I met Peter Fitzpatrick a few years ago. We had much to discuss over email – including the beauty of the Geelong Football Club.
He became a contributor to the Almanac and the MCC’s Balcony Banter.
Peter has had a wonderful career in the world of arts and letters and has been an influential academic. You can read more about him below.
He has just released his third novel Mayo Street, published by Hardie Grant.
John Harms
Mayo Street. It’s a very desirable address. And it seems to promise the perfect suburban dream. Until three of the street’s residents die.
Behind its respectable facades lie some terrible secrets, and in the course of one autumn many of them are shockingly exposed. Relationships come under pressure that not all of them can survive.
Enter a couple of unlikely sleuths – a teenage girl and a septuagenarian woman. Like their neighbours, both have plenty of problems of their own – growing up and growing old are tough enough without having a killer in your street.
Mayo Street takes a deep dive into suburban life in contemporary Australia, where things aren’t always what they seem.
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Mayo Street is Peter Fitzpatrick’s third novel. Its predecessors, Death in the Back Pocket (with Barbara Wenzel) and Promontory, set respectively in an AFL football club and on a bushwalk in the 1920s, are similarly crime-novels-with-a-twist; all three share a keen eye for the complexities – and the humour – of human behaviour.
Peter’s writing spans a number of genres: in feature film, his credits include screenplays for Hotel Sorrento (for which he won an AFI Award) and Brilliant Lies; as a biographer, he has published two dual biographies, Pioneer Players: the lives of Louis and Hilda Esson, and The Two Frank Thrings (for which he won the National Biography Award in 2013); and in musical theatre, three of his shows have been professionally staged – flowerchildren: the Mamas and Papas Story, Life’s a Circus and CrossXroads (both with composer Anthony Costanzo). Another musical, Castro’s Children (for which Peter has written book and lyrics in collaboration with composer Simon Stone) will have its premiere in 2024.
In a previous life, Peter taught English and Drama at Monash University, where he was Foundation Head and Professor of Performing Arts. He directed some thirty productions during that period, at Monash and beyond, and published three books and many articles in the field of twentieth-century Australian theatre.
Peter lives in Melbourne (and sometimes in Port Douglas) with his wife, Gabrielle Baldwin.
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