Lucy Foley's Many Twists, Turns, and Mysterious Ways

Goodreads: Even though it has a similar locked-room style, The Paris Apartment’s setting is very different from The Hunting Party and The Guest List. Can you describe your starting point for the book?

Lucy Foley: The idea actually came to me while I was finishing a draft of The Guest List. Because I like to do my own version of a writing retreat and book an Airbnb somewhere that I know relatively well, a city like Paris, and work on the book there but also have lovely things to go and look at in my breaks. And so I booked into an amazing apartment in this beautiful old apartment building.

The bones of it were so beautiful and it was so atmospheric, but it was also quite spooky. There are details that have literally gone wholesale into the book. And I would be sitting there working on The Guest List at all hours, and I could hear in the apartment above me, first thing in the morning and last thing at night, something really heavy being dragged across the floor. It sounded like furniture or something big. And obviously being a murder mystery writer, it had me thinking—someone's trying to hide a body! So if there's a spark that the whole book germinated from, that was the moment.
 
So the setting came first, the apartment building, almost like a character in the novel. I got into the gothic with The Guest List, and it was a chance to go full gothic on this and just have a lot of fun with that but also have it set in Paris and have the escapism of that. But I love the feeling of feeling isolated within a city. Jess is isolated in the fact that she doesn't speak the language. She doesn't understand what everyone around her is saying or how things work so she's completely out of her depth. And it was fun to play with a different form of isolation.

GR: I also love the way you play with the popular image of Paris as this idyllic, romantic City of Lights. The Paris in your story is in the grip of riots, and there’s a constant atmosphere of menace. Was that something central for you, that tension between the surface and the reality underneath?

LF: Oh, absolutely, showing everything that hides behind the gilded surface. There are so many different metaphors in Paris itself that I wanted to use that actually didn't make it into the book, like the catacombs, which are kind of a metaphor for the darkness beneath the surface. But yeah, it was a lot of fun to play with these opposites, that tension. And that's something, actually, I've done in the other books as well, but in a different way, I suppose. That mixture of luxury and wilderness, glamour and its opposite.

GR: When it comes to structure, do you plot or plan things out intricately beforehand? Do you always know how it's going to end?

LF: So every time I try and plot it out really carefully and I think I know where it's going to end, I start writing and the whole thing completely changes. I think I need that road map at the beginning, that plan, because otherwise I'd be in the dark.
 
But it's also important to let the story take you into places that you hadn't necessarily expected. And, actually, that's where I have some of my most exciting plot breakthroughs and developments, the things I haven't planned and then suddenly realize there's a much better way to do things, or there's something, a twist that you as the writer hadn't seen coming. And I think if something surprises you as the writer, you've got a good chance of surprising the reader of it too. So I kind of live for those goose bump moments when you think, "Oh my God, no. What if we turned everything on its head, and it was like this instead?"

GR: How did you go about creating the characters? Which came first?

LF: Jess. I feel like I still live with her voice in my head. I think I have to come back to her at some point. I had such fun writing her as a character because she's messy, but she's also a lot of fun to write. In The Guest List there are a couple of characters that hopefully the reader can root for. But I felt that Jess is someone, as the writer, that I can really get behind. For all that she's flawed, I really felt for her, and I really wanted her to succeed in her quest. It was a lot of fun to have a character like that to offset against the less likable characters.

But Sophie [the frosty socialite] also came to me really clearly. On the surface, she’s this very coiffed Parisienne, but obviously a lot more is going on underneath the surface. And I think something I love doing is playing with stereotypes, playing with these ideals and then dismantling them.

GR: We see Ben mainly through the eyes of the other characters. Everyone has a slightly different take on him, and even Jess describes him as a “phantom” she's chasing. It’s an interesting choice to have such a slippery central character. How did that come about?

LF: That was completely intentional. It's something I really wanted to do—build up a character that, although you see him briefly on the page, really your impression of him is via the other characters. I love playing with that idea that we are all different things to different people. We all have different versions of ourselves, facets of ourselves that we promote depending on the company we're in.

And it's not necessarily duplicitous. So I wanted to play with that, him being this slippery character. And I think I have met men like that, who are so charming that you can't pin them down to anything.

GR: Was there a character in the book who surprised you more than the others in terms of how they developed or what they did?

LF: So yeah. Mimi [the naive art student]. She suddenly found this strength that I couldn't have known that she had at the beginning. And who else? I was surprised by how much I felt for Sophie in the end because she was initially a very cold character. She is a very cold character, but there's a lot going on beneath the surface.

GR: All your mystery books are told from five or six points of view. How did you decide that was how you wanted to tell a murder mystery?

LF: It was just the way it felt right when I started writing The Hunting Party. And I wonder if part of the reason was that initially with The Hunting Party, I played around with using some dictation software so I was literally dictating these points of view. Perhaps originally I thought I might transfer them into third-person point of view or do something else with them. But when I actually came to look at what I’d got, it felt like the only way to tell it. [First person narration] felt almost like their witness statements and [more] intimate for the reader. Obviously when you've got multiple points of view, it's a way to differentiate voice as much as you can, which is always difficult because the page is quite a flattening medium. It allows you to get character in there as much as possible and make those voices feel really distinct.

GR: What's it been like having such incredible success, with people comparing you to Agatha Christie?

LF: It's amazing and so flattering. But I think I'm such a geek, such a goody-goody, that I'm always just panicking about the next book: How can I do things differently, and how can I really satisfy readers? I think that's good because it means you don’t rest on your laurels. But it has been wonderful. I think through lockdown it's been a wonderful way to feel connected with the outside world, with readers, being able to chat about books and connect through that.

GR: How was writing this book a different experience, given that you were pregnant when you were writing it and then it was lockdown?

LF: I would say it was so much harder in some ways. Just on a practical level, I got to a point where I was really pregnant, and I had terrible hip pain and literally couldn't find a position where it was comfortable to sit and type.
 
And then there was lockdown. I would have liked to have gone on another research trip to Paris before I started writing. That obviously wasn't possible. But at the same time, it was wonderful having this project to throw myself into and also this armchair escapism.

I think that's the wonderful thing available to us as writers and as readers—that we can escape on the page and travel somewhere else. [The story] was constrained in many ways to the apartment building, but at the same time I was writing this world of crowded streets and Metro carriages and bars and nightclubs, and at the time, in March 2020, that felt so alien, like another world, but it was wonderful to escape to.

GR: What's your normal writing day like? Do you write in a notebook or on a computer?

LF: I tend to write in a notebook first and then type it up later. Because I think, especially because of this confessional first-person point of view, it's much better to just get the words down on the page and be quite free about it. And then I can refine things when I come to type them up. So it's almost like by the time I've typed everything up into my computer, I've written every word twice and I've already done a little mini edit. But it also means that when life's normal, I can go and work in coffee shops. I like to be surrounded by noise and people and not feel too much like I'm sitting at a desk doing work.

GR: Did you have any specific influences for this book—any films or books, for example?

LF: Yes. Oh God, I'm so inspired in writing by film and have been with all the books. But with this one definitely, specifically, I would say [Alfred Hitchcock’s] Rear Window. [Roman Polanski’s] The Tenant, which has that wonderful spooky Paris apartment vibe. And there’s a wonderful film with Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant called Charade. It's set in Paris and it's this madcap caper, but at the same time it's actually quite sinister. There's a wonderful book called The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White that was made into a Hitchcock film called The Lady Vanishes. It was written in the 1930s, but it feels quite risqué. It's all set on a train hurtling across Europe, and it's sort of the original Girl on the Train.

Our heroine, Iris, knows that a woman has gone missing off the train, but no one believes her and she can't make herself understood. And I think that idea of not being able to make yourself understood in this foreign place that directly inspired The Paris Apartment. What else? [Patricia Highsmith’s] The Talented Mr. Ripley, certainly in terms of the portrayal of Ben, because I wanted him to be a Ripley-esque figure.

GR: I read that you reread Highsmith's Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction before you start a new mystery.

LF: Yeah, I actually have as a sharpener, before writing each of the thrillers, because I find it so helpful. It’s just brilliant and really gets me into the right frame of mind. She's really generous with her advice, but also with her own failures, as she sees them. I think she really speaks to the writing part of my brain in that book. I'm also reading her diaries and letters at the moment, which are brilliant and gossipy and just fascinating.

GR: What other books have you read recently and loved?

LF: I recently read and loved the latest in Elly Griffiths’ Ruth Galloway series, The Night Hawks. And Lisa Jewell’s The Night She Disappeared. I've read all of her books, and I just love her writing. She's one of those authors I'll drop everything for, because she's such a compassionate writer in terms of her characterization. You really care for those characters, and you really care what happens to them. And it's almost part of the drive of the plot for me is finding out what happens to them and making sure they're OK, and I just think it's really clever.

GR: Are you working on anything at the moment?

LF: I just finished my short story for a new Miss Marple collection, which is coming out later this year. I'm part of a list of writers, including Naomi Alderman, Kate Mosse, Dreda Say Mitchell, Jean Kwok, and Elly Griffiths. So there are 12 writers in total, and we're all writing a short story.

And then in the new year I'm going to start properly on my next murder mystery, which I'm really excited about. I pitched it to my editor as Soho Farmhouse meets Miss Marple meets The Wickerman, so make of that what you will. It’s at the outline stage, and I’m excited to start on that.

GR: Finally, if you had to spend a weekend away with one of your characters, which would you choose?

LF: Oh, a hundred percent Jess. I think partly her lock-picking abilities. I feel she would bring out the braver part of myself and encourage me to do things I wouldn't otherwise do. I think parts of her are my dark alter ego, or my naughty alter ego.