Lucy Foley
© Philippa Gedge

A well-told story

Lucy Foley shares the inspiration for her latest novel

by ANNIE MAKOFF

For an unpublished novelist, the long journey to publication can feel a million light-years away, but for Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author Lucy Foley, who started her career in publishing, there was never any mystique about the process. “I realized early on [that] novels don’t start out as glossy books on a shelf, but as Word documents full of errors,” says the London-based Foley. “It gave me the confidence to have a go myself.”

Now a full-time novelist with six books to her credit, including The Guest List and The Hunting Party, Foley says she rarely worries about writer’s block or finding new ideas. “Ideas just have a way of finding you,” she tells the Connection, while speaking from Brussels. “They are the ideas you just can’t stop thinking about, and you keep building on them until you have something tangible to work with.”

The idea behind Foley’s latest novel, The Paris Apartment, found her during a writing trip to Paris while she was working on The Guest List. Foley was renting a cheap room in a beautiful old building, which she describes as “wonderfully antique [but a bit] dusty around the edges.” It was the sort of building where not much had changed in 50 years.

“Every morning and last thing at night, I could hear something being dragged across the floor from the apartment above me,” she recalls. “I used to think it was really creepy, and I convinced myself someone was dragging a body. I thought, ‘There’s a story that needs to be told, and I want to be the one to tell it.’ ”

The apartment made it wholesale into the novel, from the light switches on countdown timers to the rickety lift, which felt as if every use would be its last.

The Paris Apartment is a murder mystery set in a grand yet rather isolated Paris apartment. “It looks at the grime beneath the gilt, the darkness beneath the surface,” says Foley. “It looks at the idea of ordinary people doing terrible things. What would drive a relatively ordinary person to murder?”

There’s a real sense of isolation, too. “The apartment itself is quite isolating,” Foley adds. “The idea that when the gate clangs shut, our protagonist, Jess, enters a different, uneasy world. And she’s also isolated because she doesn’t speak the language.”

Foley admits she relates to all of the novel’s characters to a certain extent, but it’s protagonist Jess she relates to the most. “She’s not me exactly, but maybe she’s who I’d like to be,” she suggests. “She’s [gutsy] and does things I wouldn’t dare to do. Possibly she’s my naughtier alter ego.”

Foley’s books span several genres—she’s written contemporary fiction, historical fiction and crime—so what genre does she most enjoy writing? “I don’t think in terms of genres,” she says. “But I do love a great thriller with the plot twists. Ultimately, I just love a good, well-told story with well-developed characters. That’s what I look for in the books I read, and it’s what I aim for in my novels.”

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