The Midnight Guests: A Guest Post from Alex Hay

Things at the Hotel Artemis aren't quite what they seem. Countdown to midnight in this page-turning mystery where glitz, glamour and danger collide among the world's elite. Read on for an exclusive essay from Alex Hay on writing The Midnight Guests.

For me, a novel always starts with setting. Often it’s a house – a Park Lane mansion, say, or a tumbledown warehouse in the East End of London. A building I can conjure in my mind, to peel open and rummage around inside, long before I have the premise in place.

This book started with a hotel. No characters, no plot, just a building, twisting and turning in my mind’s eye. A sprawling, fifteen-floor edifice, crouched in the heart of 1920s Mayfair. A riot of Art Deco, all black marble and gilt-work. A pleasure-palace designed for the rich and powerful.

Up on the fifteenth floor, I could glimpse the penthouse. A cool, white-walled apartment, tall sash windows facing the square below. The hotel’s owner, standing behind the gauze curtains, gazing down at the street below. Who is she? I wondered. For it was definitely a ‘she’. An impresario, self-made, determined. Guarding something. But…what?

For behind the gloss, I could sense something else. A secret, buried deep in the vaults. Something dark.

That was enough. Next came a first line, first page, opening chapter, a rough draft. Months of writing and rewriting and rewriting again, to find the story and make it work. Much sweating, panicking, TYPING. 

But when I finally finished The Midnight Guests, I realised why I’d been longing to write a hotel novel in the first place. Hotels give you so much, as a writer. They represent a world within a world, opulent and wonderfully strange. A big cast of characters, reformulated every day when the old guests depart and the new ones check in. Unexpected arrivals, new loyalties forming, old enemies gliding through the lobby…

Plus, the research was a delight. I immersed myself in accounts of early twentieth century hotels, especially the Savoy and the Ritz, famed for their attention to detail, their infamous parties, their ingenious staff. Some of the darkest turns in this story come from the streets beyond the hotel, so again I found myself delving into the seediest parts of London’s history. 

This is also the first book I’ve written that weaves a present-day timeline alongside the past. In the 2026 sections, we follow Joe, whose grandmother was a brilliant investigative journalist. He’s reopened her last, unsolved case, the mystery of two ornate coffins discovered in the vaults of this once-grand hotel. The identity of those remains, and their cause of death, is all unknown. For me, the process of answering those questions was a game of detective work of my own, filled with wrong turns and false starts, until I wrote Joe to his conclusion. 

This, I think, is why I love the mystery genre so much. The narrative question driving the plot gives the book its focus, its driving power. But around that, the author can weave all their preoccupations, obsessions and interests, delving into the darkest corners of the human psyche. And if you get to do all that inside a strange, glittering, fascinating building… well, so much the better.