Thrilling Fiction With Lucy Foley (the Midnight Feast) And Matthew Blake (anna O)

Uneasy pauses… Furtive glances... Pallid expressions…

All elements of a killer crime fiction novel.

And all elements that were thankfully missing from this discussion, as Lucy Foley and Matthew Blake – chaired marvellously by Professor Simon James – delved into the psyche of not just their characters but themselves, in an enlightening exploration into the relationship between human experience and the thriller genre.

As an audience, we were invited into these authors’ minds. Blake detailed his intricate plot-mapping, which stems from his work in screenwriting, while Foley likened her writing to completing a jigsaw puzzle. Her style, which changes in perspective and veers from chronological order, affords her the liberty of writing only what she feels on a given day, while enabling her characters to seize autonomy of the plot. Foley revealed she has even changed a murderer’s identity a third of the way into writing a novel!

Traces of literature degrees are felt throughout both novels. The folk horror of Thomas Hardy and the mysterious yet bucolic setting of the West Country inspired Foley’s The Midnight Feast; while Blake’s Anna O opens with an epigraph from Sylvia Plath, “I am terrified by the dark thing that sleeps in me”, priming the reader for the novel’s exploration of the mysteries of our minds and their relationship with our unconscious bodies. Blake commented that “real life is always stranger than anything I could make up”, as his thriller depends upon the blurring of the real world and the fictional. Both novels thrive off the unknown, testing what we truly know about ourselves, with Foley’s novel going a step further than the conventional whodunit, by questioning who was even murdered?

Both authors particularly hailed Agatha Christie for her long-lasting grasp on the genre, with Blake praising And Then There Were None as the book he wished he could have written, admiring Christie’s overwrought plot and her ability to keep it upright despite the weight of its own structure. The discussion was also shadowed by Freud and his ever-present influence in the field of detective fiction, as he seemingly dons a Sherlockian deerstalker in his deductions of the human psyche.

“The purest form of story,” is how Blake defined the thriller genre, which, he argued, stems from people’s inherent desire to escape the dangers of real life, with Foley enlightening us as to its spiking popularity during the Blitz and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, as populations tried to grapple with the over-arching fear of endings.

Throughout the event, both authors provided pockets of advice for aspiring authors, with Blake stressing the importance of holding onto your initial instinct and prioritising this throughout the writing period. He cautioned against overworking the text, while Foley reminded the audience that novels can be abandoned.

The evening concluded with a question from the audience that sought to ascertain the essence of horror itself. And while Blake looked within, considering the mysteries of our mind and the possibilities of what we are capable of, Foley spoke on the ‘other’, as her novel treads the line between supernatural forces and the arguably more terrifying ‘person-next-door’. These varied answers demonstrate the versatility of the thriller genre and how it builds upon tradition while constantly striving to connect to our modern world.

This discussion can only be summarised as utterly thrilling in every sense of the word.