Book Watch

So Brilliantly Clever:

Parker, Hulme & the Murder that Shocked the World

By Peter Graham

Awa Press, $42.00

The premeditated murder of Honorah Parker in a remote Christchurch park by her 16-year-old daughter Pauline and 15-year-old friend Juliet Hulme made headlines around the world back in 1954 and international media flocked to New Zealand to follow the trial.

Today the murder remains one of the most fascinating New Zealand criminal cases of all time, and a source of intense public interest – especially since one of the girls was revealed to be the murder-mystery writer Anne Perry, whose books have sold some 20 million copies.

The trial inspired Peter Jackson’s 1994 award-winning movie Heavenly Creatures and it was about this time that Juliet Hulme was outed as Anne Perry although this had nothing to do with Jackson. It was Lin Ferguson a journalist who broke Hulme’s cover in July 1994.

Author Peter Graham has done a remarkable job of research and detective work over several years and the book gives us for the first time the story of this truly ghastly crime in its entirety. He has gone back two generations looking at both the Parker and Hulme families and writes of the secrets and lies that permeated the girls’ families, the bizarre lead up to the murder, the trial in great detail from both prosecution and defence views, the girls’ conviction and sentencing, their lives in prison – Mt Eden for Hulme and Arohata for Parker – and of course their lives with new names after their release, and right up to the present. I was a schoolboy at the time the murder occurred but I do recall my parents talking about it with great disgust and no doubt it made the headlines in every  paper in the country.

I read this book in three long sittings and it would be fair to say I was riveted even though it is true crime instead of my usual fare of crime fiction. I found the story of their lives in the years since the trial, prison and beyond especially interesting.

Peter Graham (left - photo by Amelia Handscombe) worked for 30 years in Hong Kong as a barrister before returning to New Zealand to pursue a career as a crime writer. His first book, Vile Crimes, about a notorious poisoning case, was praised by The New Zealand Herald as “murderously good … a pacy narrative and a study in pathological selfishness”. His quest to unearth the whole truth about Parker and Hulme has taken him around the world. He lives in Canterbury, where he and his wife produce award-winning cider and run the Dunsandel Store.

Reviewed by Graham Beattie

This piece was first published in the Herald on Sunday, 13 November 2011


Craig Sisterson writes about it on his blog too.