For the April Author Spotlight, Sydney writer, Alicia Thompson, spoke about Ex (NineStar Press), her first full-length novel to fellow Sydney author, Natalie Conyer. Ex has at its heart a crime, or crimes, but it doesn’t follow the clichéd whodunnit conventions. Instead, it explores how the slow uncovering of what happened impacts those close to the event. It’s also a ghost story, and a study of grief and healing.
Adele Soames, recently returned to London, is mourning the accidental death two years earlier of her son, Toby. On Hampstead Heath she meets a young boy, Charlie Falk, who knew Toby – but as Adele later discovers, Charlie disappeared just after Toby’s death. Enter DS Xandra Bentley, who can’t let go of Charlie’s disappearance and whose involvement brings both sorrow and joy to Adele.
Where did the ideas for Ex come from? What do you want to highlight?
As with many other writers, I often write small fragments of scenes that live in notebooks and folders. Anything can inspire these, although for me it’s usually often dreams. Triggers arising from anything I’m reading can also occur – often seemingly unrelated. Ex made me realise I need to start dating these scraps! Going through my folder for ideas I kept seeing this one-page interaction with a grieving woman and a boy on a park bench. It was a simple scene to read, but I knew the boy was a ghost and the potential in that really crackled for me. Eventually I couldn’t stand it. I had to know what happened to Charlie, and the only way I was going to find out was to write his story. Kurt Vonnegut says plot momentum and development comes from having characters who want something. Charlie wanted to be found.
From that beginning, the setting ignited more sparks. I lived in London for some time and visited regularly after that. When I couldn’t be there, imagining a novel set there was the next best thing. The locations gave me other characters, and their needs and interactions just started writing the story for me.
Adele Soames is a finely drawn, sympathetic character. How did she originate, and how did you capture her?
Adele’s initial role was that of grieving mother – someone for Charlie to reach out to for help, who would sympathise with a young boy, especially when she realises he is connected to her own son. I hadn’t initially set out to write a crime novel per se, even though the solving of Charlie’s situation would inevitably lead to something having gone wrong somewhere. Following up from my first novel, Something Else (a rural, queer love story) I was still interested in exploring grief and how it plays out in our lives and those connected to us, how we manage it, how we learn to live with it in our lives and whether and how we find peace and acceptance, and what does that look like? This novel is really Adele’s journey to finding her own resolution, through love and connection. And as with many female crime writers who explore social issues, it just happens to be a crime novel, too.
A feature of an Ex, an unusual one, is the exploration of sexuality, gender fluidity and sexual preference, although you never sensationalise this nor make it tawdry. Could you tell us more about this aspect of the book?
I am very interested in what attracts one person to another, and for me a large part of that is the inner workings, the soul. I am always asking the question, what if the outer packaging is inconvenient or surprising, not what you (or society) had in mind? What to do with that? What part of a person do we love? The ageing shell or the living heart and mind? I explored this question more fully in Something Else, but it overflowed into Ex as well and I enjoyed the complexity this gave to Adele’s emotional development in particular. I may never get to the bottom of it as new characters present different ways of seeing the same thing.
Another plot development in Ex—introducing the Walmsley family and the son Jeremy—happened at first because I needed some love and light in the story to contrast with Adele’s darker space. At first, I couldn’t see the plot purpose in this divergence in the story (apart from giving me and my reader some light relief and fun) but it quickly became clear that understanding Jeremy’s needs and desires was key to the story. This was a surprise and also a gift.
It’s not a spoiler to say Charlie Falk, the boy Adele meets on the Heath is already dead (it’s on the back cover of the book). How did Charlie come to be, and did you have any problems reconciling the ghost story part of the novel with the realistic procedural part?
The starting point was Charlie’s ghost and how he became so – what does he want from Adele? Part way into writing it I realised Adele couldn’t feasibly solve this crime on her own without access and resources; hence the need for Xandra. This gave me two POVs and had the benefit of alternating from the emotional problem-discovering side to the pragmatic/rational problem-solving side, while giving the reader a break from Adele’s emotional turmoil. Romance grew from there organically when Xandra became her own self. There’s a lot going on in Xandra’s background but I was careful to only hint at it as there are future story plots hidden in her history and you don’t want to commit to details too early as it may reduce your future options (thank you Hayley Scrivenor for that handy piece of advice).
In this book you play with various uses of Ex (and X). What prompted that, and how does it add to the story?
I need to get better at recording the germination of my ideas and where they come from so I can answer questions like this. I don’t remember the igniting moment, sadly. It grew so fast the start got lost! I do love words and their etymologies. Once I got the idea, I listed all the ‘Ex words’ that seemed compatible with my themes and key plot points, then pondered how a chapter with that dynamic could look. Or I looked at chapters I already had and wondered what ‘Ex-word’ could work and made small adjustments if required. It wasn’t that hard and was a lot of fun. In fact, like writing a poem to fit a particular rule structure, it became a mechanism for releasing many new ideas. I also liked that there were double and even triple meanings available for several words.
In today’s fiction it is difficult to stand out with something new or different and I thought maybe this could provide a connecting thread of interest for the reader without being too gimmicky. If the opportunity arose it would be fun to have a series for Xandra with similar prefix titles. I do have an idea for a follow-up already with a three-letter title that could be huge fun, but let’s see if it has the opportunity to come alive.
What are you working on at present? Can you give us a taste?
While I’ve had a nice run with NSP (a specialist LGBT+ publisher in the US), I’m keen to work with an Australian agent and/or publisher to get to the next stage of my writing career, and that entails producing something fresh and new not connected to my other books. I am currently spruiking an Australian outback domestic noir set on an isolated property in the 1970s with plot and subplots touching on the growth of female empowerment, societal fallout from the Vietnam War, and other issues relevant to those times, especially for those in remote communities.
A young girl goes to a wealthy station to be a companion to the wife while her husband is away mustering. As soon as she arrives, she is exposed to the exhibitionistic behaviour of the couple; the wife continues to lure the girl into her web of jealousy and intrigue while her husband is away. In this time the girl discovers that the previous companion was found murdered and buried on the border of the property shared with the husband’s brother, a returned war veteran who has his own issues. . . At the end of the story the girl is inspired to give up her secretarial ambitions and instead enrols in the Redfern Police Academy, creating the set-up for further adventures as her career progresses over the years to present times.
More info here.