5 crime novels set in grand hotels, from Peter James

People who read are intelligent, and it is my firm view that when we read a novel, the vast majority of us want more than just want a page-turning story, we want to learn stuff too. And all these novels I’ve chosen fulfill role that wonderfully, taking us behind the scenes into almost every conceivable aspect of life in a grand hotel.

We love hotels for so many different reasons. One is because they give us freedom from responsibility.  Someone else does everything for us, from making our bed, cooking our food and washing the dishes afterwards. Another is the kind of anonymity, the thrill of adventure, pampered luxury and the suspension of reality hotels give us. Another is perhaps the opportunity to be sexually naughty or criminally naughty….

My latest novel, Dead in Three Two One, begins with this paragraph: “The tanned man of forty standing at the front desk of Brighton seafront’s fabled Royal Courteney Hotel looked pleased with himself. The confident air of someone who had it all and knew it. Good looks, great hair, expensive suit, nice watch. His arm was draped around a beautiful woman, he had a smile on his face and a bomb in his suitcase.”

I had such fun researching this novel, including spending at day at Brighton’s Grand Hotel as a uniformed concierge—and getting a £5 tip for carrying the bags of an elderly couple! It is fascinating in a hotel what the staff see that guests don’t. One of my favorite observations I garnished from my research was from a hotel restaurant manager.

He said, “Look around a hotel restaurant at breakfast. You will see all the couples reading their papers or looking at their phones. If you see a couple actually talking to each other you can be pretty sure that either they are newlyweds, or they’re having an affair!”

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Arthur Hailey, Hotel

In Hotel, Arthur Hailey encapsulated all of the above and this novel is as fresh and compelling today as when I first read it back, in 1966, soon after it was published. The elderly owner of the luxurious but financially troubled St Gregory Hotel in New Orleans aware of predators—in the form of major hotel chains—circling. Charismatic General manager, Peter McDermott, struggles to keep the establishment functioning and to make desperately needed improvements.

Hailey interweaves numerous stories involving guests and staff: a wealthy couple implicated in a hit-and-run, a professional thief preying on guests, romantic entanglements, racial prejudice and the wonderful ticking clock of an elevator that is going to fail and plunge many storeys.

When I put this book down all those years back, I was in awe of Hailey. I could not think of any ficition author who had done more detailed research, and it made me realize that’s what I wanted to do too. To write novels where the subject matter was as much a character as the people themselves. And above all to one day write a novel set in a magnificent hotel – and now I have!

Stephen King, The Shining

In The Shining, Stephen King takes us into an altogether different experience—that of a hotel, closed for the winter and cut off from the world by snow. In Agatha Chrstie’s hands it would have been full of characters, one soon to be dead. But in King’s hands the occupants are not living guests and staff, but malevolent spirits.

Jack Torrance, a recovering alcoholic and frustrated aspiring author believes life has not delivered the success he feels he’s due.  When a job comes up as caretaker of the remote Overlook Hotel in Colorado, he hopes this will give him the time to really knuckle down to write, and moves in with his wife and young son Danny who turns out to possess a strong psychic ability—the shining—of the title.

But once snow cuts them off from the outside world, everything changes.  The hotel’s malevolent supernatural forces begin exploiting Jack’s weaknesses and gradually drive him towards madness and violence. Danny discovers that the Overlook contains terrifying echoes of past murders.

The novel turns an empty luxury hotel into a claustrophobic trap, and Jack Torrance, loving husband and father, into a monster. What I particularly love about this novel is how an empty hotel can turn so instantly from a joyful pleasure dome into a place of gloom and terror.

Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

Here is yet another very different vibe—this time the hotel as a prison. Moscow’s Metropol Hotel is not a prison in the sense it having officers and cells, but for Russian aristocrat  Count Alexander Rostov, an aristocrat spared execution in 1922 by a Bolshevik tribunal, it is where he is sentenced to spend the rest of his life under at first a loose, but then increasingly, tight house arrest.

Slowly his privileges are taken away when he is evicted from his luxurious suite and confined to a tiny attic room. The impact of the communist regime gradually erodes his quality of life, including to his dismay, the quality of his beloved wines. But it forces him to accept the situation, moving from a life of privilege to a more humble citizen, stripped of his title and trappings of wealth, and to adapt.

Over the following three decades he befriends staff and guests, against the almost unseen backdrop of enormous political upheaval in Soviet Russia, Rostov’s restricted physical world becomes emotionally expansive. The Metropol functions as a miniature society—sanctuary, prison, workplace and observation post on history.

But for me the richest aspect of this beautifully written novel is how it it shows, as Rostov comes to realize,  that in some ways the less someone has, the more they have, and that nothing can ever totally destroy the human spirit.

Nita Prose, The Maid

This novel gives us another different perspective of a hotel, seen through the eyes of a maid. Molly Gray, on the spectrum and socially awkward, works at the luxurious Regency Grand Hotel at an unspecified location on the North American continent. She struggles to read people, taking everything literally and is dangerously trusting. She likes her ordered life where she finds comfort in rules, in routine and carrying out her work immaculately.

The curveball comes when she enters the suite of a rich but very obnoxious guest Charles Black, to find him dead. The shock discovery soon spirals into a nightmare for Molly when her trusting nature and connections with some distinctly dubious hotel guests turn her into the prime suspect for the murder. But as she struggles to clear her name, she finds behind the respectable façade of the hotel lurks a hotbed of criminal activity.

The joy of this novel, in the context of this article, is seeing the hotel through Molly’s highly ordered, literal view of the world. The hotel setting works so well because it allows a maid like Molly to enter private spaces while at the same time being virtually invisible to guests.

Agatha Christie, Evil Under the Sun

Here the hotel setting is a perfect “locked room” mystery and in absolutely classic—and delicious—Agatha Christie style.  What could be more idyllic than the setting of the very posh and exclusive Jolly Roger Hotel on an island off the coast of Devon? What better place to get away from it all and relax, safe and secure in a little piece of paradise, and surrounded by fellow guests. All of them are seemingly respectable and there for the same reason—to chill out in pampered luxury—not to chill out in a mortuary fridge….

But then this is Agatha Christie, where no good intention goes ununished….And the fact that Hercule Poirot has decided to holiday here himself makes us absolutely certain that a murder is about to happen. We are not to be disappointed! Beautiful actress Arlena Marshall is soon found strangled on a secluded beach. She had been openly flirting with another guest, Patrick Redfern, despite the presence of both their spouses.

But then, in true Christie style, almost everyone at the hotel appears to have a motive. The beautifully described elegance of the hotel is a wonderful counterpoint to the grim brutality of murder.

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