The Dead Sea Hotel
The Dead Sea Hotel is a satire; part spy thriller, part morality tale, part ghost story. It is set in a run-down hotel in Amman, Jordan, where the events in the book mostly take place. I actually stole the hotel lock, stock and barrel from Egypt, after I found myself staying in one of the most extraordinary, God-forsaken and, for all that, fascinating hotels in Cairo. It was literally a living museum (although we can have a wee debate about how ‘living’ it was).
I can never claim to have suffered for my art, most of my research seems to have consisted of long Almaza-laced lunches somewhere up in the Chouf Mountains or Martini-soaked dinners in the magical dining rooms of Tallinn. But my two-night stay in Cairo’s Windsor Hotel doesn’t really rank up there with my most joyous experiences, except that I found myself delightedly soaking it all up for later use in this here book.
Of Moritats
A Moritat was originally a medieval entertainment put on by street entertainers, mummers, a ‘murder ballad’ that told a tale of murder most foul. It was a form of entertainment most popular in Germany, even up to the 20th century - Mack The Knife, the song made so popular by Louis Armstrong and Bobby Darin, was originally composed as a moritat - by none other than Kurt Weill together with Berthold Brecht.
And that’s what The Dead Sea Hotel is - a murder ballad. Its central theme is death and perhaps what happens after that most inevitable of events has taken place.
Some pictures of the Windsor Hotel, just in case you think I’m exaggerating here.
Not only do we have the ‘original’ barrel bar from back in the ‘50s when it was the British Officers Club, but take a look at that there telephone system - literally, like the rest of the place, an antique…
I confess I enjoyed myself thoroughly writing The Dead Sea Hotel, at least in part because I had finally realised that conventional publishing really, really wasn’t for me. They’d never be interested in me and I’ll never get on with them, so we’re probably happier apart. That took some of the fetters off, although in hindsight I’d probably shrugged them off with Birdkill, my fifth book, which started me on the tangential development of spy thrillers that opened up slightly different worlds than those you’d find in more conventional thrillers like Beirut - An Explosive Thriller.
As a novel, The Dead Sea Hotel takes some terrific twists as a result. It has both horrified and delighted readers, and in fact was so very polarising that I put it away in a drawer for six years before finally deciding to let it see the light of day earlier this year.
Of hotels
The Dead Sea Hotel you encounter in this book is an act of wanton and wholesale theft: its entire environs, including the famous ‘Barrel Bar’, were nicked lock, stock and tattered barrel from the Windsor, once an adjunct to the infamous Shepheard’s Hotel.
The Windsor was used as the British Officers Club in Cairo and has literally, and I kid you not, remained untouched since then. The Dead Sea Hotel is rooted, in every loving detail of its wanton neglect and extreme dilapidation, in The Windsor.
Shepheard’s itself was burnt down in 1952, in a wave of city-wide conflagrations which nobody to this day can quite explain. One of the Middle East’s most famous and celebrated colonial era hotels, during the war Shepheard’s was home to a barman by the name of Joe Scialom (pronounced ‘Shalom’), the inventor of the cocktail Suffering Bastard, a play on Scialom’s own hungover state as a ‘Suffering Bar Steward’.
And that’s 30ml brandy, 30ml gin, 15ml lime juice and a dash of bitters topped up with 120ml ginger beer, served tall with a sprig of mint and a slice of orange. So now you know.
Trader Vic’s sells a very moreish drink by the same name that has absolutely nothing to do with the original recipe or its inventor, but it does taste lovely.