THE LURE OF A LUXURY HOTEL

When I decided to write a follow up to my second novel The Woman in Cabin 10, one of the first decisions I had to make was where to set it

I’d chosen the backdrop of a super yacht in the original, partly as homage to Agatha Christie’s fabulously evoked luxurious settings in novels like Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile. But I didn’t want to retread old ground, which meant finding somewhere suitably inspiring, where I could stage a very different kind of whodunnit puzzle for Lo to solve.

My first thought was a train, mainly because I love train travel, but it felt like Paula Hawkins had nabbed that particular update, and between that and Orient Express, I thought finding a new angle might be tough. A private island? That felt hopeful, but I’d just done it with One Perfect Couple and I didn’t want to go back there quite so soon. An aeroplane? Maybe. But Clare Mackintosh had tackled that brilliantly in Hostage. And besides, none of those quite captured the atmosphere I was searching for – the almost decadently lux ambience of the places inhabited by people with simply too much money to function normally, people who have lost touch with the choices normal human beings have to make. Are those people really travelling by Eurostar? I wasn’t sure.

In the end there was only one choice – and it turned out to be one that reflects my own particular travel weakness: a truly fabulous hotel.

Christie herself was no stranger to hotels, and she stayed at some of the great Grande Dames of the early twentieth century – from the luxurious Art Deco hotel on Burgh Island, where she set And Then There Were None, to the famously beautiful Old Cataract Hotel in Aswan, Egypt, where she wrote Death on the Nile, and from the fabulously opulant Pera Palace hotel in Istanbul, Turkey, where she is reputed to have begun Murder on the Orient Express, to the venerable Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate, where she staged her own real life mystery – the finale of the ten-day disappearance that perplexed the world and made headline news. Christie also featured hotels in a number of her novels – from Evil Under the Sun, which is set on a kind of alternate version of Burgh Island, to At Bertram’s Hotel, a Miss Marple set in a fading London landmark hotel, and many more. From fashionable south coast watering places, to the laid back Caribbean resort featured in A Caribbean Mystery, Christie knew a good hotel, and some of my own favourite trips have been spent attempting to retrace her footsteps.

Like Christie, I am intimately acquainted with the charms of a good hotel – and the perils of a bad one.

Unlike her, my trips are usually to less exotic destinations than Luxor’s Winter Palace or the ancient city of Ur in Mesopotamia, now modern-day Iraq. Most of my travels are for work, and I’ve stayed in some stunning historic buildings, but also some very tired, rundown places with an unglamorous view of an airport parking lot. Luxurious or spartan however, there is something particularly delicious about a hotel stay – about the idea that here, you can be anything you want, do anything you want, and that for good or ill, anything might happen.

Want to order room service buffalo wings and champagne at 3am? Eat pancakes in bed while watching Mad Men? Browse the hotel buffet breakfast for a disgusting mix of cheese, cold meats, waffles and patisseries, topped off with a green juice? No-one is going to stop you, and I have felt more pampered and more completely myself in a hotel than almost anywhere else.

I’ve also felt more scared. There is nothing like lying in an unfamiliar room in the dead of night listening to the sound of screams, your heart thumping in your chest as you try to ascertain whether it’s someone being murdered, or having a pillow fight with their boyfriend. Or waking with a jolt to footsteps that sound so loud they could be almost beside your bed. A cough in the night. A far off bang. Every sound in a hotel is a reminder that you aren’t alone, and I’m sure I’m not the only solo traveller who’s pushed her case up against the door, eyed a particularly flimsy security lock, and slept with one eye open.

Even in a good hotel, where the room feels secure, and the carpets are thick enough to muffle the sound of your drunken fellow travellers coming home at three am, your room may feel like your own little kingdom – but it’s also somewhere almost every member of staff has a swipe card to gain entry, and where you’re only ever an administrative mixup away from a stranger being accidentally checked into the room you’re staying in. We’ve all read nightmarish reddit posts about someone walking into a stranger’s hotel room, or even just housekeeping coming in while you’re in the shower.

All of that means that a hotel feels like the most natural place in the world for a thriller. From a $20,000 a night suite overlooking the Pacific, to a 200 baht hostel room by the train tracks, all human life is here. Eating, sleeping, relaxing, screwing. Kicking back, and making memories. And maybe, just maybe, committing crimes. Sleep well!