Two-fisted 80s mixtape: notes on Blue Hotel
Raymond Chandler once wrote in a letter that ‘all late night ideas are gaudy’. With Blue Hotel I set out to write one such gaudy novel: a nocturne of pulp tropes and bad-feeling encounters that would challenge sensitivity readers and comfortable crime fiction in general.
I envisaged the story would interleave graphic descriptions of a sexual underworld with a detective-style plot. It wasn't until the second draft that I noticed I wasn't getting around to writing the graphic stuff.
There were two reasons for this. The first was that I'd already covered this ground in novels like Heaven and short stories like 'Archie and Veronica' (in The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself) and ‘Supercollider’. The second was that the modern internet has made adult pornography ubiquitous. Sexual acts are no longer motivation for the characters or a shock to the modern reader. Nowadays denizens of the Blue Hotel would have their own WhatsApp.
This realisation liberated the writing. I could follow Lovecraft's rules for describing the unspeakable (i.e. that it's unspoken). The retro attitudes also had the positive effect of dating the novel. Being set in the long-ago 1980s made Blue Hotel historical fiction as much as crime. Ray Moody drives everywhere and digs through piles of paper. Computers are slow, phones have a cord. (One reader described it as a “two-fisted 80s mixtape.”)
The novel's unexplained disappearance is a pre-internet event. The missing woman Blanca Nul apparently comes to life from a photograph, provoking urban legends in the time before reverse image search. One of the novel’s many noir inspirations is Fritz Lang's The Woman In The Window about a femme fatale who appears, as if summoned, in a reflection before her painted portrait. Blue Hotel also follows my favourite film noir rule: mirrors are windows, mechanical images are deceitful, and art is the only truth.
The other theme which emerged from the novel as I worked on it was one of invasion. Blanca is an exotic visitor whose difference threatens the natural order of a small island nation. The story is populated with animals: caged, collected, untamed, in effigy. Humans are fighting their primal instincts. Society's conflicts are treacherous.
The novel's protagonist Ray is a ray of sunshine but he's also Moody. His rehab makes emotional but not logical sense; the stories he hears from his fellow addicts don't answer his questions directly.
I made Blue Hotel as complex as I could. I didn’t want it to boil down to an easy blurb. As soon as one plot line was resolved I added another. It's not long by the doorstop standards of, say, the fantasy genre but it's dense. I hoped that layering these ideas would give a reader more on a second and third reading as a reward for finding it in the first place.
Blue Hotel was shortlisted for best novel in the 2023 Ngaio Marsh Awards.
