Read Anne Perry's Bedford Square the other day. It's part of Perry's series featuring Thomas and Charlotte Pitt. It's a long series, still ongoing. Bedford Square is a fairly late book in the series, but the books seem fairly self-contained. There were enough references to past events to pique my interest, but not enough to confuse or annoy me.

I enjoyed the book. I thought it was very well-paced, doing a good job of keeping the mystery developing, throwing in new clues or events that make you think, "Wait a minute...." The ending was maybe a bit melodramatic. What really convinced me to read more books in the series was the characters. I really like Charlotte. And Aunt Vespasia. And Gracie. And Tellman. And especially Tellman and Gracie, together. (There's nothing more fun than a couple who clearly were made for each other and who equally clearly haven't figured that out yet.)

The book had some nice Victorian period detail, too. And sent me on a Google quest to find out why on earth one's butler would iron the newspaper in the morning. Answer: it sets the ink and helps keep it from rubbing off on your fingers.

Hmmm...I wonder if that would work on a modern newspaper. Though, it's a major event if I bother to iron my shirts, so ironing my newspapers isn't something I'm likely to try anytime soon.

I'm glad the book was so good, because it helped to distract me from an odd biographical fact about the author which might otherwise have intruded: in 1954, Perry, who was 15 years old and known as Juliet Hulme at the time, helped her best friend Pauline to murder Pauline's mother. Both girls were convicted and spent five years in prison before being released. Both have been living peaceful and productive lives (under new identities) ever since.

The crime was the basis of the film Heavenly Creatures, released forty years later. It was the publicity surrrounding the release of the movie that led to the "outing" of Perry as Hulme, although apparently it had been something of an open secret in New Zealand literary circles for some time. There is an exhaustively complete website which will tell you everything you could possibly want to know about the movie and the real events behind it.

It's worth looking at, just because there are so many bizarre aspects to the case. There's the alleged motive for the crime: Juliet was about to leave the country, and the girls didn't want to be separated. They convinced themselves that if they killed Pauline's mother, Pauline would be allowed to go with Juliet.

And then there's the trial. A great deal of testimony was woven around extracts from Pauline's diary and fiction written by both girls. Writers here: imagine if your adolescent fiction was introduced in court as evidence pertaining to your sanity. (Virtually all the testimony was directed towards determining the girls' states of minds at the time of the killing -- there was no question that they'd done it, just whether they could be held to be sane, and thus responsible.) The girls do seem to have constructed an elaborate fantasy world portraying themselves as special, but it's hard to tell whether they were seriously delusional, or just playing a complicated role-playing game. And it's curious how often people testifying felt compelled to remark that the fiction the girls had written wasn't any good. I mean, it seems to be true, based on quoted excerpts, but I really don't see how it's relevant.

Then there were deterimined attempts by both the defense and the prosecution to insinuate that the girls were lesbians. The defense apparently thought this would bolster their insanity defense (!), while the prosecution was determined to portray the two as "dirty-minded little girls." Ew. Predictably, this has resulted in the recent publication of a book that apparently portrays the two as proto-feminist sexual rebels. Um, no. Sorry. They really did murder someone.

And then there's the weird appropriateness of someone who was convicted of murder becoming a mystery writer.

I could go on. It's just sort of fractally bizarre. Choose anything, and look at it more closely, and you find more weirdness lurking there.

But the thing that really strikes me about this case is that the girls were released when they grew up, and then proceeded to lead law-abiding lives. And in Perry's case, become a best-selling writer.

In this day and age, in the USA, we're not really big on the idea of rehabilitation in the justice system. It's not that unusual to see children younger than Pauline and Juliet were at the time of their crime tried as adults. If two girls of the same age committed a similar crime in present day California or Texas, I'm certain they would have been tried as adults, and quite possibly even face the death penalty.

Makes you think, doesn't it?