Three renowned writers of true crime Helen Garner (greatest contemporary writer), Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein (legal expert) tracked Erin Patterson’s preminary hearings and trial, joined the media scrum at the Latrobe Valley Law Courts, slept over in Morwell, a town east of Melbourne, and close to Leongatha, where the deadly dish was served, and spent unlimited hours in fervent discussion of the case and the themes it raises: Love, Hate, Jealousy, Revenge, Marriage, Money, Mycology and Murder.

The writers explore the gap between the certainties of the law and the messiness of reality, their own ambivalence about the true crime, genre, and all that remains unknowable about Erin Patterson.

 Hooper says “It’s comfortably middle class and white. There’s not the discomfort of racism or horrendous poverty.” To which Garner replies “ Well, it could be us.”

What possessed Patterson to commit such a murder and how did she think she would get away with it? Garner  explains “ What’s fascinating about crime is that there’s a sort of membrane that separates people like us, ordinary people who don’t murder, from someone who does. And I always want to look at the person whose foot has gone through that membrane, who has wrecked their own life by ending someone else’s”.

The Mushroom Tapes gives us recordings with excess detail that can bog down even the best-written account of some cases. The authors consider the appeal of true crime to women, wonder at the lies of the accused, and are struch by how everything becomes a metaphor the Dickensian fog. 

The Judge translates “moral culpability and harm caused into a unit of time” for Patterson life with a non-parole period of 33 years. 

The Mushroom Tapes: Conversations on a Triple Murder Trial by Helen Garmer, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein, W& N £20/ Text Publishing A$16.99, 256 pages.