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."
Strangely enough, what came next was… nothing. Or rather, nothing bad. Perry's friends stood by her. Her publishers kept publishing her. She won an Edgar Award in 2000. The Times of London named her one of the "100 Masters of Crime." She wrote over a hundred more books and sold twenty-six million copies before her death in 2023. The obituaries called her "prolific" and "beloved." They mentioned the murder, of course—it had become part of her brand, the ultimate irony of a murder mystery writer who'd committed a real one. But they mentioned it the way you mention a difficult childhood: regrettable, formative, long ago.
Murder, apparently, can be forgiven.
Then there’s the case of Marion Zimmer Bradley, who died in 1999 after having published over sixty novels, founded the Society for Creative Anachronism, and written The Mists of Avalon. This book awakened feminist consciousness in a generation of fantasy readers, reimagined Arthurian legend through the eyes of Morgaine, and taught countless women they could be powerful and magical and that the old religions weren't evil.
