Harriet Said...

Harriet Said... was the first novel written by Beryl Bainbridge, based on newspaper reports about the Parker–Hulme murder case in New Zealand which involved two young girls.
Although completed in 1958 it was rejected by several publishers in the late fifties, and one of the rejections is quoted on the flyleaf of the first edition:
The manuscript was thought lost but was found by one publisher, returned to the author and finally published by Duckworth and Company|Duckworth] in 1972, and by George Braziller in the US the following year.

Plot

It concerns two schoolgirls spending their holiday in an English coastal town. Harriet is the older at 14 and the leader of the two. The 13-year-old unnamed narrator develops a crush on an unhappily married middle-aged man, Peter Biggs, whom they nickname "the Tsar". Led by pretty, malevolent Harriet, they study his relationship with his wife, planning to humiliate him. Their plan quickly goes wrong, however, with horrifying results.