Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I was 10 when Christchurch was shaken by the murder of Honora Rieper (Parker) by her daughter Pauline and Juliet Hulme, and my parents discussed it at length, so the case has always been with me. This book adds a great deal to our knowledge of it, especially about the relationship of the girls and the role of their parents. The Hulmes' coldness and neglect of Juliet accounts for a great deal in her personality. The Reipers were not blameless in their handling of Pauline, but they seem to have been much better than they were painted. While class was an important factor in 1950s Christchurch, both families made full use of the egalitarian aspect of New Zealand society to cross that divide, and the Reipers were not the clods they are sometimes painted. Juliet (Anne Perry) has made all the running in rewriting the history, turning herself almost into a bystander to the murder (as it may well now seem to her), but Peter Graham delves into her later life less sympathetically than more authorised biographers and interviewers. (Never has anyone whose life handed them such bitter lemons turned it into sweeter or more plentiful lemonade!) He finds a narcissistic personality, who welcomed Pauline's worship and may have taken a more active role in planning the murder and carrying it out than she now admits. She says the whole affair lasted little more than a day, but Graham indicates how circumstances built up over a period of months, the girls inseparable, the parents more or less intent on separating them, Henry Hulme clearly lying to Pauline that she could join Juliet in South Africa or England when he had no intention of letting that happen. As Graham implies, had the girls known their parents' true plans, it might not have been Pauline's mother who died. The film "Heavenly Creatures" has been criticised for suggesting the girls lived in a world of hysteria, yet as Graham tells it, that is how it was, each living for and through the other, feeding each other's fantasies. The lesbian aspect added titillation, but Graham puts it into perspective. It was physical, but that probably meant more to Pauline than Juliet, and not a great deal to either. The case's major source has always been Pauline's diary. Juliet also kept one, and her resourceful mother Hilda Hulme ensured that it was destroyed before the police could find it. What a different story it might have told us! Pauline has resolutely guarded her privacy. If she were to speak out, the kaleidoscope of this case might turn again, revealing a quite different pattern. I read this book under the tile of "So Brilliantly Clever". Since it seems to be the same content, it is misleading to imply it is especially about Juliet Hulme/Anne Perry. While she may have smoothed over her past (who wouldn't?), she has served her time and is entitled to the new life she has made for herself. Putting her new name into the title is exploitive and cruel. And "the crime of the century"? I think Parker/Hulme is challenged for that title by Leopold/Loeb, Christie/Evans (which helped bring an end to hanging in Britain), the Manson "family" or several others.