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Book Review: So Brilliantly Clever by Peter Graham

“Why could Mother not die? Dozens of people are dying all the time, thousands, so why not Mother?”

These chilling and immortal words of Pauline Parker at age 15 are merely the tip of the iceberg of Peter Graham's investigation into what many people consider to be the most disturbing crime ever committed in New Zealand's history. The murder of Honorah Parker in 1954 has been a constant source of fascination both nationally and internationally and Graham tells the story in great and thorough detail.

Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme seemed like normal 15-year-old girls growing up in 1950s Christchurch, which is why the apparently cold-blooded murder of Pauline's mother seemed so shocking to the entire world. However, Graham's intense and thorough study of the two girls reveals that they both suffered life-threatening illnesses and deeply lonely childhoods as a result. Graham paints such a thorough portrait of what their lives were like that it could almost be easy to see that their disturbed minds were merely a result of their childhoods and the incredibly repressive society they were growing up in, and therefore feel a little sympathy – not for the murder, but the circumstances leading to their state of mind – and it did indeed appear that their minds were one and the same.

Pauline and Juliet's childhoods were almost mirror images of each other. Pauline in hospital alone with a bone disease, Juliet sent off to the Bahamas and the Bay of Islands with life-threatening lung infections. Both suffered loneliness and lost the ability to play and interact with others as normal children would. So naturally, when they met, they had a lot to relate to each other about, and thus began a union that they were completely and utterly desperate not to have broken.

Graham covers the girls' entire lives, and through Pauline's journal entries and testimonies from people who knew them, is able to truly capture how their friendship developed and became more and more intense. Graham explores a number of reasons for their psychosis – they certainly were mentally unwell at the time of the murder, although the courts disagreed – so the reader is able to finish the book having made their own conclusions about what was at the core of the girls' motivation to murder Pauline's mother.

Graham also describes what Pauline and Juliet are like now, and reveals that it actually wasn't a condition of their release that they never meet again – they have apparently just chosen not to. Each are desperate to put their terrible crime and past lives behind them; as desperate as they once were to not be separated. Juliet Hulme is now Anne Perry, a bestselling crime author, and Pauline Parker is now Hilary Nathan, living alone on a remote island off the coast of Scotland.

Peter Graham has clearly done his research in creating this book, and it shows. The book ends with what happened to Pauline and Juliet's families and the lawyers involved in the case, showing how deeply the murder shook New Zealand and how everyone involved struggled to go on afterwards.

Sixty years on and Pauline and Juliet's crime is still an endless source of fascination to people. This book certainly provides a deep insight into their lives, their motivations and what it was like to be a girl in 1950s Christchurch, dealing with class struggles, loneliness, parental neglect, the culmination of these pressures and the chilling and sad aftermath.