Lucy Foley is a successful historical-fiction writer in England, but in The Hunting Party, she shifts gears. The Hunting Party is a contemporary thriller, a murder mystery set at a remote Scottish lodge where a group of well-off Londoners have gone to celebrate New Year’s. The night before New Year’s Eve, there’s a blizzard, and the friends are cut off from society—which means that when one friend dies, another one must be the murderer.
If you grew up on Agatha Christie, this might sound familiar. The Hunting Party is a classic locked-door murder. In style and structure, this novel is as historical as it gets. Foley conjured Dame Agatha at every step in writing The Hunting Party, from choosing her setting to creating her respectable-but-awful group of Oxford grads. It’s easy to imagine Miranda and Julien, the group’s alphas, vanishing from The Hunting Party and reappearing in Death on the Nile.
This strategy has its pros and cons. The Hunting Party is a novel of privilege. Not all its characters are well-realized, and its formal innovations are limited. And yet it’s tremendously fun to read. The closed setting works beautifully, and the friends’ backbiting feels all too real. It’s a fitting tribute to Christie, and one she might have liked to read.
Lily Meyer: Why did you switch from historical fiction to crime?
Lucy Foley: I’ve always wanted to write books that I thought readers wanted, and the books that I myself wanted. As a reader, I was looking for a modern take on the country-house murder mystery. I wanted a modern Agatha Christie, and that desire led me to writing a thriller.
Christie is everywhere in The Hunting Party. Were there particular books of hers that influenced you? Or other writers’ books?
By the time I began writing this book, I was terrified to read Christie, but I reread all my Agatha Christies while I was thinking about it. I also read Isabel Colegate’s The Shooting Party and Ethel Lina White’s The Lady Vanishes. I think White’s a genius at building suspense and tension, and I took a lot of inspiration from her. Those books were all in the atmosphere, but I didn’t base The Hunting Party on any of them. A crucial difference is that with Christie, there’s always a sleuth: Poirot, Marple, the policemen in her early work. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to remove the sleuth to make the narrative less cozy, and to subvert the model a bit.
Unlike Christie, you open the novel with the murder, and you hide the murder victim’s identity. It’s a long time before we know which friend died. How did you arrive at that strategy for building tension?
The whole plot hinges on the friends’ dynamics. I got very invested in their friendships, their romantic relationships, what’s going on beneath the surface. I wanted those dynamics to be the arena in which readers start guessing, rather than the traditional questions: Who did it? Who had the best motive? I wanted the reader to be more embroiled in these nasty, messy, ailing friendships. There’s the mystery of not knowing who’s died, so you’re thinking it could be any one of the friends, and then you realize that anyone could have killed anyone in this group. I wanted the reader to really scrutinize the characters’ relationships to figure it out.
How did you build your friend group? Did you have roles you wanted to create?
I started with the point-of-view characters: Miranda, the party girl; Katie, her quiet best friend; and Emma, the newcomer. As far as professions go, I did think of Agatha Christie, who so often includes these supposedly upstanding community figures, politicians and doctors and so on. In this friend group, we’ve got a doctor, a lawyer, and a banker. Those are professions you’re meant to trust, but none of them are trustworthy. Nor are they likeable. I didn’t want the reader to like these friends, but I do want you to have the uneasy sense that you might know them. I want these characters to be familiar, and I don’t want you to feel good about it.
I’m surprised that you want the characters to be familiar, since you place so much emphasis on their privilege. They all went to Oxford, and there are huge displays of wealth—Emma stocking up on caviar, Julien buying Dom Perignon. How do you want readers to relate to that?
In that sense, I don’t want them to be relatable at all. I would imagine that everyone has old friends you still see, but don’t emotionally connect to any more—I wanted that aspect to be relatable, but I also wanted to make these characters extremely privileged and unlikeable. That, too, was a way to play with Agatha Christie’s upstairs-downstairs trope. There are no servants, but at the Scottish lodge, these friends still pay for services in a way that I hope makes them dislikeable.
So much of this novel is about aspiration. Without giving too much away, it’s especially about Emma’s aspiration to Miranda’s beauty and social standing. Could you talk about the role of beauty in this novel?
In a nasty way, I really enjoyed writing Miranda. In society’s eyes, Miranda has it all: she’s beautiful, she went to Oxford, she married a stockbroker. But she’s desperately unhappy. She’s playing the golden girl, just like she did at university, and genuinely can’t understand why that role no longer works. Miranda’s meant to demonstrate how poisonous the idea of a golden girl can be: she believes she’s owed something by the world around her, and can’t accept that she’s not.
A lot of these characters seem to believe life owes them something, the men especially. Is that fair?
Absolutely. There’s a lot of toxic masculinity going on. The men in this group, except Nick, think the world is theirs for the taking. I was inspired by the play Posh, which got made into the film The Riot Club and is based on Oxford’s Bullingdon Club. Many current British politicians were in that club, and it clearly breeds this form of entitled, toxic masculinity. You see that entitlement in Brexit, and in the massive hubris of political figures like Boris Johnson and Michael Gove.
Nick and his boyfriend Bo are clear exceptions, I think: they’re gay, and have worked through Bo’s drug addiction together. Did you ever consider amping up their role in the novel as a counterpoint to the rest?
I did, but honestly, I wrote far too much. Every character had a part to play, and I just had to cut so much out. But they are meant to be a counterpoint, and to unnerve the other characters, if only because they’re the happiest couple among the friends.
What about the outsiders? There’s a creepy Icelandic couple staying at the lodge, and there’s a serial killer in the Scottish Highlands. One turns out to be relevant, and one turns out to be a red herring. Without giving away which is which, how did you come up with those two elements?
In traditional murder mysteries, there’s always the third man, and I used those characters to give experienced murder-mystery readers their third man. I wanted them to recognize that trope. I also wanted to put in a red herring because I find that so satisfying as a reader. I love to spot the red herring, to wonder whether I’m wrong, and to be satisfied when I’m right. I had a lot of fun introducing that element.
Alcohol is such a strong element in The Hunting Party that it’s almost a character. How do you think the weekend would have gone for these friends without heavy drinking?
I haven’t ever considered that! I think the weekend still would have gone badly, because the wilderness brings out a feral quality in these characters, but alcohol speeds that process along. It’s a very useful device for getting people to reveal what they wouldn’t otherwise reveal. It’s also a sign of excess, and a real return to that privileged, Bullingdon-Club environment.
I really felt for Emma, the outsider in the group, who didn’t go to Oxford. Do you, as the author, align yourself with her?
Absolutely. When I met my husband, he had such an established group of friends, with songs they all knew, stories that were familiar, in-jokes—you know, the whole lexicon that old friends have. I felt like I’d never be able to catch up because I just wasn’t there. Emma’s been in this group for three years now, and she’s constantly being reminded that she’s the last one in. I really wanted my empathy with her situation to come across on the page.
You present Emma as the least feminine, too. Samira and Miranda are beautiful, and Katie has learned elegance. Is it fair to say Emma feels rejected because she’s less sexy or less glamorous?
I hadn’t thought of it that way, but yes, that’s true. Emma so often mimics the others. She dresses like them and wears the same makeup. She’s intimidated, and I do think they would be an extremely intimidating bunch.
Did you have a favorite character? Or one you enjoyed writing the most?
My favorite character was Katie, who’s the opposite of Emma. She wants to leave this group of friends. She’s a new person now, a very successful lawyer, respected at work, and yet her college friends force her to regress. She’s the only one pulling away, the only one with forward momentum. The rest of the characters are in retrograde. My favorite character to write, though, was Miranda. I wanted to make her compellingly awful, but not so awful she became a stereotype. I hope there are moments when the reader feels for her. I wanted her to jump off the page.
Did you ever put a character in the group who had no secrets and no past darkness?
No. I wanted to keep the book very tight. You could have one character who throws the rest into relief, but in this book, it didn’t feel right. I needed everyone to be in the fray, working for me, which meant I needed them all to have some form of motive. Everyone should be a suspect.
