Are you on the list? We chat with author Lucy Foley
“There’s a lot of darkness in there but I had so much fun writing it.” Lucy Foley’s enthusiasm for her work is infectious. And well deserved, both of her books have been published to great acclaim. We’re meeting to talk about The Guest List, which details a society wedding set on an island off the Irish coast that doesn’t end happily for one guest. Satisfyingly unsettling, readers meet a series of characters – the best man, the groomsmen, the bridesmaid – who all have secrets and who all have a motive.
Fast becoming the queen of the locked location plot – Lucy’s first book The Hunting Party was one of my 2019 favourites – she talks about the chances she was able to take when writing.
“My editor was brilliant because she was like, ‘You can make it more over the top here,’ it’s brilliant. I’m always worried if it’s much or too outrageous but she said, ‘I’ll tell you to rein it in if it gets too much.’
“I went to a couple of weddings when I was writing this. They were wonderful occasions but I thought, ‘I could use that,’ elements of the day I hadn’t thought about including, things like the rehearsal dinner, the best man’s speech, the cutting of the cake.
“I love writing the crowd scenes, when you’ve got a big group and they’re all sort of bouncing off each other, behaving more and more badly. There’s also the idea of these adults who have left their children behind so they’ve no responsibilities and are going all the more mad because of it, drinking too much, falling over things.”
Key to editing The Guest List was dialling up the tension, and where appropriate, the humour or satire.
“Having been a fiction editor, I know how important the editing process is. It’s such a collaboration between the writer and the editor and it’s so important,” says Lucy.
“[My editor] never say, ‘I think you should do this,’ she’ll say, ‘Have you thought about doing this?’”
Intrinsic to any whodunit is giving the reader enough to make a judgement of the murderer whilst peppering in enough red herrings to make it entertaining.
“As a writer, it’s about being aware of what you put on the page, rather than what’s in your head,” says Lucy. “The reader only has what you’re putting on the page so you have to make sure you’re giving them enough.
“You constantly putting things on a scale. You want your clues to be there because the reader has to know they’re there, and if they re-read it, they’re all there. But you don’t want to tip the scale. Of course there’s a point at which you’ve lost your innocence because you know whodunit and it looks so obvious to you, your editor has lost their innocence as well because they’re read it – but it’s that fine tuning, I love it at the same time.”
A lover of the classic murder mystery – after the interview we chat about our mutual love for Agatha Christie – Lucy says she loves, ‘hat element of fun and humour, a kind of campness to it that you don’t get in all crime fiction. I think [2019 film] Knives Out brought that out so well, it was such fun to watch.”
What’s also fun is developing characters, most of whom in The Guest List aren’t entirely likeable.
“I did want to make sure there were a couple of characters who the reader does root for. Hannah, for example I think everyone’s been in a position of being the plus one at a wedding or event, where everyone seems to know each other and you’re on the outside looking in. But I love writing the villains, but again, you never want to write the cut-out moustache-twirling sort of villains. It’s always having an understanding of what makes your characters ticks and a compassion for them. Everyone is the hero of their own story, everyone thinks they’re the good guys.”
The Guest List was originally meant to be set on a Greek island but an anniversary trip – and her heritage – helped change that.
“I’m half Irish, my grandad came from Connemara. My dad spent all his childhood in Connemara and I went there a lot as a child,” she says.
“When I first had the idea for this book, I had wanted to set it on a Greek island, I think partly because I wanted a research trip there,” she laughs. “In a way, I needed to do something different from The Hunting Party, so a hot place, but increasingly it felt like Mamma Mia! I needed something to offset the campness of the wedding.
“My husband and I travelled to Connemara for our wedding anniversary and I was still in the planning process. We got the ferry out to Inisboffin and seeing it appearing, so dramatic, and then standing out on the island and looking out at the Atlantic, being buffeted by the wind. There’s nothing between here and the North American continent, it’s quite desolate but so beautiful, so romantic, and has this amazing myths and legends surrounding it, as all the islands do. It’s an amalgamation of that and the islands that weren’t inhabited, that was where the whole book came together for me. It was like a character itself.”