In the back-room office of her Thornbury home, Mandy Beaumont points out one of her most prized possessions. It’s a collection of Murder Casebook magazines in their plastic binders. I lift the cover of one – “Body in the trunk” – and snap it shut.
Beaumont doesn’t shy away from the grisly. When she was young, her mother would take her to the newsagency to pick up the latest binder. The pair still phone each other to dissect the latest breakthroughs. Her dad’s taste was pretty groovy by comparison; reading his copy of Henry Miller’s Nexus as a child blew her mind.
Mandy Beaumont’s new novel is fiction, but based on the real-life serial killer John Wayne Glover.Credit: Andrew Watson
These twin influences make for a noirish blend. Beaumont always wears a slash of red lipstick, swears prolifically, is ready with a hug and talks at a clip.
The Thrill of It, her third book, is fiction, but based on the real-life serial killer John Wayne Glover, more luridly known in headlines as “The Granny Killer”. Between 1989 and 1990 he is known to have murdered six elderly women on Sydney’s affluent North Shore, and is suspected of murdering at least one other, wallpaper designer Florence Broadhurst. In 2005, 15 years after his arrest, he died by suicide in jail.
Beaumont says her latest novel is a homage to Glover’s victims.
In Beaumont’s book, the killer is leaden, epitomising the phrase “the banality of evil”. His only passion, apart from targeting women who remind him of his mother, is long-running Brit police procedural show The Bill – which is the only similarity he shares with his creator.
“I wanted him to be beige,” says Beaumont, “the guy who walks down the street and you ignore him. Whereas Marlowe Kerr (a character reminiscent of Broadhurst), she contains multitudes. She lies a bit, but she’s fabulous, she’s artistic.”
It’s a delicate dance, drawing on real-life crimes. Beaumont created a young female protagonist, Emmerson, who is training at the NSW Police Academy in Goulburn, to go into bat for the victims.
“It’s a homage to these women, unpacking their stories in a fictionalised way,” she says. “I really wanted it to be a love story, like a young woman’s love story for her grandmother, and also, a love story to older women. As I’m getting older, things are changing in my body and in the way I’m seen in society. I wanted to speak to those older women because their voices are just not out there.”
Some of Glover’s victims were described in the newspapers as “wife of” and, of course, as “grannies”, but had actually enjoyed illustrious careers in their own right. Beaumont has a horrific personal understanding of how victims of crime are diminished in the media. In 2020, her 15-year-old nephew, Angus, was stabbed to death by two teenagers.
“The media speaks of the criminals more so than the people who got hurt,” she says.
“The things that came out about Angus, were, ‘What was he doing in that park? He was doing drugs, he knew the blokes.’ It just wasn’t true – there’s footage. It’s just the way that the media portrays crime. The Thrill of It isn’t a pretty book because when that shit really happens, it’s physical, visceral. I think it’s important that we do connect with that stuff because if not, we become numb from watching serial killer docos or seeing people dead in the media. There’s a complicity to that, and it takes away the humanity. It’s a constant gut churn for me.”
Beaumont is one of those people for whom injustice just really sticks in the craw. “I worked in unions for 20-odd years. If you don’t see injustice in the world, you’re living a privileged f---ing existence.”
She grew up in Redcliffe, the coastal town in which Angus was murdered, a 30-minute drive from Brisbane. “It’s very working class. Very violent. A lot of bad shit happens,” she says. She moved to Brisbane and then to Melbourne with her partner, Russ, a baker, nine years ago. Remotely, she taught creative writing at Griffith University for over a decade. During the pandemic, that work dried up. Russ was working 70 hours a week to keep them afloat.
“Angus died two days before lockdown and I couldn’t even get to the funeral,” Beaumont says. “Then my dog died maybe two months later, and I was hardly seeing my partner. I was really f---ing sad and grieving.”
Beaumont’s previous novel, The Furies, was permeated with her grief.Credit:
This grief permeates her previous novel, The Furies. Nominated for the Stella Prize, the book follows Cynthia, an abattoir worker in a godforsaken country town, who rages against misogyny and mourns her dead sister. “I wanted to set it in the outback because I was influenced by Cormac McCarthy and Andrew McGahan, and a bit of Mad Max,” Beaumont says.
As with its successor, The Furies was loosely influenced by true crime. Beaumont was fascinated by the case of Katherine Knight, an abattoir worker who skinned her partner and was the first woman in Australia to go to jail for life without parole. “Some reviewers were not into it,” Beaumont says of the book’s distinctive prose. “One said, ‘This hasn’t been edited. She doesn’t know how to use grammar.’ Oh no, I very much do.”
Actually, she’s Dr Mandy Beaumont to you. Her PhD in creative writing is from RMIT University she was poet in residence at the State Library of Queensland.
Losing her regular teaching work was the impetus she needed to go down the more mainstream route of commercial crime with The Thrill of It.
“The Furies was a deeply feminist, literary fiction book, which isn’t that accessible to Joe Bloggs down the road,” Beaumont says. “It scares a lot of people to even go near that stuff, so I decided to write something that sells. The reality is that I’m a working-class writer who needs to make money. I was rejected for the 11th time for a grant yesterday. And I don’t have a doctor husband.”
As a writing teacher myself, I make it clear that most full-time authors have an invisible benefactor, be it a partner or through inheritance. “So many people don’t disclose that,” Beaumont agrees. “‘Oh, I just write all the time.’ Yeah, but your husband is in a $200,000 a year job. You own your own house!”
Despite The Thrill of It being a heavy book, Beaumont found joy in the research process, leaning into nostalgia with references to Madonna’s Like a Prayer album, Princess Diana’s visit to Sydney Harbour and Body Shop’s much-missed dewberry range. Kerry Packer even makes a cameo. “I reckon that’s really important, to have all those little titbits providing a real sense of place and to have people’s memory clicking,” she says.
To preserve her sanity she also created a “no-stress environment” from which to write, centre of which is resident cuddler Paisley, her staffy.
“I have a joyful life. I give myself to all my friendships and I have fun,” Beaumont says. “I exercise a lot, and to be really honest with you, I watch a whole lot of trashy, mind-numbing shit. I love The Real Housewives. I’ve got, like, every f---ing episode.”
The Thrill of It by Mandy Beaumont (Hachette) is published on February 26.
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