The extraordinary book DEAR MADMAN (&Also Books 2026) by Edwina Shaw is part ancestral memoir, part true crime, part family history, part mystery, part psychological examination and part sociological and cultural analysis. Touching on grief, murder, parenting, prejudice, institutionalisation, prisons, poverty, class, sibling bonds, infamy and particularly intergenerational trauma, DEAR MADMAN is the true story of a notorious crime a hundred years ago in Shaw’s family, and the blight or even curse it has left as a stain on generations of her family.
The voices in this story are powerful and authentic. We have the author herself, who has heard the story firsthand from her nana many times over the years: how her great grandfather hired a farmhand without realising he was a dangerous and violent man with a criminal past, and the risk this posed to him, his wife and their children (a son and four daughters, one of them Shaw’s grandmother). Shaw relates the chronology of her knowledge of this story and her research into the factual history through the use of Trove, government archives, institutional records and personal connections. Her voice is contemporary, wise, poignant, pragmatic and reasonable. The horror of this man and his actions have haunted her family for decades and she asks of herself whether it is ever possible to find forgiveness for someone responsible for the death of a child. In her quest, she searches deep into the man’s childhood and early life and finds not only psychological disturbance but also extreme physical illness and emotional paucity.
This leads her to write part of the book in the man’s voice. Through her careful and compassionate rendering and reimagining of his life, her research and a few scant photographs, the murderer is brought to life, his perspective accounting for a large portion of the book. Indeed, after the murder, he wrote several notes of confession to the victim’s mother: ‘Dear Madman’ he wrote (misspelling Madam), ‘I humbly confers to you for a deed of murder.’
The third point of view is third person and concerns the family and events of the time, as reimagined by Shaw from what she’s pieced together from newspaper articles, police reports, prison records and other sources. Together, the three voices combine to provide a powerful account of a troubled man, a vulnerable family and the societal forces of the time which were not up to the task of dealing with anyone with severe mental or even physical difficulties.
But the story Shaw has heard repeatedly from her nana is different to that from her great aunt, and Shaw’s mother is suspicious of the whole project. What good could come from digging into the past? How could understanding, let alone forgiveness, ever be possible?
Shaw has suffered several traumatic losses of her own and she began to wonder if untangling this story – and perhaps breaking the fabled curse – would go some way towards healing her broken family. What she discovers is transformative, unpredictable, confronting and heartbreaking.
No baby is born a killer. Murderers, rapists and other serious offenders are made so by a combination of dodgy genes, physical maladies, mental illness or psychosis, tortuous parenting, the lack of proper role models, bad luck, traumatic experiences, bad company, and a life of no consequences lacking opportunities or appropriate help. We, as a society, mould people according to how we treat them, the help we offer, the respect we show (or don’t), the prejudices we confirm, the labels we confer and the biases we sustain. Shaw explores this broad societal difficulty through the lens of this one man and his involvement with her ancestral family.
She questions, researches and probes, and tackles this difficult subject not with a sentimental attitude but rather a heart open to uncovering the truth, whatever that may be.
The story is masterfully written and well crafted. The murderer’s voice is distinct and original. Shaw does not set out to enlist pity but somewhere along the way, comprehension dawns. We see this man become what he is because of his circumstances and while that doesn’t in any way excuse his actions, it does explain them.
Shaw has carried this story since she was seven, when it was first told to her. All her adult life to this point has, I suspect, been training for the writing of this account – a dark reckoning of the links between past and present, a chilling and grisly crime tale that transforms into a story of profound tenderness and compassion.
I can only imagine the toll it’s taken for the author to compile this book, to finally set it all out on paper and release it into the world. Yet I hope it has done for her what she imagined it would – drain the festering wound and allow healing to take place.
We all have sordid stories in our backgrounds if we look hard enough. Mostly they are kept hidden because of embarrassment or pain or distress or humiliation. Rarely are they exposed to the light. Rarer still that both sides of the story are researched and presented in this way, so that victims can finally be spoken about without trauma, and perpetrators are seen also as victims.
I read this book in two breathless sittings. The mystery of who is killed propels the narrative as much as a contemporary crime novel, more so in fact, because this is personal. The more Shaw uncovers – and the more she delves deep into her psyche and the culture of the time – the more layered and fascinating this story becomes. A true triumph of a book, not least because of the author’s meditations on truth, trauma, family and forgiveness.