis called Perry in a panic, ready to phone the lawyers.
“I’m afraid it’s true,” Perry said. “You can’t ring the lawyer. It’s true. I am Juliet Hulme.”
Stra…