DEBBIE ELLIOTT, HOST:
The Grand Alpine Hotel is majestic, nestled high in the Swiss Alps with so much crisp, clean air and so much snow, perfect for skiing. Guests can climb into a gondola and ride to the top of the peak to hit the slopes. Oh, but watch out. There's a dead body in one of the gondolas on its first run one morning. Before long, no one can get off the mountain. That's the opening of "Murder At The Grand Alpine Hotel." If it sounds like an Agatha Christie novel, well, that's because it nearly is. It's by British mystery writer Lucy Foley, who joins us now. Welcome to the program.
LUCY FOLEY: Hi. Thanks for having me.
ELLIOTT: So this is the first authorized Miss Marple novel in 50 years. How do you channel Agatha Christie?
FOLEY: Oh, I mean, no pressure because she did it all just best, didn't she really? I mean, she is - she's the person I look to inspiration so much in my own writing. So it was a little bit of a terrifying ask but also really exciting.
ELLIOTT: Now, did you grow up reading Agatha Christie books?
FOLEY: I did. I actually read my first of her books when I was probably far too young. But I've learned that, actually, lots of people have this experience. I was 12 or 13. We were staying in a holiday cottage. I'd run out of my own books, and I found "Murder On The Orient Express" on the bookshelf.
ELLIOTT: Wow.
FOLEY: I love Poirot, but I just think Miss Marple clinches it for me because of her lack of ego and her sense of humor and, I mean, she's wonderful in so many ways.
ELLIOTT: So let's tell our audience, those who might not be familiar, a little bit about Miss Marple, and tell us why she's in the Alps in the first place in this book.
FOLEY: Of course. So Miss Marple is a really incredible creation actually, especially when you think that she was created nearly a hundred years ago. She has no formal training as a detective. She is just an elderly woman who's lived in a small English village pretty much her whole life. But she has the tools at her disposal or her rich understanding of human nature. I mean, she very cleverly plays up to the sort of assumptions that people have about her. She has all these little mannerisms and she says, oh, I'm so forgetful. And oh, I'm so very stupid. And, you know, she's very kind of fluttery and twittery and seems very gossipy. And yet, there is this brilliant mind working away all the time.
ELLIOTT: She doesn't miss a thing.
FOLEY: She absolutely doesn't. I think the funny thing is, I think we all know a Miss Marple. We all know someone like that. Both of my grannies, in different ways, had those sort of qualities. The other part of your question was why has she gone to the Alps? And I really felt that Miss Marple deserved another holiday. And that's because she only gets to go on one, so she goes to the Caribbean.
And then I learnt in my sort of preliminary research that she was meant to go to Egypt. So "Death On The Nile" was originally conceived of as a Miss Marple novel. And then, for whatever reason, Christie changed her mind and made it a Poirot adventure. And I really felt for her in that. So I thought, do you know what? I'm going to give her another trip.
ELLIOTT: Now, like any Agatha Christie mystery, there is a cast of characters here. Among them, witnesses, victims, killers - you're not going to find out who's who until you get to the end. And you're telling this story through four of them.
I'd like to play a little game here with you. I'm going to name them, and I'd like you to give us a sentence or two that sort of sums up who these characters are. Are you game?
FOLEY: Oh, yes. I'm game. Let's go for it.
ELLIOTT: Diana Glass, the help.
FOLEY: Diana Glass is Dolly Bantry's ladies companion with perhaps a little bit more than meets the eye. She's very intelligent and adventurous and has had some experiences.
ELLIOTT: Catherine Narracott, the wife.
FOLEY: Catherine Narracott is this image of the perfect society wife. She was a debutante. She's sort of from that very high kind of Mitford-level of society. She's been trained to say the perfect thing and wear the perfect thing and behave absolutely perfectly. But again, there's more than meets the eye.
ELLIOTT: Sylvia Sinclair, the star.
FOLEY: The quintessential silver screen siren, I would say - very much in the mode of the Rita Hayworths, the Ava Gardners, Marilyn Monroe.
ELLIOTT: Bruno Crane, the friend.
FOLEY: Bruno Crane is a rather sort of bumbling, I would say, unattractive figure who turns up at the hotel slightly unexpectedly for what seems to be a holiday with his wartime chum.
ELLIOTT: After the discovery of the body, a snowstorm has now rolled in. The police can't make it up from the valley, and they're all stuck up at the Grand Alpine Hotel. I'm wondering if we can ask you to read a little bit from the book.
FOLEY: Right. Here we go. This is from Diana Glass' perspective.
(Reading) It might be a scene of cozy perfection. Some of the guests are reading in high-backed armchairs or playing card games over glasses of liqueur, as though totally oblivious to the tragedy earlier this morning. But we learned this during the war. You can't be in a state of full-blown panic at all times. Normality, humanity, even boredom creep back in at the most fraught of times.
ELLIOTT: You know, that's one of the themes running through this book. It's just five years after World War II, but people still carry the experience of living through it, and some of that has become habit now, right?
FOLEY: Oh, absolutely. I think so. I mean it's funny because I was thinking back when I was writing this that it was only - it was a similar amount of time from the start of COVID. And so actually that time felt very recent and, you know, still quite traumatic in many ways and very much so for the second World War in this book.
But there's also a sense of, you know, what did you do during the war? What did you get up to? Were you heroic, or were you not? And also the chance for some people to perhaps rewrite their own history a little bit to further their own ends. I won't go into too much detail there 'cause it might be a spoiler, but it's very much something I like playing with in the book. But the thing about an Agatha Christie is that the truth will normally always come to the surface, and the past catches up with people.
ELLIOTT: I'm curious. Was writing this mystery any different than, you know, your process when you're writing your other mysteries?
FOLEY: It was. I mean, there was a huge research burden in this one, obviously, to get the historical setting right. I absolutely loved that challenge, actually. I wrote historical books before I went over to the thrillers. So it was a real chance to marry those two skills and really indulge the history geek in me. So there was a lot of reading to be done, a travel to the Alps, which was great fun. And really, I went quite method for it, actually. I watched - when I was writing it, I only watched films set in the 1950s - so a lot of Hitchcock. I read a lot of thrillers from the 1950s, very post-war sort of masculine thrillers.
And I would say the other thing for me was researching the character of Miss Marple. I'd never had someone else's preexisting character - especially such a beloved and iconic one - to put into the book. So really, for me, the challenge was about getting Agatha Christie's Miss Marple as closely as I possibly could on the page to the way she wrote her in the original books.
And the other thing was obviously the Christie plotting. I obsessed over that. And for the very first time, I actually plotted out the whole book before I started writing. Normally, I get greedy and impatient, and I just think, oh, it's more creative if I just start writing. But this time, I sat on my hands, and I let it percolate just a little bit longer, maybe six months longer. It actually doesn't sound like a little bit. And the whole plot sort of formed itself. And it turns out, I've learned - eight books in - that's a much easier way to write a book.
ELLIOTT: There you go. The pressure of channeling Agatha Christie - actually, you learned something about your writing.
FOLEY: Absolutely. I feel she's taught me something. I'm very grateful (laughter).
ELLIOTT: Well, that's Lucy Foley. Her new novel is the first authorized Miss Marple mystery in 50 years. It's called "Murder At The Grand Alpine Hotel." Thanks so much for talking about it.
FOLEY: Thank you. I really enjoyed it.
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