The Fall Girl



This was published 10 years ago

The Fall Girl

By Fiona Gruber

DEEP in the heart of one of Melbourne's most respectable suburbs, in a large ramshackle house surrounded by unkempt apple trees and sagging sheds, lives the Gilmore family.

The neighbours barely notice the 10 adults who, in subtly changing guises, pass down its cracked driveway.

Toni Jordan

Toni JordanCredit:PENNY STEPHENS

They have no idea that the house contains false walls and secret basement rooms, that the sheds hide contraband and are used in the creation of subterfuge. Unlike the doctors, lawyers and real estate agents who inhabit the neat villas around them, the Gilmores are professional confidence tricksters.

Trained in the art since infancy, the close-knit clan, with the patrician and debonair Lawrence Gilmore at its head, gull, hoodwink and shake down their "marks" (as victims are called) with ruthless efficiency and a dazzling array of elaborate and methodically planned heists, secure in their philosophy that the rich need their assets stripped.

Fall Girl is Toni Jordan's second novel, a follow-up to her highly successful debut, Addition, and, like its witty predecessor, this is intelligent romantic comedy at its deft best.

The protagonist is 29-year-old Della Gilmore, a redhead with a fine figure, seductive candour and lots of chutzpah. She needs all her talents as she attempts the biggest con of her career, prising $25,000 from the family trust of the extremely wealthy Metcalf family, for a spurious research project involving the highly elusive (most would say extinct) thylacine.

In the character of Dr Ella Canfield, Della fronts up to the Toorak mansion of Daniel Metcalf as a va-va-voom scientist in tight khaki and oversized tortoiseshell specs. She carries a briefcase brim-full of back-up for her claims to be a highly regarded evolutionary biologist with degrees from Melbourne and Harvard.

Della has done her research and knows that Metcalf, the handsome and dishevelled heir to a vast fortune, is also a thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) fancier; he believes he saw one as a child on a camping trip to Wilsons Promontory.

As with any successful con, knowing your target's weaknesses and beliefs is useful. The Prom is where "Dr Canfield" plans to conduct an expansive and exhaustive investigation and the Metcalf Trust, which doles out money for offbeat scientific projects, is just the outfit to fund it.


The trouble is, Della has only done enough research for an initial bluff, and Daniel insists on accompanying her on a reconnaissance trip to the Prom, to watch her in technicolour scientific action. This results in an upping of the ante that involves the entire Gilmore clan in a variety of guises, as hikers, campers, fellow thylacine spotters and earnest research assistants and provides some of the novel's funniest scenes.

Like its predecessor, Jordan's second novel is sure-footed when it comes to science. As a molecular biologist who came to fiction writing almost by accident (she took a writing course at RMIT in order to become a commercial copywriter and signed up for the creative-writing component as an afterthought), Jordan throws in gobbets of information with brio. She expects her readers to be as enthusiastic as she is; this is a romp to delight all sexy nerds and witty geeks.

In Addition, with its exploration of the world of obsessive-compulsive disorders, we learnt a lot about people with chronic counting habits and the enigmatic life of the Serbian-American scientist Nikola Tesla.

In Fall Girl we receive a brief outline of "Lazarus species", creatures once classed as extinct that have later been found clinging on in remote corners of the globe. The Vu Quang ox, Leadbeater's possum, the central rock rat and the mahogany glider pop their rare snouts into the picture.

There is also a steamy encounter between our hero and heroine that manages to incorporate the now defunct theory that the human embryo, in its development, embodies the various stages of species evolution, from fish to human. "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" is a phrase that has almost certainly never appeared in a romcom before.

Jordan has a gift for dialogue that would stand her in good stead if she ever tried her hand at television or film scripts. With both her novels she has shown that the boy-meets-girl-but-love-doesn't run-smoothly genre of fiction has a lot of room for new twists.


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