[00:00:00] ANNE BOGEL: Hey readers, I’m Anne Bogel and this is What Should I Read Next?. Welcome to the show that’s dedicated to answering the question that plagues every reader, what should I read next? We don’t get bossy on this show. What we will do here is give you the information you need to choose your next read.

We have a super fun live episode for you today! I’m so excited for you to listen. Right now at what should I read next HQ, we are sweltering in the summer heat and also we are gearing up for fall. We are looking for fall guests. Do you want to be one of them? Our submission form is now open, if you’re interested, at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com/guest.

If you’ve listened to What Should I Read Next? for a while, you know that some of our episodes could run practically any week of the year, but some are very seasonally specific. So this is what we’re looking for right now.

[00:01:08] We’re looking for your stories or reading experience about cozying up for a cooler season. We’re thinking about reflections on thankfulness. We might be interested in hearing about books that haunt you.

Now, we are intentionally leaving this open-ended. Maybe that makes you think of scary books. Maybe they’re more like hangover-type books, but books that haunt you. Maybe books or reading experience that evoke a crowded table.

Also, I just did my mid-year check-in. If you’ve done a mid-year check-in and you now have realized you need a second half of 2024 correction, look, I love to jump in and be your bookish problem solver.

Also, we hear from some of you who say, ah, I’m interested in talking to Anne but I just don’t have a big important topic to talk about. Let me tell you, some of my favorite submissions are the very simple ones that raise interesting books that we haven’t talked about before, interesting questions.

[00:02:03] I especially love those episodes that say, “This is what I like, or I even can’t figure out what I like, but I’m looking for clarity. Help!” If those books are interesting, we will look really hard at your submission.

And here’s what I mean by “interesting”. Really it’s not complicated. We’re looking for books that we haven’t featured on the show that we think our listeners may enjoy talking about, and that I think I would like to have a great conversation about.

So you are the expert on your reading life. If you would like to bring that expertise to What Should I Read Next?, whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com/guest is the place to go. When you fill out that submission, we will ask for three books you love, one book you don’t, what you’re on the lookout for in your reading life right now, and maybe we’ll be talking to you this fall.

Thank you so much for considering being so generous as to share your reading life with me and all of us. It’s how we do what we do and we are grateful.

[00:02:58] Now for today’s episode. We are having a live conversation with author Lucy Foley, who came to Louisville, Kentucky, my town, in an event hosted by Carmichael’s Bookstore to talk about her brand new release, The Midnight Feast.

Now, I talked to Lucy two days after this book came out, and we both just realized, while we were backstage in the green room, wait a second, the big events in this book go down on the summer solstice. And we are having this conversation on the summer solstice, which is a really great coincidence. You’ll hear us talk about that at the beginning of the episode.

This new revenge thriller from Lucy Foley is set at the Manor. This is a very lush, very posh luxury resort nestled into the southern British coast. You will hear her talk about the real life inspiration and some of the fascinating research she did in the conversation that is to come.

This is a Lucy Foley story, which means the past is never in the past. It’s very present in the pages of this book and at opening night of the Manor. The pages are filled with secrets, lies, and murder, and it is so much fun.

[00:04:04] You’ll hear us discuss Lucy’s authorial inspiration for this book. She references the unholy trinity of women authors who inspire her.

We discuss the research she did to Soho House in Italy, the cabin she went to for some of her earlier books. We’ll also talk about her evolving career as an author and the switch she made several books back from historical to contemporary mystery. It comes down to wanting to write unlikable characters, and you will hear more about that shortly.

This was such a fun evening. I’m grateful to Lucy Foley for a great conversation, to Carmichael’s Bookstore for being such an excellent host, and for inviting me to be a part of it. I love doing events like this, so if you or your organization is in need of someone to do exactly that, please keep me in mind. I hope you’ll hear that a good time was had by all. And I’m so excited they gave us recording permission so you can hear it today. Let’s get to it.

Woman: Please join me in welcoming Lucy Foley and Anne Bogel.

[00:05:13] ANNE: Well, hey, everybody.

LUCY FOLEY: Hi. What a crowd!

ANNE: Welcome to a great conversation, and welcome to Kentucky.

LUCY: Thank you for having me on the solstice.

ANNE: I know. Lucy, your book came out on Tuesday, and I don’t know what strings Carmichael’s pulled, but I’m impressed, y’all, because we get you on the solstice, which this came out two days ago. Has anybody read it yet? Yeah, you pick it up and you can’t put it down, right?

LUCY: Wow.

ANNE: So you may not know yet that the summer solstice is when all the juicy stuff, but also all the bad stuff happens in this book. Tell us more.

LUCY: So the action in the book all takes place at the opening of this very glamorous countryside retreat built on old secrets beside an ancient wood, and they’re having this sort of solstice party to celebrate the opening because the opening weekend coincides with Midsummer, and I would say tensions and temperatures are rising and some unexpected guests have come to stay.

[00:06:18] The local community are up in arms and they have some plans to disrupt this glamorous solstice party. So I won’t say any more but you know, I feel like we should sort of have some kind of wild solstice bacchanal tonight, no? After this. Anyone up for it?

ANNE: You know, I’m on Eastern time but you came here from London, so if you want to stay up till 8 a.m. your time, you’re welcome to.

LUCY: I’m just not speaking to it. You know, it’s fine.

ANNE: Now, I really enjoyed reading. I was telling Lucy that we live in the US, and we live in Kentucky, and anything British is automatically sophisticated. I was reading how you described your book to European outlets as, what was it? Soho Farmhouse meets the Wicker Man. And I thought, well, that sounds very interesting. What is the Soho Farmhouse and what is the Wicker Man?

I Googled Soho Farmhouse and went, “Oh, y’all, I can’t even see how much a room costs a night because I’m not a member.” And I’m already intrigued and I want to know everything.

[00:07:21] The Manor, features prominently in this book, it feels like a character in its own right. Please tell us about the Manor.

LUCY: Yes, absolutely. Well, I’ll talk about Soho Farmhouse first of all. It is a very strange place. It’s very odd. It’s a sort of outpost of Soho House, if you’ve heard of that. But it’s kind of rich city folk get to go and experience the countryside. But it’s very clean pigs, you know, and it’s very fragrant and they have a florist and they have a nice place where you can get cocktails.

It also feels weirdly kind of post-apocalyptic because they’ve got these sort of Nissan huts everywhere if you know what they are. They’ve got kind of corrugated iron roofs and these sort of very groomed paths over it. It’s very strange.

I sort of heard about it, I managed to wangle my way in there and it was just brilliant. It was so, so inspiring. We actually… I almost wanted to get this in the book somehow. One very strange thing that happened was we saw they had a children’s playground and I had my three-year-old son with me at the time and he was like, “Mommy, Mommy, look there’s a slide.”

[00:08:25] So I went up and I said, “Oh, could my son use the playground?” And they said, “Is he a member?” I was like, “No.” And they were like, “Sorry, he has to be a member of the farmhouse.” I was like, “That’s a slide.”

Anyway, the Manor is very inspired by that. It is a hotel though. It is very much a hotel where paying guests can go and stay. I think hotels are funny in that sense, even luxury hotels, because there is a certain kind of democracy to them in that anyone can stay as long as you can afford the price of the hotel room, which is obviously not easy in itself. But it means that anyone can sort of turn up and pretend to be someone else. And I just think that’s quite fascinating. We very much got a character that’s doing that in the book.

It was also very inspired by… so my parents live in a little village in the South Downs in the middle of the countryside and the next village over was up in arms because they had this new outpost of a luxury countryside hotel opening there. And it was really vitriolic. People were so angry about it. I think probably that tension was the first spark of the idea for the book and then it all sort of grew from there.

[00:09:38] ANNE: We can really see that in the book because I feel like your character who owns the Manor, she would not let your son go down that slide.

LUCY: She would not. There aren’t actually any children. It’s a very grown-up place. I sort of didn’t want them to get near the mayhem at the end of the book. I didn’t really know how to cope with that.

But funny enough, I also want the Manor to feel like somewhere as the reader that you really want to stay, to have that feeling of kind of luxuriating in it, to want to lie by the infinity pool, to want to use the spa, to hang out in these… they have these kind of woodland huts which are… I mean, they are kind of wooden huts. But they have four-poster beds and luxury roll-top baths outside things. I want you to really enjoy all of that until you want to run a hundred miles in the other direction and never look back.

ANNE: I think one of your gifts is creating these books that have this atmosphere that is sinister and brooding and ominous, and also we want to hear all about it. Tell us about creating the moody vibes of the Manor and surrounds. I mean, take this in any direction you want, but I’m especially thinking of the forest and what lurks within.

[00:10:50] LUCY: Oh, absolutely. I mean, so first of all, it was setting for me with this book. And it was this sort of West Country setting that really brought that all to life for me, the sort of atmosphere of the book. So the West Country in the UK is just really rich in sort of ancient history, folkloric tradition. All the druids will have been at Stonehenge today doing their thing.

So you’ve got Stonehenge, you’ve got Glastonbury Tor, you’ve got kind of Neolithic burial mounds, [every age?] can shake a stick. You’ve also got Arthurian legend, all of that. So it feels like it’s literally there, like right beneath the surface. So that was great fun to play with.

And then, yeah, I wanted this kind of beautiful setting. So you’ve got these very dramatic cliffs in Dorset. It’s called the Jurassic Coast. So you get all these wonderful kind of fossils washing up on the beaches and these beautiful kind of cliff formations.

But I wanted to have my cake and eat it because I wanted to also have this kind of deep dark ancient forest behind the hotel that sort of encircles it. So it’s almost kind of hemmed in and it’s like pressed up against the cliffs and all sorts of weird things are happening in those trees. And I had such fun with that. You for fun.

[00:12:04] ANNE: No spoilers tonight.

LUCY: No, I’ll try not to.

ANNE: But I found the way it unfolded very satisfying. We would love to hear about your research. You told us about going to Soho House, perhaps other luxury hotels, but also so much about the history and culture that goes back… centuries?

LUCY: Centuries.

ANNE: Millennia?

LUCY: Maybe even millennia. Neolithic. Yeah, it’s so, so, so old.

ANNE: What did you need to find out to write your story and what did you discover along the way that you didn’t even know you were looking for?

LUCY: Oh, really great question. I discovered that there is a portal to the underworld underneath Glastonbury Tor. Did you know that? You can go under there and meet like the Fairy King or something. I’m going to try it one day.

ANNE: But do you have to be a member?

LUCY: You probably do. Don’t bring your children. No. So research, yes. Did lots of research into all of that wonderful kind of myth and legend and the folklore of the area. And it was so rich and so interesting. I didn’t even realize that people like Thomas Hardy wrote folk horror really. He was one of the kind of first people to try it.

[00:13:14] The Victorians were sort of the first folk horror writers in a sense because there was this sort of fear, I think, of the kind of pagan and the rural sort of somehow infecting their civilized world. So there was this real sort of, yeah, thing that they had going on with the countryside.

They were suddenly becoming, I think, industrializing and becoming a bit suspicious of it. So kind of going way back into sort of almost like Victorian history and beyond to kind of ancient pagan history. But then I sort of had to forget all of that and come up with my own brand of kind of folklore. So I wanted to come up with my own folkloric legend.

When I set out to write this book, I thought, “Well, that’s just going to be easy. I’ll just come up with a nice story, and it’ll be fun. It’ll create atmosphere.” And it was the big challenge of writing this book, to be honest, because it wasn’t nearly as easy as I thought it would be. What I realized was that I needed this folklore, this kind of mysterious… I don’t know how to talk about them without doing too much of a spoiler.

[00:14:17] ANNE: No, but you are going to have so much fun in your book clubs.

LUCY: Yeah. This presence called the birds, let’s just call them, I wanted them to be really rooted in local community and the history of that community and sort of enact justice on behalf of the community in centuries past. So I had to sort of put all of that in. And it was great fun doing it.

But I also had to make sure that they were on the page just the right amount because I want you to be a little bit scared of them. So it’s almost like in a horror film where actually things are much more scary if they’re just sort of glimpsed from the corner of your eye and they’re not kind of fully there in front of you illuminated because your brain does the rest of the work.

So it was about getting that balance right and sort of feeding you little bits of this legend without you also feeling, as the reader, like, Oh, I just had to read this big long thing and it’s actually a bit boring. Yeah, that was great fun.

[00:15:14] ANNE: Okay, you just said a horror, and I’m realizing…I think this is the closest you’ve come in your work, is that right? Did that stretch you as a writer?

LUCY: Yeah. It was just something that kind of grew naturally, I think, out of the setting of the book. And I felt like it was an element I hadn’t seen in a sort of murder mystery before. I should very much say it’s not horror.

ANNE: No, no, no, no, no.

LUCY: I mean, I’m such a scaredy cat with horror films.

ANNE: But speaking in the, like, where’s my beret and my the literary tradition?

LUCY: The literary tradition, absolutely. It was just a kind of thread that was a lot of fun to play with. Probably the closest murder mystery in terms of that kind of folk horror thing that I’ve read is The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie. She really did go into it with that book.

ANNE: I have not read that one.

[00:15:59] LUCY: She did it so well. So that was kind of very inspiring. But it was great fun kind of watching all those. Having said I’m sort of really a scaredy cat about horror, I hate to kind of slash a movie, that sort of thing. Like, Oh, I can’t do it. But give me kind of the Wicker Man or a Midsommar, something with weirdly… it sounds strange, but they’ve almost got a little bit of humor to them, a kind of playfulness.

ANNE: Well, they have to or we’d quit reading them.

LUCY: Yeah. Oh, totally, totally. But yeah, I had great fun sort of researching those. And also things like Hitchcock’s The Birds. There’s a kind of big homage to that film in this book.

ANNE: I’m so glad you said justice. Because I think something that’s so satisfying about reading this is that there is a strong, prevailing theme of justice and also respect. And the owner of not Soho House, she has no respect for local traditions or local customs, which makes it really easy to dislike her and enjoy disliking her. Like one of the ethos that she’s trying to embody in her space is pagan chic. That’s just rude, y’all. You can’t do that. But she’s trying.

[00:17:11] You mentioned justice. I’d love to hear how, as we talk about the privileged few doing whatever they want at the expense of the masses and other ways that you’ve referenced here, how… did you initially see that as a theme that you wanted to pull through the book?

LUCY: I mean, yeah, I think it was there from the start. Because as I say the sort of initial spark was this sort of local hotel opening in the local kind of rural community. I think there’s also very much been this thing since COVID in the UK, which is that sort of wealthy city folk have kind of discovered the countryside, and they’re like, Oh, the countryside’s kind of great really. You know, it’s really nice. It’s so green and lovely. There’s lots of space.

And you do have these certain pockets of the UK. So you’ve got the Cotswolds is one example, the West Country it’s happening, there’s a town called Bruton where, you know, every other house is owned by a rock star or a sort of fashion designer or a supermodel. And what it’s doing is it’s kind of forcing the local community out of the homes that would traditionally have been theirs.

[00:18:18] So it’s very much sort of looking at those tensions. I suppose with these books I’m always kind of interested in looking at that sort of upstairs, downstairs dynamic that you have in a kind of golden age murder mystery, but in like 2024 formulation. Like what does that look like now? And there was just more and more and more there the more I kind of pulled that thread really.

The other thing that I sort of came across was the fact that… so we’ve got this system of footpaths in the UK. And I thought that was a wonderful thing because you can kind of ramble along a footpath and experience the countryside. But I read this brilliant book called Trespass and it explained that actually 92% of the UK is unknowable to British people because you cannot explore it because it’s all really… I mean, so much of it is parceled out to these huge landowners who have owned this land since William the Conqueror’s time. It’s really feudal.

[00:19:13] So it’s sort of playing with a bit of that as well, because we’ve got this hotel that was an ancestral home. It was Francesca’s ancestral home. And she’s doing all sorts of terrible things that you’re definitely not allowed to do in the UK or you’re a very evil person. So she’s getting this sort of footpath rerouted through the woods. I mean, she’s really kicked the hornet’s nest here.

But she was also such fun to write as a character. She was great. I had a lot of fun. Because obviously we talked about the darkness in this book, but I also had great fun in this book, pushing the humor as well, pushing that kind of satire.

And it’s almost a humor that comes from the way people try and represent themselves and the slippage between who they think they’re kind of coming across as and who they actually are. And that is nowhere more apparent than in Francesca’s narrative.

She was just such a fun character to write because she’s really sort of extra in the way she speaks, in the way she presents herself to the world, wafting around in white linen, waving her crystals and her sage sticks.

[00:20:23] ANNE: Does the humor come naturally? Is that something you’ve had to work to develop? I’m asking that as an aspiring funny person?

LUCY: Oh my goodness. No. I mean, I’m so unfunny, I feel like, in my day-to-day life. But it’s something that… I don’t know. I think it comes from the dialogue for me. And the dialogue is the bit in writing that when I first started writing, I found it really hard and it felt really sort of forced and difficult. I think that’s something that’s just come out of practice and practice and practice and do more and more and more writing.

Now it’s my favorite thing, because it feels like the bit where I can almost sit back as the writer, if that doesn’t sound too weird, and kind of let the characters take over and just see what happens, not kind of micromanage it too carefully.

And so much of the humor, I think, comes from dialogue. And it also comes out, I think, particularly in Eddie’s thread. I just want an excuse to talk about Eddie, because he was also one of my favorite characters to write.

[00:21:22] He is the kitchen help at this hotel. And if we’re talking about this sort of upstairs-downstairs dynamic, he sort of embodies that both in terms of the kind of rural community and the sort of money community of the hotel, but also in the hierarchy of the hotel, because he’s kind of the lowest of the low.

He’s 19, he’s a kitchen help, he aspires to be a bartender, and his parents own the farm just down the road. It’s the last building that you get to before you come to the hotel. And he doesn’t tell anyone he lives there, because the guests sort of complain about the smell of manure when they’re lying by the pool. You know, they like the idea of the countryside, but they wanted it to be very fragrant.

Yeah, he was just such fun to write, because he’s kind of your eyes and ears into the story, but he is also this innocent. So some of the things he says I thought were funny, but who knows. Let’s see what you think.

ANNE: I enjoyed everyone’s inner commentary. Like I remember Eddie saying something like, “Check out my shoes. I didn’t pay for them. Francesca did, because they cost three times my weekly salary.” But the way he says it is the way that a 19-year-old kid with a good sense of humor would say it.

[00:22:31] We hear from everybody’s point of view in the story, and it’s a wide net. Tell me about writing all those different perspectives, and knowing how to get it right.

LUCY: Oh my goodness, great question. I think I’m just greedy and nosy. So I want to have the opportunity of trying to get into different people’s heads, and people that are very different from me. So writing from the perspective of a 19-year-old boy, not something that’s particularly familiar to me, but was a brilliant kind of writing challenge.

I just love writing in this sort of confessional, first-person point of view, because it feels kind of intimate. You’ve almost got the character, hopefully. It feels like they’re kind of whispering in your ear, telling you all their deepest, darkest secrets, but at the same time, trying to be sort of the best version of themselves.

I love an unreliable narrator. I love playing with that. I love the sort of slippages in the ways different people experience the same event. And it’s not necessarily that my characters are lying. Sometimes they definitely are lying, or they’re concealing things from you. But sometimes they’re seeing it through the prism of who they are. And I just think that’s fascinating.

[00:23:47] ANNE: As you’re describing these, I’m thinking these are the qualities that a writer of thrillers needs. I think it’s so interesting that it’s not where you got your start. Your first few books were in the historical fiction genre. And I’d love to hear about what you learned then, and especially if there’s a story there about your pivot into the thriller space. What prompted that shift?

LUCY: I mean, I love writing the historicals. I have, as a writer, always just tried to write the book that I want to read. And at the time I was reading a lot of historicals and these kind of sweeping epics. And so that was in my head when I sat down to write the book Lost and Found.

I loved writing them. I loved writing them. But then a similar thing happened with The Hunting Party. So I think I’d been going back to a lot of my Agatha Christie’s and reading them again. I first read them when I was about nine, which is way too early to read books about murder.

But I think I’ve heard a lot of people say that because you read them for the puzzle, and they’re kind of addictive, and you want to go to the next one, the next one, the next one, and you’re trying to guess. That’s just so satisfying. I don’t think I was aware of the darkness, because there is a lot of darkness there.

[00:24:57] Anyway, I’d been reading a lot of those, and then my husband and I were meant to be going on this holiday. I mean, it was a holiday, we had a lovely time. But we were going on this holiday to this remote spot in the Scottish Highlands. It was much less glamorous than in The Hunting Party. We were just renting a little cottage.

But on the way up, I was reading the instructions, and they said, “In the event of very heavy snowfall, you may find that you’re unable to leave the estate that the cottage is on.” And I looked up, and through the windscreen, I saw the first flakes of snow start to fall, and it just got heavier and heavier. So I was already thinking even before we got there, This is the perfect place to set a kind of golden age, closed circle murder mystery, but in a kind of modern setting.

So my poor husband… we really did have this heavy snowfall, and I made him basically spend the week kind of tramping around, working out where I could kill someone off, and this could happen there, and you know, there.

[00:25:53] I think at the same time, we’d had this thought that it would be a great place to get a group of old friends for New Year’s Eve. And the two ideas sort of converged in this very evil way. But I was meant to be writing another historical at the time. And I think I might still be in my contract with the publisher, but just no one ever talks about it. Just forget it ever happened.

I just couldn’t stop thinking about this thriller. And that was the thing that was sort of glimmering at me. I mentioned this to my brilliant literary agent, and she said, “Look, if that’s the thing that you’re obsessed with, write it, and we’ll just work the rest out.” And so I did. And kind of the rest is history.

I loved suddenly writing as contemporary voice. I loved writing characters that you might love to hate, or hate to hate, I don’t know, or hate to love. But just kind of unlikable characters. Because I think with the historicals, I always wanted my characters to be purely kind of sympathetic. And so suddenly to go to the dark side in more ways than one was… yeah, it was a real thrill.

[00:26:59] ANNE: I love that it was the story that came to you that prompted the switch. I’d love to hear about your love of Agatha Christie. Who are some other authors that have either really inspired you and influenced you as a writer or who you just love to read?

LUCY: In terms of sort of historical writers, I always think my kind of unholy trinity of women’s writers is Agatha Christie for plot. I’m going to say Agatha for plot, Daphne du Maurier for setting and atmosphere, and Patricia Highsmith for character. So I sort of always go back to those three.

And there’s a lot that’s inspired by Daphne du Maurier, actually, in this book in terms of the Manor, this building being like a character itself in the novel in the way that Manderly is in Rebecca. We’ve also got a bit of the birds. And of course, she wrote the original short story that inspired the film. Yeah, just so great on kind of setting and that kind of seaside setting as well. She’s Cornwall, this is Dorset, but there’s definitely a sympathy between the two

[00:28:00] And then in terms of modern writers, I mean, I love Lisa Jewell. She’s my kind of literary hero. I think what I love about her is that she’s just so great on character. She writes characters that you… she’s very compassionate to her characters. And they feel so real, and they feel so kind of fully fleshed out.

I talked to her about this once, and she said she thinks it’s because she comes actually not perhaps from a crime and thriller background. She comes from a sort of what we call in UK women’s fiction. I don’t know why we have to call it women’s fiction. It’s just great fiction. But she comes from that background, which was so kind of character led. And she sort of brought that to her brilliant thrillers, which she does so well. So she’s one of them.

Elly Griffiths, I love. I don’t know if anyone here has read Elly Griffiths. Someone’s nodding. She’s really big in the UK. She writes these wonderfully atmospheric books. Again, they’re set in Norfolk.

[00:28:56] The series that I really love is the Ruth Galloway Mysteries. Ruth Galloway is a forensic archaeologist. So she kind of works alongside the police. There’s always a cold case and a kind of modern case. And sometimes the cold case is like 3,000 years old. And so there are sort of two mysteries running parallel.

They’ve got this wonderful sense of place. And they’ve also got these characters that sort of develop across the series, which I think is probably a really hard thing to do. I’ve never written a series. But you fall in love with them. There’s this kind of “will they, won’t” they thing between Ruth and the head of police. I’m sort of in love with him. She draws him so well. Yeah, they’re brilliant. So those are two of the biggies for me.

ANNE: It’s so much fun to hear the writers that we love to read speaking about the writers that they love to read with admiration. So thank you for that.

Feel free to pass on this because we can be really superstitious about the stuff we’re working on. But is there a book, a kind of book that you would love to read where you feel like you’re not ready yet, it’s not the time, but one day you think would be really fun?

[00:30:01] LUCY: Yeah. Oh great question. So literally two days ago on the plane I had an idea for the… not the next book because I’m writing that now, but the book after. But it’s so early. It’s in that stage where you’re like, is that just mad or is it a good idea? I sort of have to sleep on it a bit.

I’ve had this experience where I’ve literally woken in the middle of the night to feed the baby or whatever, I’ve been half asleep, thought I’ve got a brilliant idea for a book or the book that I’m writing, you know, written it down in the notes on my phone, woken up the next morning and been like, this is the ravings of a mad woman, this doesn’t mean anything.

ANNE: A tired woman. They’re different things.

LUCY: A tired woman. A tired woman, yeah. So I’m just kind of noodling on that at the moment and rolling it around in my brain, but I am excited about it. But I think often for me for a book to come alive, it’s like you have this initial spark. So with The Midnight Feast that was this sort of hotel opening, but then you need like two other things.

[00:31:04] It’s like a sort of chemical reaction that happens. You need maybe a character to come to you and then you need one other element and then it sort of sparks to life. So I’m sort of waiting for that at the moment and then it kind of snowballs from there.

ANNE: What are you working on now? Do you hear the hesitance? Oh, you’re going to talk about it. Okay.

LUCY: Well no. I have to apparently… so I have to be really mysterious about it because it’s a bit different and I’m not allowed to say anything. It is a murder mystery. I can say that much. I’m so excited about it. It’s got a lot of the things that I bring to my murder mysteries, but it’s definitely a little bit different. So watch this space. I’m so bad at keeping secrets. I just want to tell you all, but I’ve been told I’m paying to death.

ANNE: But I mean… that’s intriguing. Okay, last question before we move to your all’s questions. But Lucy, you write these books about terrible things happening at very specific places, but the places sound so good that we want to visit them. Like never mind the murder, clean it up and let us come stay.

[00:32:10] I’d love to hear, what’s your dream destination as a person? On vacation, on a research trip, whatever, but also a perhaps intriguing destination for a future book that you may or may not actually write one day.

LUCY: Oh my goodness, great question. I mean, as someone that loves to travel, I sort of get panicky about a question like that. It’s a bit like as a book lover when someone says, what’s your favorite book? You’re like, Oh, what… even what are you reading at the moment? And I can then never remember any book I’ve ever read.

But I think it’s also that if you’re a really big reader, sorry going off on a tangent here, but if you’re a really big reader, you’ve perhaps got several books on the go at once. Like I don’t know about you, but I have my book on the bedside table that’s not too worrying, so I can read it just before I go to bed at night. I couldn’t read Lisa Jewell’s None of This is True before I went to bed because that book… it just got in my brain and upset me so much. It’s so brilliant, but yeah.

[00:33:07] And then I’ve got my audiobook that I listen to in the car, when I’m cooking. I’ve got another book downstairs. Anyway. So travel is a bit like that for me. I’m just gonna say it’s always Italy because, oh, I mean, why not? Italy’s always a good idea.

Would I ever set a book there? I actually have set a book there. I set The Invitation, which was my second historical there, which is all kind of set in the film world of the 1950s and 60s. It was just really a great excuse to travel along the Italian Riviera.

Funny enough, my whole family, this is before I had kids, but both my parents and my husband ended up coming with me. I think when I said, “I want to go on a research trip to Italy,” they were all like, Yeah, I’ll come too.

They all gave themselves jobs. My dad was like, “I’ll be the historian.” My mum was like, “Well, I’m a gardener, so I’ll talk to you about the local flora and fauna.” And my husband was like, “I’ll carry the bags.”

ANNE: It’s good to have support.

LUCY: Yeah. It really was. They were great.

[00:34:08] ANNE: It’s time for questions for Lucy.

WOMAN 1: So mine’s kind of a two-parter. Did you or do you, with your murder mysteries, do you know before you begin writing who or what the culprit and the cause is? And if you do, like throughout your writing, how do you get the right amount of clues and the frequency of clues to the point where you know that not everyone’s going to figure it out right away?

LUCY: Oh, great question. Great kind of two-part question. Okay, the first bit. Do I always know who done it? Do I know? No. I wish I did. I have now seven books in, finally made my peace with the fact that I’m just not a proper author and I don’t plot really carefully to begin with in the way that I think you’re supposed to.

I love the idea of having that wonderful, almost like in a police investigation where you see in a film, they have like the board up on the wall and they have all the like scraps of paper and they have the strings that go between it just because visually that looks so great. But I’ve tried doing that and I’ve tried to have my spreadsheets and all of that. When I do that, the book just feels dead on the page to me and it feels really boring and I just want to start writing. And I think that’s because for me, it all comes from character and I have to start writing those characters to get to know them.

[00:35:33] So what I say is I plot as I go along. It’s not like I don’t have any idea of where I’m going. I have an idea of the sort of set-piece scenes that I want to get to along the way. I have an idea of character and I sort of go from there.

And then, you know, yeah, I have an idea of maybe who done it when I start out but in every single book I’ve written, that has changed about 30% of the way into writing. And I live for those moments as a writer because they’re the really exciting moments where you feel like the book’s coming to life for you. But you also feel that hopefully if you’re surprised as the writer, the reader will be too. So that’s a real thrill.

In terms of the kind of making sure the clues are all in the right place and the red herrings, that for me is part of the kind of drafting process. So that’s very much not all there in the first draft. That’s a kind of layering across like second draft, third draft, fourth draft, putting things in, taking them out. Maybe they’re too obvious. You sort of have to row back. Maybe you haven’t got enough in there, you have to put more in.

[00:36:36] Because as a writer, I always want to play fair with the reader. So I would always prefer that you kind of guessed in the first chapter, then you got to the kind of big reveal or some of the twists and you felt like you’ve been tricked. Because that’s a kind of cheap feeling. It’s not satisfying. I want you to have that wonderful “of course” moment. Not like, What? Like, no, that doesn’t make sense. Rabbit out of a hat. So yeah.

The key thing, actually, is to have innocent readers as well. Because obviously, as the writer, I’ve lost my innocence from the word go. Even my editor has, you know, when she’s read the first draft. So it’s about finding people who’ll read it and tell you if they’re surprised in the right place. It’s a great challenge writing these books.

WOMAN 2: During that process of you drafting and trying to figure out and, you know, being fair to the reader, how do you trust yourself and have a balance of, you know, this is what I really want to be in the book, this is where I want to go, but then other people are like, don’t do that? How do you trust yourself in that writing and drafting process to know, this is where I want to go, this is what I’m sticking with, or I’m going to listen to somebody else’s idea and kind of go off of that?

[00:37:51] LUCY: That’s a really great question. I’m lucky in that I’ve worked with the same editor for years. So we have this wonderful sort of trust, I guess, between us. And so I know she’s never going to kind of force me to do anything I don’t want to do. But when she does query something, I know that she’s a brilliant editor, so I know that she’s querying it for a reason.

And what she’ll do is she won’t say, I think you should do this. She’ll kind of say, I think there might be an issue with this. And she’ll say, This could be a way of solving it. But I know that that’s never necessarily going to be the way I do it. It’s a kind of jumping-off point for me to kind of go away and think about it and come up with the answer on my own. And sometimes I just can’t think, I can’t think. But it always comes to you, your subconscious is kind of working away all the time.

But yeah, there are certain things, actually, that I have also had to kind of stand my ground on. So even the last line in this book, I’m not going to be spoilery, but I really, really wanted that to be the last line. And there was a bit of a debate as to whether it would be. And I was like, No, this is something I’m kind of sticking on. Just to be really mysterious there.

[00:39:00] WOMAN 2: Awesome. Thank you so much.

LUCY: Yeah, great question.

WOMAN 3: Okay. So I recently read a really good book. It’s called Everyone on this Train is a Suspect.

LUCY: I’ve got it. I’ve got it. I haven’t read it yet.

WOMAN 3: It’s amazing. It’s amazing. And I’ve gotten obsessed with authors who blurb other authors. I’m sure as your popularity continues to rise, you have a million authors that are wanting you to blurb them. How do you decide who to blurb? Or, you know, is it just total personal preference? How are they sent to you? I’m fascinated.

LUCY: That’s a really great question. I don’t think I’ve been asked that. The books I want to read, the books that look really great. Because you know, there are so many books, so little time. So yeah, anything that just really intrigues me.

Woman 3: So I think it really is just like a personal… just if you fell in love with the book, you’ll consider blurbing it.

LUCY: Totally.

WOMAN 3: That’s helpful.

LUCY: Because I want it to be really authentic. I want to give those quotes with kind of a real sense of like, read this book. I’ve loved it. You might too. Because personally, I love reading on recommendations. So if someone says… like presses a book into my hands, then that’s my favorite way to kind of find stuff.

[00:40:12] But also I choose books depending on who’s crazy on the cover. Because I think, oh, well I love, you know, Elly Griffith, so I’ll read something she’s quoted on. It’s kind of organic and authentic, hopefully.

WOMAN 3: Awesome. Good to hear. And then my last question is when you’re in the United States, what do you like for fast food? That you can’t get in the UK.

LUCY: So today I had a great… it was like a fried chicken, hot burger thing. I think it was called a sandwich, but it was like in a burger bun with cheese and pickles and hot sauce. But I asked her before, I was like, “How hot is the hot sauce?” And she was like, “I think you can handle it.” I could handle it, had a kick, but it was great. It was perfect. It was amazing. And these like curly fries.

WOMAN 3: Where was it from?

LUCY: It was called Chef Shack.

WOMAN 3: Chef Shack?

LUCY: Thank you. That was it. It was great.

WOMAN 3: Awesome.

LUCY: My top tip.

WOMAN 3: Good recommendations. Thank you, Lucy.

LUCY: Welcome. Great questions.

[00:41:13] WOMAN 4: I have a question about one of your previous novels, if that’s okay.

LUCY: Yeah, totally.

WOMAN 4: So in The Hunting Party, all of the chapters are in first person, except for the chapters from Doug. His are in third person, and I was curious on why you wrote it that way.

LUCY: Really great question, because actually I also have… so I’ve got five points of view in this book, and I’ve got one point of view that is in third person, and I really went back and forth on that one. And it was the same with Doug.

I tried writing his in the first person, and it just didn’t work. It wasn’t Doug for me. He’s quite a mysterious character. He’s quite kind of closed off. He’s very private. And every time I tried to write in the first person, I was like, “Doug wouldn’t be telling us his business like this. It’s not who he is. He’s a very kind of private man. I’ve got to get to know him in a different way.

That actually was another thing that I had to sort of make my case for editorially, because they were like, why are you writing not in the first person for this one? It feels a bit weird. And I was like, “Sorry, that’s just the way Doug has to be.”

[00:42:14] And in this book, it’s the same. I sort of flirted with a bit of a kind of detective thread in this book. So we have this sort of.. I don’t want to say police procedural element, because it’s very much not a police procedural, but it’s the first time I’ve actually really had the police in a book before. Again, I went back and forth with, should this be first, should it be third? And it just naturally felt like third. And I think you have to really trust your instincts as a writer on these things. And that was my instinct. So there we go.

WOMAN 5: Hi, I have two questions. The first one is just about… so you mentioned that you went on a research trip to Italy just for a previous book and I was curious if you had a favorite research trip you’ve been on or a favorite drafting experience, either in a location or just at home?

LUCY: Great question. I did have to research a couple of lovely countryside hotels for this book. And I can’t say that was one of the harder parts of writing this book. I did really enjoy it.

[00:43:15] But I also, to be honest, then when I was massively pregnant, trying to finish this book about a year and a month ago, it was just such a wonderful thing to kind of imagine myself in a luxury countryside hotel, sort of very uncomfortable, sweating. We had a heatwave. I mean, nothing like this. Nothing. It was a British heatwave. British heatwave. I was pregnant, and I was just sort of imagining myself in this wonderful luxury, you know, hotel room on my own is my happy place these days, having two small children. So I’m very happy to have one to go back to tonight. So yeah, that was just a dream.

WOMAN 5: Then my second one was, do you have a first reader?

LUCY: Yes. It’s my husband. He’s an ex-lawyer, so he is brutal. He gets out his red pen. He’s much meaner than my editor, but he’s just great for that. He’s like, “I’m not sure about this. This is a bit cringe.” I had a sort of slightly romantic scene in one of my historicals and I literally had the phrase “the boat rocked,” because they were getting into a boat rather than because… and he was like, “That’s a bit cringe. Don’t have that.”

[00:44:32] He’s also really good at telling me when… you know, because I think it all comes from my imagination. And most of it does. I should say that there’s a disclaimer at the beginning of the book. It’s all, you know… it’s not based on real people or places. But he’s really good at telling me when I’ve accidentally sort of put a little bit too much of someone we know into the book. I’m going to embarrass myself because my editor isn’t going to tell me that. So thankful to him for that.

WOMAN 5: Thank you.

WOMAN 6: I was wondering, because you had mentioned Agatha Christie being like an inspiration, do you have one that really sparked some of your mystery writing or do you have a favorite that you go back to often?

LUCY: I mean, yes, totally. This feels like a very easy answer. But And Then There Were None, very much inspired. I would say both The Hunting Party and The Guest List. The Guest List, obviously in the sense that it’s set in an island, but it’s also in the sense that it’s got that kind of cut off by the tide thing.

[00:45:31] But it’s just such a brilliant book. It’s the book I kind of reach for when anyone says that Agatha Christie is a cozy crime writer, because there is nothing cozy about that book. It’s just so great as well. The way it’s written, there’s like no fat on it. It’s just like plop, plop, plop. You just can’t turn the pages quickly enough.

But I think I was also inspired by the TV adaptation we had. I don’t know if anyone’s seen it. It was like a few years ago, Sarah Phelps’ TV adaptation. I don’t know if it made it over here. Aidan Turner of Pulled-Up fame is in it. And it kind of really just brought out the darkness in that book. I think I watched it sort of when I was writing the historicals, and I think it kind of fed into the thinking around The Hunting Party that sort of fed into the inspiration for that book.

WOMAN 7: One final question before you head out. When you come back to Carmichael’s for your next book, hopefully you’ll have more time to visit Kentucky. What would you like to do when you’re here next? And does it include the Kentucky Derby?

[00:46:29] LUCY: Oh my goodness. What should I do? Apparently I need to drink a lot of bourbon. But I mean, I’m currently doing that this evening, so it’s fine. I would love to explore, just walk around the city a bit more and explore the history, because I think there’s a lot of history here. And like right back to the kind of French occupation or the French influence onwards. So I’d love to know a bit more of that.

I’d love to get out in the countryside. I was sort of like nose pressed up against the glass on the plane on the way here. Like just looking at sort of this beautiful kind of green rolling countryside you have. So all of that. Yeah. If anyone wants to be a tour guide next time I’m here, I’ll take you up on it.

ANNE: Thanks everybody.

WOMAN: Let’s give her a round of applause.

LUCY: Thank you.

ANNE: Hey readers, I hope you enjoyed listening in on this live author event that took place in Louisville, Kentucky. Lucy did not have very many stops at all on her American tour of The Midnight Feast, and I’m so honored that my town got to be one of those stops.

[00:47:34] I would love to hear what you think about today’s conversation. If you have any experience with her works, if you’ve read, are reading, or will read The Midnight Feast, what you would recommend to someone who has burned through all the Lucy Foley thrillers? What I really mean is give my daughter some book recs, because that is totally her right now.

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[00:48:42] Thanks to the people who make this show happen. What Should I Read Next? is created each week by Will Bogel, Holly Wielkoszewski, and Studio D Podcast Production. Readers, that’s it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. And as Rainer Maria Rilke said, “Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.” Happy reading, everyone.