Intimate, but not really. Clean and quiet with a bar downstairs. A hotel is a great place to write and, Chad Taylor believes, the ideal place to die. 

The Sunday Essay is made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand.

Illustrations by Devon Smith

 

I want to die in a hotel. Not imminently, you understand (at my age, the odds improve) but I do think that provided accommodation would be the best place, at some point, to finally, well, check out.

There is rock’n’roll precedent for kicking off in a one to five-star booking. Hendrix, Belushi, Joplin: ending things in a branded chain puts you up there with mainstream celebrity.

As a published author, I believe representation in literature should extend to how writers bite the big one. Readers increasingly seek engagement, fresh offerings and diversity. It’s vital that writers perish in more exciting and relevant ways.

Drinking yourself to death à la Jack Kerouac is so yesterday. Jack’s contemporary Frank O’Hara, on the other hand – hit by a dune buggy – ended it with a zeitgeisty twist that brought his work to a wider audience.

Because for writers, death is the best career move. No rights arguments, only the young bio photo, all those commissioned forewords: an author’s hot the moment they turn cold.

Physical memorials, however, are expensive. In lieu of an actual statue (or plaqued 30-minute parking space – just saying), it’s the hotel where it happened that becomes the commemorative object.

You can’t say “Oscar Wilde” without thinking “wallpaper”, and there’s a reason for that. Oscar complained about his room’s furnishings at L’Hôtel before leaving permanently. Bad booking, good branding. Yesterday’s TripAdvisor is tomorrow’s Goodreads.

But my main reason for wanting to die at a hotel is that it would require me to be staying at one, and I love staying at hotels.

Don’t get me wrong: as a noir and road movie fan, motels are a rich narrative resource. Driving in the States, there was nothing more useful than a single room with spit-and-paper walls blasting real-life dialogue at you from both sides. (Also, free ice from the machine.)

The Joshua Tree stop with a tarantula-wide space around the air con unit, or the Santa Barbara unit alongside the bail bondsman: sleep did not come easily, but boy, do I have notes.

A hotel, on the other hand, is something else. Quite literally: something else. More people, more snatched conversations, more things that can happen. The reservation calendar offers a high tea of possibilities.

Shanghai’s Peace Hotel was restored in 2010, but I was clever enough to visit in 2005 when the Häagen-Dazs dispensing machine whirred emptily in the lobby and the velvet furnishings were layered with a finger’s depth of dust.

In the famous bar the famous jazz band played the famous jazz standards endlessly, vigorously, at the same unyielding tempo, and the drinks were watery, and the upstairs gold and mirrored ballroom was shuttered like a tomb.

At the end of the breakfast hour the standoff between Russian “businessmen” and hotel staff eager to close down was nail-biting. The teenage waitress aimed her buffeting floor polisher squarely at feet of the tardy guests who continued talking and smoking and simply raised their legs to allow her to keep cleaning. It was all very messy and I’d go back there right now – but only if it was how it was in 2005.

Staying in Edinburgh, I booked a non-smoking room, which meant the ashtrays had been thoughtfully tucked away in the drawers.

While the Gideon Bible remains bedside reading in many venues, one in Los Angeles provided a Life of Buddha.

I’ve witnessed some good fights in hotels. Barcelona was the best for shouting arguments (bridal party). London, natch, was best for a certain type of adult exchange. Wherever I stay I’m always on the lookout for wrongdoing.

In crime writing, the drawing room mysteries of the likes of Agatha Christie were staple until authors like Dashiell Hammett, in the words of Raymond Chandler, “took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it the alley”.

Thematically, for me, a hotel setting combines both worlds. Closed rooms connected by dark corridors: a city within a city. Christie and Hammett can take adjoining rooms.

Because face it, modern cities are malls. Nothing’s going to happen there that isn’t planned for you already. Pedestrian connectivity has closed our mean streets.

Hotels remain the last vestige of what cities used to be: a mish-mash of people with discordant interests forced to co-exist. Conflict is inevitable.

Writers are awake to this. In Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Tremor of Forgery, screenwriter Howard Ingham holes up in the Hotel Tunisia Palace to work and is interrupted by a prowler, who he may or may not have dispatched by hurling his typewriter. Ingham’s work does not survive the interruption.

We see a similar dilemma in the Coen brothers’ film Barton Fink, in which a playwright’s lodgings mirror his mindscape. Fink has writer’s block, so the hotel makes no sense. And of course there is Jack Torrance, in Stephen King’s The Shining. Hotels, writers mutter, are a bad place to write.

This is fiction. Hotels are the perfect writing environment. Quiet, with standard lighting, an always-on TV, and downstairs there’s a bar.

In 1978, author Michael Crichton stayed for several weeks at London’s five-star Claridge’s Hotel, “famous for catering to the idiosyncrasies of its guests”. Crichton was working in his hotel room, typing up a screenplay. To edit, he cut the pages with scissors and stuck the fragments together with Scotch tape snipped off in long strips he ran down the knobs of the desk drawers.

A year later the bestselling author returned to Claridge’s and checked into his room. It was nice, he wrote, “but it had a peculiarity: someone had stretched rows of Scotch tape down all the drawers of the desk in the corner…”. 

Crichton’s experience embodies the attraction of provided accommodation: hotels know their guests only just enough. The apparent intimacy is bracketed by distance. Their staff are really not too worried about you, which is what makes them a good place to die.

Death reduced to a service call. Turndown in 571. No big deal, world keeps turning. Their inn is your out. That’s how things should be.

Chad Taylor’s latest novel Blue Hotel (published by Brio Books) is out now.