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Like many novels, Aoife Clifford's latest book has a pretty good origin story.
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But, if you've read When We Fall (Ultimo Press, $32.99), a gripping Aussie noir set on the Victorian coast, it won't be the story you're expecting.
For starters, it has nothing to do with the novel's plot, or setting.
"Some people start with a plot idea or they start with characters, but what I usually start with is two opposing ideas, or ideas that are completely not related to each other," says Clifford.
"And sort of push them together and see kind of the chemistry that comes from that. And then off I go, trying to explore the ideas that I'm thinking about."
Clifford, who is based in Melbourne, spends a couple of days a week working in a bookshop, and the first kernel of a story appeared for her during a conversation with a customer that ended up blowing both their minds.
The customer was already unusual, in that she wasn't much of a reader. Instead, she was into fashion, and the two were discussing why some fashion appealed more than others.
For example, the customer said, about 15 years ago she saw a red dress in a shop window in Melbourne. She found a picture of it, cut it out and had kept both the cutting and the mental image of it during several moves.
She hadn't been able to get the dress out of her mind, and had often wondered what became of it.
Clifford, as it happened, had a very definite answer to this customer's burning question.
"I was absolutely gobsmacked because that was my wedding dress that she was describing. I know because it was a really distinctive dress - it was a red dress," she says.
"And so I said, I know exactly where it is, it's in a box at my house. So we sort of looked at each other and thought, this couldn't possibly be right, because this was like 15 years later."
The two used a picture to confirm they were talking about the same dress, a strapless, floor-length gown with black roses on the skirt.
"The dress itself is quite distinctive and the shop had only ever made one of them," Clifford says. "They'd made it for the singer Marina Prior, for a gala."
The dress had been worn once and returned to the shop, after which it was displayed in the window as a showpiece - a hint of the possibilities that lay beyond the usual kind of evening or wedding wear.
"The woman even came back a couple years later and said, 'I really want to get an oil painting of your dress. Is that okay with you?'" Clifford says, still slightly incredulous.
"It gave me the kernel of an idea of a person who kind of sees the world in words - people like me who have a legal background and like books - walking into a world where all the clues are visual clues because the other people involved in the story are visual people, and that's how they record the world."
The kernel grew into something quite different - the world of an artist who fetches up in a small coastal town, interpreting the world around her through paintings. When she turns up dead, it's her works that seem to hold vital clues to what has happened to her.
Clifford has also been inspired by Without Consent, a touring exhibition staged by the National Archives of Australia, about Australia's historic forced adoption policy.
She found herself thinking deeply about how people behave when governed by social conventions that are later revealed to be horrific, and traumatic.
"It was an exploration of mothers and their children, and what happens when people who perhaps think they're doing the right thing, have pretty devastating consequences for children being taken away from their parents," she says.
Growing up with an Irish heritage - her first name is a giveaway - she was already well-acquainted with the stories of forced adoption and its consequences.
"At the time, no one ever really put their minds to what had happened to those women and why they'd given up their babies," she says.
"Whitlam brought in the single mother benefit, and if you're looking at a government policy that has a direct effect almost straight away, that would have to be up there, because almost instantly, adoptions plummeted. So I was really fascinated by that."
When We Fall unfolds with a formula we have all come to recognise as the very best one for escapism - murder in a small town, solved by an outsider. Those around the victim have secrets, the outsider - in this case barrister Alex Tillerson - has her own problems and a long-standing connection to the place. The weather is relentless (here it's rain, a refreshing change from the tinder-box tension of a drought-stricken country town) and the physical setting becomes a character in its own right.
And, most pleasingly, the book only came out in February, and there is not a hint of COVID to be found in its pages. Clifford says the pandemic is too big to deal with in a couple of sentences - best to leave it off the pages entirely, and let the genre speak for itself. And, as someone who works with books, and speaks regularly with enthusiasts, she wanted to write the kind of book she knew people were craving - not least herself.
"I think, especially at the moment, crime fiction is really comforting because at the end of a book, it orders the world," she says.
"That whatever the big knot is in front of you, at the end, it'll kind of be a piece of string again, and you can get on with your life knowing that you got answers."
"And I know, at different times of the last couple of years, I've desperately wanted to read a book like that. I had that in mind, that I wanted to read a book that I knew others, or hoped others wanted to."