New York Times bestselling husband-and-wife writing duo Ellery Lloyd talk to us about their latest novel 'The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby' and the journey to finding a combined 'voice' for their pseudonym author.
Ellery Lloyd is the pseudonym for New York Times bestselling husband-and-wife writing team Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos. Collette is a journalist and editor, the former content director of Elle (UK) and editorial director at Soho House. She has written for The Guardian, The Telegraph, and the Sunday Times. Paul is the author of two previous novels, Welcome to the Working Week and Every Day is Like Sunday.
Suffolk readers will be familiar with the duo's books as People Like Her was a huge bestseller, as was The Club. Their latest book The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby was published by Macmillan in June. You can find all the Ellery Lloyd books on the Suffolk Libraries catalogue.
Paul: I’ll be honest, it was The Tree Pirates from Sheila K. McCullagh’s books - Roderick The Red, Gregory The Green and Benjamin The Blue Pirate.
Collette: No question, it was Nancy Drew. It might help that I have red hair just like the fictional teenage detective, but I also fancied myself as a bit of sleuth.
Paul: I wrote a big book about dinosaurs with my sister when I was about seven years old – I’ll admit it wasn’t really original research though! But actually I also had two novels published (Welcome to the Working Week and Every Day is Like Sunday) before I started writing with Collette.
Collette: Paul’s first two novels were romantic comedies, but I have always been more of a crime and thriller reader, so I always knew if I was going to write a novel that it would lean towards that genre. Although I have a background in journalism, I hadn’t ever tried to write fiction before starting our debut, People Like Her. And that came about basically because we had a timely idea (it’s set in the world of Instagram influencer mums) and we wanted to start getting words down on the page before someone else wrote it!
Collette: When you write a novel you can’t write explicitly for a particular audience or you end up overthinking it, imagining that reader looking over your shoulder as you write. But we were so delighted that they did connect and feel incredibly lucky that they both did well (People Like Her was a Richard and Judy pick and The Club was a Reese Witherspoon pick and therefore New York Times bestseller), mostly because it’s allowed us to write more books!
Paul: We hope that we make the fact we are two writers work in our favour by writing separate voices in our novels (usually they are told from a few different characters’ points of view). But actually the finished product is very much ‘our’ voice as when we edit successive drafts, we both work on everything. But by the time one of our books is on a shelf, we genuinely can’t tell who wrote what, but we have both definitely touched every single sentence in the book.
Paul: It’s a mystery set over the span of a century, which centres on runaway heiress artist Juliette Willoughby, who perished alongside her older artist lover Oskar in a Paris studio fire in 1938. Her masterpiece, which had been displayed for only one night, was destroyed alongside them in the inferno.
In the 1990s in Cambridge, two art history students, Patrick and Caroline, discover evidence that not only might sinister forces have been involved in the blaze, but that the painting may have survived – and could hold the key to dark, long-buried secrets about Juliette’s family. Then in present day Dubai, Patrick – now an art dealer – is arrested for the brutal murder of his oldest friend, Harry, the only surviving member of the Willoughby clan, just after selling the rediscovered Self Portrait as Sphinx on his behalf for £42 million. The novel unravels these riddles.
Collette: She was absolutely informed by the women in the Surrealist circle. Artists including Leonor Fini, who often used Sphinx imagery in her work, Leonora Carrington who herself was a runaway heiress and others including Dorothea Tanning and Lee Miller.
Collette: We certainly did have to delve quite deeply into a few topics! I did an art history degree at Cambridge so the setting and the Surrealists I knew quite well. I also lived in Dubai for a few years, so knew it quite well. Obviously neither of us had been in Paris in 1938, but we scoured eBay for guide books to the city published around that date which were incredibly useful.
We are working on book four, which involves time travel. We never make life easy for ourselves…
Paul: Someone on Goodreads suggested that we should have marriage counselling after reading our first novel…
Quite a lot of readers don’t know we are two people, and they always assume we are a she!
