Australian Kirsten Tranter debuts with The Legacy, in which Ingrid Grey, an idealistic young woman modeled on Henry James's Isobel Archer, is among the missing when the World Trade Towers fall on September 11.

How did the events of 9/11 influence this book?

I was living on Manhattan's Lower East Side at the time. What I remember most from the few weeks that followed is the incredible number of flyers posted all around downtown by people with relatives and friends and loved ones "missing" in the event. In 2003, when I was back in Australia, I started thinking about how 9/11 would have provided the perfect opportunity for a murder—or, alternatively, for someone who wanted to disappear. Very quickly this idea came together with one I'd been mulling over for a long time, which was to write a contemporary version of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady. My story borrows from and reflects on James's novel, but it takes it in a very different direction. In general, we all make sense of the random chaos of history partly through the stories we tell about it, and 9/11 is no exception.

How does art play a role in Ingrid's life through Gil Grey, her art dealer husband, and his 13-year-old daughter, Fleur?

We've all heard the clichéd response to Jackson Pollock: "A child could do that!" ­So what happens when a child actually does something like that, and it's recognized as art? This figure of the child artist has a kind of pathos I find very compelling. In the case of Fleur, her father and his friend, Maeve, exploit her talent to further their own careers in the art world. I do believe that the art world makes this kind of exploitation possible.

How did Raymond Chandler influence you?

I'm a huge fan of Raymond Chandler and his complex, labyrinthine plots and terse, poetic style. My narrator, Julia Alpers, was inspired by a marginal character in his novel The Big Sleep, a clever bookstore assistant. Julia becomes a kind of anti-detective, put in the position of a Marlowe-type private investigator excavating the terrible truth, but she struggles with the responsibilities and costs of that position and eventually refuses it in order to put herself more at the center of her own life.

What's next?

My next book is a very different project, but it also covers some similar territory to The Legacy, such as the complexities of friendship and the explosive power of secrets from the past. I'm writing mainly about male friendship, which is an interesting stretch of the imagination.