Written in pain, written in awe

My earlier novels such as Departure Lounge and Shirker were riffs on crime fiction. Labelled neo-noir (I'm cool with that), they took aspects of the genre – including the audience's expectations – and shuffled them like a deck of cards. Departure Lounge was about a victim who was never found, and focused on the characters' conflicting memories of her, Rashomon style. That the mystery was never solved, or at best remained ambiguous and / or mythical, was part of the reading experience. Departure Lounge was about how loss felt.

Shirker was about a protagonist who had cheated death, and who lived off others vampirically. (There's a Wilhemina in it.) His presence in the story ruptured the other characters' view of themselves: a lot of it was about how a person's identity survives.

At least, that's how I remember it. Generally speaking I don't read my books after they're finished. A lot of the fun of writing is solving the puzzle of what the book is, or wants to be. Once that's done you move on. An author's favourite book is always the next one.

Nevertheless as the dust settles on Blue Hotel I can see my previous novels in it: Shirker's masked identities; Departure Lounge's missing girl; the addictions of Electric; the K Road walked in Heaven. The role of painting and art in the story is an idea that was central to The Church of John Coltrane. Finding all those novels to purchase, including Blue Hotel is a mystery for the reader to solve. Consider it another riff on the crime genre: the reader as detective, the printed novel as the beautiful corpse.