The Search for Anne Perry

A New York Times bestseller, this acclaimed biography of crime writer Anne Perry is now in paperback.

When Peter Jackson released Heavenly Creatures, based on a famous 1950s matricide committed by two teenage girls in an obsessive relationship, the movie launched his international career and forever changed the life of Anne Perry. Perry had achieved extraordinary success as a crime writer but was now publicly outed as one of the murderers, Juliet Hulme. A new light was cast, not only on her life but also on her novels, which feature gruesome and violent deaths and confront dark issues, including infanticide and incest.

For this biography, Joanne Drayton was given broad access to Anne Perry and her friends, relatives, colleagues, and archives. In a gripping narrative that alternates between the story of Juliet Hulme leading up to the murder and Anne’s life and writing career afterward, Drayton illuminates both parts, while drawing parallels between Perry’s own experiences and her characters and storylines. Drayton also gives a riveting account of the outing and Anne’s response. Anne Perry has sold twenty-six million books worldwide and published in fifteen different languages, yet she will now forever be known as a murderer who became a writer of murder stories.

Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Joanne Drayton is a Research Associate in the Centre for Art Studies at The University of Auckland, and an English teacher at Avondale College. Her critically acclaimed Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime (2008) was a Christmas pick of the Independent when it was released in the United Kingdom in 2009. Her other biographies include Edith Collier: Her Life and Work, 1885–1964 (1999); Rhona Haszard: An Experimental Expatriate New Zealand Artist (2002); and Frances Hodgkins: A Private Viewing (2005). She has curated exhibitions of Collier, Haszard, Hodgkins, and DK Richmond, and publishes in biography and art, and design history and theory. She was awarded a National Library Fellowship in 2007 to write her biography of Marsh. She is currently carving a post-colonial chess set in response to the Lewis pieces in the British Museum, and her interests include long-distance running, art, music and reading. She lives in Auckland, New Zealand with her partner and three cats.

"A pleasure for Perry's loyal fans and a book that is likely to win her some new ones as well . . . Drayton tells a beguiling story of an author's climb to the best-seller lists and how a secret she would rather keep hidden was publicly made known." —Kirkus Reviews

"A solid, well-documented literary biography. Drayton . . . examines Perry’s many novels in light of her earlier life, showing how some of her books’ themes reflect the turmoil and violence of her younger years and, in effect, showing how, though Perry might have left Hulme’s identity behind, the environment that shaped her younger life has also shaped her literary life."—Booklist

“The Search for Anne Perry is a terrific biography—and absolutely ingeniously structured.” —Terry Castle, cultural commentator and author of The Professor and Other Writings

“Important . . . revelatory, insightful, wonderfully researched, and powerfully written.”—Weekend Herald (New Zealand)

“A deeper and more important story than it’s ever seemed before.”—Toronto Star

“Builds a complex picture of the world of past crime, public success, work and private pain. . . . Drayton makes her case with insight and compassion.” —New Zealand Listener

“A fascinating book.” —Herald on Sunday

“Daring . . . Drayton is allowed an unprecedented level of access into the world of Anne Perry, and weaves in both her life and the lives in her crime novels to illustrate the story of a truly fascinating character.” —Time Out

“As riveting as the best of acclaimed author Anne Perry’s own fiction . . . [Drayton] opens windows.” —Vancouver Sun