Mandy Beaumont’s novel The Thrill Of It is true-crime inspired

Mandy Beaumont’s first novel tries to put the victims at the centre of a true-crime story.

Wallpaper designer Florence Broadhurst, who was killed in 1977, was the inspiration for the character known as Marlowe Kerr in The Thrill Of It.

Novelists have always been suckers for true crime. Dostoyevsky wrote Crime and Punishment after reading a Russian newspaper story about a young man who killed a chef and a washerwoman with an axe. The inspiration for Truman Capote’s genre-leaping non-fiction novel In Cold Blood was a short article in the New York Times about the murder of a family in rural Kansas. Both authors were fascinated by the psychology of the killers.

The attraction of true crime stories to novelists (and film-makers) is obvious: they are inherently dramatic and have the authenticity that comes from being based on real events. At the same time they lend themselves all too easily to exploitation, sensationalism and moral evasions. One often shades into the other. A critic who admired Justin Kurzel’s movie Snowtown, about the South Australian “bodies in barrels” murders, nevertheless described the film as “often unwatchably violent”.

Granny Killer John Wayne Glover

In her author’s note Mandy Beaumont states that her novel The Thrill Of It is a work of fiction that was “inspired and informed by the real-life brutal slayings of six older women on Sydney’s North Shore between 1989 and 1990 by English-born John Wayne Glover, also known as the Granny Killer”.

Beaumont divides her narrative between two voices: a third-person giving us the thoughts of the killer and the first-person of a young woman named Emmerson whose grandmother, Marlowe Kerr, was the killer’s earliest victim. The fictional Kerr is clearly modelled on wallpaper designer Florence Broadhurst, who was bludgeoned to death in her Paddington studio in 1977. Broadhurst has often been named as a possible victim of Glover, but he was never charged with her murder.

Sunbeam’s retro kettle based on Broadhurst’s designs.

After her own “free-spirited” mother manages to steal the police evidence box related to Marlowe Kerr’s murder, Emmerson — who dreams of joining the police — sets out to reinvestigate the case. Somehow she manages to enlist the help of other police who, instead of confiscating the missing evidence box and charging her with receiving stolen goods and perverting the course of justice, agree to help crack the case. It’s all a bit Mrs Marple.

Beaumont’s first novel, The Furies, was longlisted for the Stella Prize and drew comparisons with Charlotte Wood and Margaret Atwood, but her mojo seems to have gone missing here. The early chapters are littered with Wiki-style descriptions (“I’d received a letter accepting me into the New South Wales Police Academy — 200 kilometres southwest of Sydney in Goulburn”) and slapdash storytelling (“Back when Marlowe was killed, my mother and I sat on her couch for a week, only getting up to use the bathroom or make Vegemite on toast”).

Reading descriptions of the Sydney Harbour Bridge as “iconic” and the Opera House as a “momentous feat of engineering” and being told that Emmerson sat down on a “large sandstone rock that was formed millions of years ago” made me wonder whether the author’s heart was really in it.

The third-person voice inhabiting the mind of the murderer has more conviction, although readers might tire of the curling lip and tightening groin that warn another attack is imminent. Like John Wayne Glover, Beaumont’s fictional killer (a meat pie salesman) attacks many of his victims in nursing homes. Not all the attacks are fatal. Here he is, on page 30, assaulting a woman named Edith:

He walks up behind her and grabs her by the hair, pulls her head up to meet his face and hard-punches her — all energy and action in the swelling frenzy of his fists … As he hears the residents moving past Edith’s room to the cafeteria, he moves towards the door and smiles to himself as he opens it slightly and sees the word Alzheimer’s again … Outside, he walks past the bins lined up against the back fence, knowing that none of the nurses will suspect him of hurting Edith. Poor Edith’s memory just got a little bit more pickled after this fall, they will say.

The Thrill of It author Mandy Beaumont.

Even allowing for the fact that this is supposed to be the murderer thinking, readers might wonder why none of the nurses could tell the difference between a frenzied attack with both fists and a fall?

The assailant walks away and poor forgetful Edith is never heard from again.

In her author’s note, Beaumont chastises the media for their “ongoing glorification and sensationalism of the lives and actions of perpetrators of violent crime, while so often ignoring the victims and their once rich and meaningful lives”, suggesting that this “speaks to the kind of society we have become”.

Coming from an author who has chosen to write a thriller about one of Sydney’s most infamous murderers, this seems a bit rich.

Beaumont says she hopes her novel “can in some small way restore agency and power” to John Wayne Glover’s “invisible” victims, whose names she lists in the novel’s dedication. Yet with the exception of the Florence Broadhurst character, the elderly women in the novel are nearly always introduced and dispatched within a few paragraphs, their only role being that of victims needed to advance the serial killer plot. This doesn’t feel to me like agency and power.

Beaumont has won critical acclaim for her previous work but here she seems unable to find the tools she needs to transform a well-documented real-life crime into a fiction that succeeds in its own right. Narrative tension quickly evaporates and her manifesto of victim empowerment feels specious at best. Another Australian author, Fiona McFarlane, has just published a series of short stories based on another notorious killer, Ivan Milat. Her approach is oblique, reflective and haunting in its restraint. Less is sometimes more.

Tom Gilling is a writer.