Heard Through Hotel Room Walls!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: How fabulous is sleeping? That moment, you know, when you slide between the sheets, and the thread count is lovely, and the pillow are puffy, and you cuddle down and sink in and..then—ah. Oh. No.

Whatever. Interrupts you. Someone left the light on. A fly is buzzing. There’s a TV on someplace. Your phone is glowing blue, or pinging about something that you don’t know what is. Everything is magnified into infinity.

Our darling brilliant Agatha nominee (yay!) Annette Dashofy has had her coziness interrupted by—well, let her tell it. But, because she is brilliant and thoughtful and always thinking about her next book—she put the sleep invasion to good use.

Hotel Rooms And Overheard Plots

By Annette Dashofy

I travel enough that I can usually sleep well in hotel rooms, but not enough to have contingencies for when I can’t. There are times when I’d give my kingdom for some noise-cancelling headphones. On the other hand, if I owned a set of those, the opening chapter of Fair Game would be very different.

A couple of years ago, I was attending a mystery or writing convention (I can’t remember which one or where it was…or which hotel). As is always the case, I retreated to my room that night, exhausted beyond words. All I wanted was a solid eight hours to recharge.

Okay, who am I kidding. I’d be happy with six hours. Seven would be heaven.

I fell into my lush, comfortable bed, closed my eyes, began to drift into oblivion…

Which was when the party started next door.

Lots of shouting and laughter. A man. And it sounded like perhaps more than one woman. Hmm.

To be fair, even when they weren’t being loud, I could still hear them. I didn’t want to hear them. I wanted to sleep. But I’m a writer and consider overheard conversations a gift from the idea gods. I was wide awake and mining (eavesdropping) for tidbits. Alas, there were none.

At least nothing I could use in my genre.

I considered pounding on the wall and yelling, “I can hear every word you’re saying!” But then another thought struck me.

If I could hear everything they were saying, they could hear everything my fellow mystery author roommate and I had been saying.

Now, I really couldn’t sleep. As writers of crime fiction, we tend to have some…odd discussions. “Well, it might be better if we killed him off by (fill in the blank).” “Or I could dump the body (again, fill in the blank).”

Were those footsteps in the hall the police coming to arrest us?

Thankfully not. But I had more than a mere tidbit of conversation to use in a book. I had a premise for an entire story thread. What if a traveler stays in a motel with paper-thin walls and overhears his neighbor planning to commit murder? Does he report it? The homicidal neighbor might be drunk and blowing off steam. Or he might be a mystery writer discussing his next story.

Or he could be a killer, and reporting him might just save a life.

In the opening chapter of Fair Game, a conflicted traveler has this exact conundrum. The problem is when he got up in the morning, the guy in the room next door had already checked out. Our traveler debates whether to say anything or not…until he passes the Vance Township Police Station and takes it as a sign. He stops and tells Chief Pete Adams, who then must decide how much weight to give such a report. No murder has occurred. No one in his jurisdiction has gone missing. It’s probably nothing.

Until, on a whim, he stops at the motel to get the murderous guest’s name and license number. Both of which turn out to be fake…

So Reds and readers, have you ever overheard any “interesting” conversations through a hotel room wall? And what would you do if you overheard your neighbor say, “I’m going to kill him!”

HANK: That would be a very difficult decision! Whoa. And I’m not sure what I would do. Yeah, I might call. Certainly I would call if I heard “I’m going to kill you!” Definitely.

 The last hotel disaster I had was when every time I took a shower, it set off the smoke alarm.  Truly. It went through my mind, the first time—well, I’m in the shower, I’ll be wet and so, fine. Brilliant. 

I’ve heard loud partiers, that’s for sure. But nothing sinister. 

So how about you reads and readers? Any hotel “insights”? 

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Paramedic Zoe Chambers hoped a week at the Monongahela County Fair, showing her horse and manning the ambulance, would provide a much-needed diversion from recent events that continue to haunt her. An old friend, a bossy nemesis, and a teenage crush from her 4-H days fail to offer the distraction she had in mind. But ever the caregiver, she soon bonds with a troubled teen and a grieving father.

Back in Vance Township, a missing woman turns up dead, leading Police Chief Pete Adams into a journey through her mysterious final hours. With each new clue, the tragic circumstances of her death grow increasingly muddied.

A cryptic phone call leads Pete to join Zoe for an evening at the fairgrounds where the annual school bus demolition derby concludes with a gruesome discovery and a new case that may or may not be connected to the first. Pete’s quest for the motive behind two homicides—and Zoe’s stubborn determination to reunite a family—thrust them both onto a collision course with a violent and desperate felon.

Annette Dashofy is the USA Today best-selling author of the Zoe Chambers mystery series about a paramedic and deputy coroner in rural Pennsylvania’s tight-knit Vance Township. A lifelong resident of Washington County (PA), Annette has garnered four Agatha Award nominations including Best Contemporary Novel of 2018 for CRY WOLF. She’s a member of International Thriller Writers, the Pittsburgh Chapter of Sisters in Crime, and is on the board of directors of Pennwriters. FAIR GAME (May 2019) is the eighth in her series.