“All Together Now” is the theme of our 2023 summer reading program for youngsters, which has begun and will run through July 28. Here at Rhoads Memorial Library, we are still registering Castro County youth through age 17, for this annual event. Plenty of prizes will be awarded as children complete reading goals, Terrific Tuesdays will be held beginning June 13, and we hope a fun time will be had by all!
In the adult world of books, we learned that Anne Perry, a favorite author among many of our patrons, died in Los Angeles on April 10, at the age of 84 following a heart attack suffered last December. Known for writing socially conscious and historical detective novels set in 19th century London as well as several Christmas novellas, she was born Juliet Hulme on Oct. 28, 1938, in London to Dr. Henry Rainsford Hulme, a physicist, and his wife, Hilda Reavley Hulme, a marriage counselor.
Juliet developed tuberculosis at age 6 and was sent to live with a foster family in the Bahamas for her health. At age 13, she was reunited with her family in Christchurch, New Zealand, where they had moved for her father’s job as rector of Canterbury University College. It was at Christchurch Girls’ High School where Juliet and her new best friend, Pauline Yvonne Parker, bonded and invented an elaborate medievallike fantasy world. In 1954, Juliet’s parents decided to divorce, with Juliet to accompany her father to South Africa, and it was then that fact became stranger than fiction.
Best friend Pauline wanted to move with Juliet, only to be told no by her mother, Honorah Parker. The girls’ solution to this problem was to murder Pauline’s mother, which they did, repeatedly striking her in the head with a half brick wrapped in a stocking. The trial for Juliet, aged 15 and Pauline, 16, was a sensation, much of it focusing on the girls’ fantasies about becoming famous novelists.
Convicted of murder, both girls were to serve five years in separate prisons, after which they would be released and given new identities. They were instructed never to meet again; if they violated that order, they would return to prison and serve life sentences. So, Juliet became Anne Perry and spent the next two decades working in retail sales, doing clerical work, serving as a flight attendant, limousine dispatcher, and insurance underwriter.
Perry still longed to become a writer. She settled in a small Scottish village and published her first novel in her late 30s. She went on to write over 100 books, selling over 26 million copies. Her criminal past was secret until word leaked in 1994 when movie director Peter Jackson wanted to recount her true-crime story in the film, “Heavenly Creatures.” In 2017, the never-married Perry moved to Los Angeles full-time to promote film adaptations of her novels.
It was in a 2003 interview that she said, “I hope I have been punished. I hope I have profited from the whole experience... to seek redemption, to devote the rest of one’s life to becoming a more compassionate, more just, less judgmental person. To atone.”
On that note, we bid you adieu until next week!