Checking in to a fictional world: The enduring appeal of literary hotels

At a literary event at Burgh Island Hotel in South Devon recently, the novelist Catherine Newman remarked that whenever she looked down from the island’s steep cliffs while walking, she half-expected to discover a body.

It was an apt response to a place that helped inspire Agatha Christie’s crime novels, including Evil Under the Sun. In the novel, Christie makes the island’s isolation part of the mystery. When character Emily Brewster remarks, “This isn’t the sort of place you’d get a body”, the famous sleuth Hercule Poirot responds: “But why not?”

Burgh Island is more than a beautiful Art Deco hotel. Its cliffs, tidal causeway and isolation are geographical realities, but Christie transformed these features into elements of a fictional world. Generations of readers have since learned to see the island through her stories.

This is part of what makes literary hotels so fascinating. Some are associated with writers’ lives, others with the places where they worked. A third group has become part of the fictional worlds themselves.

From writers’ lives to fictional worlds

Years ago, shortly after moving to Lancaster, I spent a night in a hotel where Dickens once lodged. There was a certain pleasure in knowing that he had been there before me, but the connection was historical rather...

Read more