Date:
Author: Kevin John Brophy, Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing, The University of Melbourne
Original article: https://theconversation.com/a-serial-killer-blames-his-monstrous-mother-but-misogyny-is-the-real-culprit-250805
Mandy Beaumont’s debut novel, The Furies, was unrelentingly intense in its depictions of self-hatred, violence, rape and induced abortion. Her latest novel, The Thrill of It, is a more controlled and conventional excursion into male violence against women. It is just as serious in its exposure of misogyny. But it has a stronger narrative, with episodes of relief from its scenes of debasement.
Review: The Thrill of It – Mandy Beaumont (Hachette)
The Thrill of It reimagines the events surrounding John Wayne Glover, better known as the Granny Killer, who was convicted of murdering six elderly women on Sydney’s North Shore between 1989 and 1990. It occupies a sometimes uncertain territory, somewhere between case study and crime thriller.
The novel’s starting point is the murder in 1977 of a celebrity designer and businesswoman named Marlowe Kerr – a murder that mirrors the brutal, still-unsolved killing of real-life designer Florence Broadhurst, famous for her iconic wallpaper designs.
Chapters alternate between third-person accounts of the horrific crimes and domestic life of the killer – a modestly successful salesman with a model North Shore family – and first-person chapters in the voice of Kerr’s granddaughter Emmerson Kerr, known as “Em”.
Em found her grandmother’s murdered body back in 1977. She is the first person in Sydney to see the connection between a spate of sexualised murders of aged women and Kerr’s death 12 years earlier.
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So ordinary, he is barely visible
Em is a smart, inquisitive, critical, attractive and observant character, who could well feature in future novels. She plans to join the police force, but becoming involved in this case could cruel her chances. She might be interfering too amateurishly, and her reckless mother managed to persuade someone (possibly a boyfriend) to steal evidence from the crime scene back in 1977.
This thread of the narrative, the most fictionalised aspect of the plot, allows for an outsider’s fresh view into how the police do and don’t “get it” when it comes to the murder of women. The police have come to early conclusions and are looking for a young man, so they are missing clues and ignoring leads that could save lives and hasten the discovery of the killer, though their incompetence does not entirely undo what they bring to the investigation.
The chapters that describe the murderer’s home life and his increasingly manic killings follow real events from 1989 more closely. He has a job as a travelling salesman for Big Boys Pies and Sweets, which gives him access to aged-care homes. There, he can select victims, harass the residents and cause havoc without being noticed. He is one of those men who appear so ordinary they are almost invisible.
The novel makes a point of showing the older women who become his victims are not merely “grannies”. They are full of personality. They have impressive achievements and live rich and vital lives. Their deaths will long be grieved by those who loved them. This point is made again and again.
Yet it is the killer who occupies centre stage for a good part of the novel and his atrocities are shockingly detailed. Beaumont is determined, across both her novels, to avoid euphemisms when she depicts male violence against women. This is becoming one of her trademarks.
Blaming the mother
The Thrill of It takes us inside the killer’s mind, tracing the psychological motive for the murders back to bizarre sexual teasing by his mother (at least, as he perceived it), in between visits from her lovers and clients.
It is a common trope in crime fiction that the mother carries much of the responsibility (if not the blame) for the son’s twisted sexual appetites – and his resulting need for revenge upon women. At times, The Thrill of It takes on the characteristics of a psychological case study. But its adherence to the thriller genre also seems to determine some of its attributed motivations – especially in the case of the monstrous mother. Here, the novel as serious inquiry and the novel as entertainment become an uneasy match.
From Crime and Punishment to In Cold Blood, writers have often been drawn to the gratuitous act of murder for its drama, its contradictions, and its arresting effect on the many of us who can barely imagine the mind behind such violence.
Many writers would wilt under the challenge of entering the mind of a man who kills for the thrill and power of it – particularly a man who focuses this insane pleasure on the act of killing older women.
Beaumont keeps to her task and makes something real of her portrait, though at times her own sense of horror draws her back from fiction into summary statements, even when they are delivered via the killer’s psyche:
Yes, of course he wishes he could stop what he’s been doing, but he can’t, he hasn’t been able to since he was young – the thrill of it all has become an unstoppable surge.
In the end, however, the novel – dedicated to the victims of the real-life killer – is not about attempting to understand this all too ordinary and banally evil man who likes to eat fish and chips in his car. Rather, The Thrill of It is about the real lives lost, the long work of grief, and the dangers that are always present for women in a society where male violence is too common.