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| Blue Hotel
| | J.T. Conroe
| "Blue Hotel" is a crime novel set in the 1940s:
In the winter of 1948, Michael Egan, the young protege of a Chicago mobster flees a botched heist with a valise full of bearer bonds belonging to his mobster mentor. With a festering bullet wound and a desperate need for a hiding place, he takes refuge in the “Blue Hotel”, the only landmark in a small Nebraska railroad town whose ability to survive in post-war America is in grave doubt.
However, a stranger in this lonely place quickly gets noticed. Egan is arrested by the town's corrupt sheriff, who discovers his prisoner is wanted by the mob. Sensing an opportunity, the sheriff sells Egan to the highest bidder and deputizes Andy Bond, a nerve-shattered amputee war veteran, to guard him.
But when the sheriff overplays his hand and a blizzard isolates the town, the two rival gangs with whom he has been negotiating, attempt to kidnap Egan and extract from him the location of the money he had hidden just prior to his arrest. Egan’s only hope is Andy Bond who takes his side in a lethal three-way cat-and-mouse game that alters the fates of the two men, the sheriff, and the town itself.
This novel is imagined as a sequel to Stephen Crane’s 1899 short story, “The Blue Hotel”. It has been written that Stanley Kubrick was inspired by Crane's story to make "The Shining" although the basis for the movie, of course, is the popular novel by the same name written by Stephen King. There are, however, no supernatural elements in this novel or Crane's story.
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