Author Edwina Shaw has wanted to write her memoir, Dear Madman, since her Nana told seven year-old Shaw about the man who murdered Nana’s sister over a century ago.
Now in mid-life, Shaw has written her true crime story and included the voice of a violent, mentally ill perpetrator who she portrays with empathy and compassion. She does not hold back on the brutality but contextualises the crime in a way many writers do not.
‘It’s an examination of what it was like to live in Queensland in the early twentieth century and the brutality of the age,’ says Shaw.
Author Edwina Shaw. IMAGE supplied
‘The ugly truth is that early settlement years were bathed in the blood of Aboriginal people and the poor and damaged people from England who were exiled here. It was a brutal time and the mentally ill were neglected.
‘Dear Madman looks at what makes a killer.’
The story is set in the Lockyer Valley farming region in the early 1900s, where the author’s great-grandfather unwittingly hired a man with a history of violent crime, endangering the lives of his wife and four young daughters.
The ensuing murder of Shaw’s ancestor, a little girl, left her family feeling cursed and they carried the trauma through generations. Some relatives wanted to keep the story a secret and urged Shaw not to write the book but she felt compelled.
‘I wanted to make sense of what happened and cleanse the ancestral wound we were all carrying,’ Shaw says.
Voice of a killer demanding to be heard
For four years, the author deeply researched the events leading to the murder and heard the voice of the killer in her head.
‘I was writing the first draft at a residency at The National Writers’ House, Varuna, when a photo of the murderer arrived,’ says Shaw.
‘He had been forcing his way into my writing. I was taking dictation from his point of view. When his intake photo from the Mental Asylum arrived, I saw the face of the man dictating his story to me.
‘The photo (now the cover of Dear Madman) softened me.
‘I see him looking for the angels.’
Shaw intentionally took an empathetic view of the perpetrator and in the book she explores whether forgiveness without excusing violence is possible.
‘I’ve worked in prisons and I know society contributes to the making of these people.’
Suspenseful reconstruction of a heinous crime
In Dear Madman, Shaw offers a creative reconstruction of events that led to the seemingly senseless killing of a child. She confronts not only the murder, but her personal search for meaning, accountability and forgiveness.
Shaw, a writing teacher, editor and author of several books, says she waited until she had the ‘writing skill and practice’ to give her difficult family story the treatment it deserved.
Her timing paid off because Dear Madman is a perfect blend of fast-paced suspenseful thriller with the slower, reflective passages of the narrator and many light hearted family moments in a world similar to Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians.
Never mawkish, the book has equal compassion for the man born to disadvantage and the family he almost shattered.
Influenced by the investigative depth of Helen Garner’s This House of Grief and the psychological intimacy of See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt, Dear Madman is both true crime and a meditation on violence, intergenerational trauma and the radical possibilities of forgiveness.
Shaw is so close to the story. The man who killed her ancestor spent the rest of his days in The Sandy Gallop Asylum in Ipswich, a building she can see from the patio of her home.
Sandy Gallop Asylum in Ispwich. SOURCE: Qld Parliamentary Paper 1911
So Dear Madman is a memoir, told in a warm voice that brings the characters to life on the page.
Well-written and researched true crime novels, such as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, are very popular but many end with punishment, execution or destroyed lives and can leave the reader feeling flat, horrified and hopeless.
Shaw’s book is different because it’s written by a seasoned female author in a highly original voice full of empathy, nuance and ultimately: hope.
Dear Madman is published by and available for sale at AndAlso Books and retails for $35.50. Also available at selected bookshops including Avid Reader
