The hotel is a seductive setting for a writer. It houses a wide spectrum of people who do not know each other, yet who spend nights under the same roof and are affected by one another's behaviour in ways they may not be conscious of: they hear each other's bathwater draining away, they catch snippets of conversations in the lifts. A couple in a hotel lobby might be lifelong partners, or lovers making the most of anonymity. A gang of three who arrive at 2am might be business colleagues who have just closed a deal in a different time zone, or murderers who've recently disposed of their victim.
With all this in mind, I set about writing my novel Hotel Alpha, which is based in a grand London hotel but comes with 100 extra stories to reflect the nearly infinite variety of life in these places. Here are some of my more illustrious predecessors in the "hotel novel" sub-genre.
1. The Shining by Stephen King
One of the worst advertisements for the hotel and leisure industry. A writer takes an off-season caretaking job at the Overlook hotel, hoping to catch up on his work and put recent alcoholism behind him. Things don't go well. The film adaptation made the book famous, but the novel is darker and more perceptive.
2. Evil Under the Sun (and others) by Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie is one of literature's great users of hotels as a backdrop for maleficence. A good number of her novels see a chambermaid dropping a tea tray in shock after gaining entry to the room of a newly dead guest. In this one, Poirot is hoping for a quiet holiday: but as in every other situation where Poirot is hoping for quiet, he gets embroiled in a devilish murder.
3. Hotel by Arthur Hailey
Arthur Hailey's novel is set in the mid-60s, the time the establishment in my novel opens: a perilous time for traditional, independent hotels, thanks to the rise of glossy chains. The book is about that struggle, and also about the thousand tiny acts and characters that make up a hotel's life – such as the cleaning lady who smuggles out steaks under her uniform.
4. These Foolish Things by Deborah Moggach
A very good novel with a not-very-good title, Moggach's book became a lovable film under the name The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. It deals with the Indian adventures of a cast of retired characters rebelling – some successfully, some not – against the coming of old age and the consequences of their decisions.
5. The Lady With the Dog by Anton Chekhov
A short story about an affair between a Russian banker and a naive young lady in turn-of-the-century Yalta, this haunting tale was adapted by Brian Friel into the play The Yalta Game, which examines the way memory plays tricks – and plays a couple of its own on the audience.
6. No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
This tense, bloody bungled-drug-deal novel, adapted by the Coen brothers into an even tenser and bloodier film, sets a pivotal scene in an El Paso motel. It's particularly gripping if, like me, you have spent a fair bit of time in roadside motels feeling almost certain that you're likely to be killed in the night.
7. The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving
One of Irving's sweeping modern-Dickensian novels, it follows the various dramas of a family in two separate hotels, each called the Hotel New Hampshire. Among a huge cast, there's an author who kills herself as a result of writer's block, which possibly isn't the sort of thing you want to read while researching a novel about hotels.
8. Psycho by Robert Bloch
Another book which underwent a notorious transition to the screen: in this case, with a screechy soundtrack, a wily campaign of hyperbole by Hitchcock, and a then-unprecedented depiction of someone in the shower. Everyone knows the film, but the book reveals much more of Norman Bates's terrifying mind and still delivers potent suspense and horror, even when you've seen Hitchcock's version.
9. The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem
A manic satire of utopianism and progress, whose plot is pretty much impossible to summarise but whose send-up of the world of conferences, delegates and seminars is eerily relevant today.
10. Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec
Set not in a hotel but Paris apartment block, this massive, diffuse, fascinating but hard-to-follow work was one of the inspirations for my novel. All human life is there, but as a result it takes most of a human life to read it.
• Hotel Alpha by Mark Watson is published by Picador. Additional stories to those in the novel are available here.
