Deadly Debuts with Aoife Clifford & Janice Simpson

Deadly Debuts: First time crime novelists, Aoife Clifford & Janice Simpson, talk to Sisters in Crime’s Maggie Baron about what makes them and their books tick.

Aoife Clifford won the Sisters in Crime’s Scarlet Stiletto Award in 2007 for the first thing she ever wrote and since then has notched up a second prize and numerous other category wins. She won the S D Harvey Ned Kelly Award in 2012 and been shortlisted for the UK Crime Association’s Debut Dagger. In 2014 she was awarded an Australian Society of Authors mentorship for her novel, All These Perfect Strangers, published in Australia in March 2016 and United Kingdom in August 2016 by Simon & Schuster and the United States in July 2016 by Penguin Random House.

Her debut novel centres on first year university student, Penelope Sheppard, and three deaths, actually more, if you go back far enough. Perhaps all of them were murders but it’s a grey area. Murder, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, she says. Little by little, through Pen’s flawed narration and tantalising diary entries, secrets, truths and lies come to light and a dangerous dilemma unfolds, twisting and turning until the very last page.

Click here to view author video.

Janice Simpson, a Sisters in Crime national co-convenor, is working on a new crime series set in Australia, as well as a compendium of stories about the importance of place in the lives of adoptees.  Simpson has had several short fiction and nonfiction pieces published in print and online magazines. She works as an academic at RMIT and is a creative practices PhD candidate, also at RMIT.

In Simpson’s first book, Murder in Mt Martha (Hybrid Publishers, April), murder stretches its tentacles into the past when Nick Szabo interviews elderly retiree Arthur Boyle to flesh out his thesis about defectors from the Hungarian water polo team during the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. Szabo’s investigations take a radically different path when Boyle mentions the 1953 murder of work colleague, Beverly Middleton. She was only 14.

What is it about the account that compels Szabo to join forces with Boyle in a quest to uncover the truth? Australia in 1953 and 2013 might be separated by sixty years, but eerie similarities exist between public and private morality.

Maggie Baron is Sisters in Crime’s President. A former forensic scientist who worked in the area of trace evidence analysis, she is a passionate crime reader who brings a strong analytical perspective to the craft of writing. She works in infrastructure and transport planning.

Venue: The Rising Sun Hotel (upstairs – no lift), cnr Raglan Street and Eastern Road, South Melbourne. Melways map 57 H2; free on-street parking after 6 pm; trams 1, 12 or 55 or St Kilda Road trams

Tickets: $10 Sisters in Crime and Writers Victoria members/concession; $15 non-members

Tickets not sold prior to the event will be available at the door for $12/$17

Dinner upstairs from 6.30 pm (bookings not necessary); men or ‘brothers-in-law’ welcome

Click here to book with Eventbrite. 

Sun Bookshop stall: members receive a 10% discount

Additional information: Carmel Shute 0412 569 356; admin@sistersincrime.org.au