A break from crime writing led to a future on the Costa del Sol

Nick Foster's career has taken him from the corridors of power in Brussels, to Brazil and Ireland to investigate murders

Jennie Rhodes

Marbella

Friday, 2 August 2024, 13:53

When Nick Foster read Peter Robb's A Death in Brazil, and The Adversary by Emmanuel Carrère, he immediately asked himself whether he would be able to "do something like that."

And he has: Nick has published two books so far; the first one, The Jolly Roger Social Club: A True Story of a Killer in Paradise, was published in 2016 and the second Murder in Roaringwater, in 2021.

Nick, who bought a house in Marbella in 2022 and is "moving down little by little", worked for the European Union in Brussels "for many years"; a career that has taken him to Venezuela and Brazil as well.

Originally from Liverpool, Nick, 58, says he left the UK in 1990, "more or less straight out of university". There was no particular plan - he was "just looking for adventure". He never planned to spend his entire adult life living abroad but "it has just turned out that way".

Apart from the career in the heart of the EU, he says he always "had an inkling" that his true vocation was to write. In the early 2000s he decided to give journalism a try and, despite some early rejections, he persevered after receiving an encouraging, albeit 'thanks but no thanks' reply from an editor of the Financial Times.

The note said they weren't going to buy the article he'd sent in but did tell him not to give up. Nick went on to have a successful career as a freelance journalist, writing for The Times, The New York Times, The Telegraph and, despite the early rejection, he would go on to write a number of articles for the Financial Times.

He wrote mainly about travel and property and even had a stint as a sports journalist, interviewing footballers after UEFA matches through which he discovered that he had a particular talent for interviewing people - a skill that would be vital as he started to investigate crimes.

The Jolly Roger Social Club: A True Story of a Killer in Paradise is set in South America, which is a part of the world he knows well having lived in Venezuela for five years (he is married to a Venezuelan), Brazil for four years and Uruguay for a year. The first two countries were stints working in EU delegations and he says he spent a year in Uruguay as a young man.

Murder in Roaringwater is the inside story of the final days of young Frenchwoman, Sophie Toscan du Plantier, before she was killed and the subsequent investigation into one of Ireland's most well-documented murders.

Nick got to know the main suspect in the case, a British man called Ian Bailey, who died in January this year. Bailey was found guilty of Sophie's murder 'in absentia' in a French courtroom.

Although Nick has largely left journalism behind, he did pick up the baton again when Bailey died, writing for the Irish Mirror about getting to know the suspect and speaking to him about the case on a number of occasions.

When SUR in English caught up with Nick, he was in the lively Rio de Janeiro district of Lapa, which is famous for its samba clubs. He was there to record some background sounds for a podcast he's working on for his next book which follows the murder of a couple involved in the South American oil industry.

At the moment Nick divides his time between Brussels and Marbella, with stints in Brazil to research the book. He and his wife discovered Marbella as Nick was recovering from a serious illness.

"I had been very ill in 2021 and afterwards I had a bit of time off to recover. I accepted an invitation to see a friend who lives in Marbella and loved the place from that first visit. That's how we came to start house-hunting there," he explains.

Nick says that the plan for now is to be mainly based in Brussels until his two teenage sons finish secondary school. "Then I think we'll spend most of our time in Marbella," he reveals.

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