Lucy Foley: The New Queen of Mystery

Bestselling British author takes on Miss Marple (and comes to TC)

If you’ve walked into a bookstore in the last eight years, no doubt you have seen one of Lucy Foley’s iconic covers: bright, scrawling type against an eerie, atmospheric background. The Hunting Party, The Guest List, The Paris Apartment, and The Midnight Feast have made Foley a household name and a New York Times bestseller when it comes to page-turning thrillers.

But did you know she got her start in historical fiction? Or that she’s partnered with the Agatha Christie estate for a new installment of Miss Marple, titled Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel? Or, best of all, that she’s headed to the City Opera House in Traverse City for a National Writers Series event on Sept. 23?

Read on for our interview with this generation’s Queen of Mystery.

The Christie Connection

As any Marple or Poirot fan knows, Agatha Christie wrote incredibly clever, twisty mysteries—66 of them, in fact, plus short story collections, nonfiction titles, and plays—between 1920 and 1974. Her works have been translated around the globe, made into movies and television shows, and celebrated in her own time and the 50+ years since her death.

It’s no wonder Foley was a little bit nervous about stepping into those shoes.

“It was an honor of a writing career, and also completely terrifying,” Foley admits about being asked by the Christie estate to pen the book. “She [Miss Marple] is so beloved, and Christie is so beloved.”

In addition to her own impressive catalog, Foley had written a short story, “Evil in Small Places,” for the 2022 collection Marple: Twelve New Stories. She guesses that the story helped earn her the attention of the Christie team.

According to Foley, in Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel, Miss Marple gets to go on holiday—“because she only gets to go on one in the original books”—to the Swiss Alps. The detective is expecting a few days of relaxation in a historic old hotel—“it should be cherry brandy by the fire in the library and enjoying the mountain views and going on horse sleds through the pine trees,” Foley says—until a fellow guest gets into a gondola alive and is found dead when the doors open again. Of course, Miss Marple must bid farewell to vacation and get on the case.

Blending History & Mystery

The new book is set in the 1950s, and Foley jokes that she went “quite method” in her research, watching almost exclusively films from the fifties and even taking a few trips to mountain towns to get a true feel for the setting.

“The way people moved and inhabited space [in that time period] really was different,” Foley explains. “People were much more formal in the way they dressed at all times, and all of that probably informed the way that they moved and interacted with each other.”

But Foley is used to research, and she’s used to diving into history. Her first three novels were all historical fiction: The Book of Lost and Found (oscillating from the 1920s to the 1980s across Europe), The Invitation (1950s Rome), and Last Letter from Istanbul (1920s Constantinople).

All of those stories had a thread of mystery to them, so it was no surprise that she eventually turned to writing whodunnits. Though the actual moment of inspiration was surprising.

Foley and her husband were on vacation in a remote part of the Scottish Highlands, staying in a guest house on a sprawling estate, during a snowstorm, and thinking how fun it would be if their college friends could have joined them. (If this sounds like the plot of The Hunting Party to you, you are correct.) That activated “the Agatha Christie fan in me since I was age 12” to start thinking about a closed circle murder mystery.

This wasn’t the only real-life experience that triggered a book idea. Foley thought up The Guest List—which follows a wedding-gone-wrong on an island—while visiting Inishbofin in Ireland. The Paris Apartment came to her while staying in an apartment in Paris…where it sounded like a body was being dragged across the floorboards overhead. (We do kind of want to go on vacation with Foley now, just to see what she comes up with next…)

Even The Midnight Feast was inspired by real-world events, when a luxury hotel was being built in a place precious to locals, who in turn took up the cause to fight against the development. (Sounds a bit like northern Michigan, eh?)

Plotting or Pantsing

For Foley, every good story idea begins with “place and circumstance” or “place and character.” She doesn’t need a whole lot more to start writing.

“I was always a pantser, and I used to say that’s the only way I can do it,” Foley tells us, referring to the dichotomy of “plotters” who heavily outline their books and “pansters” who write by the seat of their pants. Granted, that approach did mean she’d have to go back and make a lot of changes. “I’d have these really unwieldy first drafts and lots of plot holes and cul-de-sacs that I’d written myself into. … And I often wouldn't know who the murderer was, so I’d give everyone a plausible motive, or I’d start out with an idea of who had done it, and then about a third of the way in, it would change, and that was really exciting.”

Though this worked well for her first seven novels, Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel was a different story.

“With Marple, I think I was so intimidated by the Christie plotting, the like, Swiss-watch perfection of plotting,” she says. “I knew I had to get Miss Marple on the page as close as I could get her to Christie’s Miss Marple, and I wanted to get the plotting right. … I didn’t let myself start writing, and I let a little bit more percolate, and I worked out the shape of the whole thing.”

Is she a plotter convert now?

“It did make it a lot easier,” Foley says with a laugh. “It was a really well-behaved book. I think I have learned something from this process. Turns out, eight books in, you can still learn.”

Q&A with Lucy Foley

Before we said farewell over Zoom between TC and London, we asked Foley a few lightning round questions.

Express: How do you juggle the research part of writing historical fiction?
Foley: “Do all your research and do it really thoroughly, but then sort of let most of it sit like an iceberg beneath the water. Don’t just do this whole, ‘look how well I've done my research’ and kind of bung it all in there. You have to find a way to almost imbibe it all and then sort of forget it or let it just kind of come out organically.”

Express: What is some of your most helpful writing advice for aspiring authors?
Foley: “A big one for me is knowing when to step away from the desk. That’s a huge one, especially when you’re trying to work out a kind of knotty plot problem. Probably the worst thing you can do is just sit there and try and think it out, like battle through it. … Go for a walk. Have a long bath. Go to the cinema.

“I haven’t been very good at this one, but try and write a little bit as often as you can. I wouldn’t worry so much about word count. But the more often you’re doing it for a specific idea, that means it doesn’t have time to grow a film of dust over it. But also, obviously, it's that habit thing. It’s that muscle that you’re flexing.”

Express: What is your favorite Agatha Christie novel?
Foley: “A Murder Is Announced because it’s such a brilliant premise. It’s so creepy—a murder being advertised in a newspaper. I mean, so clever. Wish I thought of it.”

About the Event

An Evening with Lucy Foley is presented by the National Writers Series at the City Opera House at 7pm on Wednesday, Sept. 23. In-person tickets range from $43-$53 and include a signed copy of the book; student and teacher tickets are $12; and virtual tickets start at $15.25. Tickets can be purchased through the National Writers Series website at nationalwritersseries.org.

Headshot by Jesse Dittmar.

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