Why Rob Hart Needed to Write a Time Travel Hotel Detective Novel

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Rob Hart hit the bookish bigtime with 2019’s The Warehouse, a dystopian thriller that exposes the seamy underside of late-stage capitalism. Prior to that, he penned the terrific five-book series about PI Ash McKenna. But all this time, Hart knew he had a time-travel book in him. In the just-published The Paradox Hotel, it’s 2072, and January Cole heads security at the government-run hotel, where tourists stay before their journeys to Ancient Egypt, the Renaissance, or the Battle of Gettysburg via the Einstein Intercentury Timeport. January used to be a time-traveling detective for the Time Enforcement Agency, but it turns out that too much professional mucking about in the timestream can lead to becoming Unstuck, generating erratic, disturbing time-jumping experiences for that person. Amid the hotel hosting a summit for billionaires and their privatization bids for the timeport, there’s a snowstorm causing travel delays; someone appears to have smuggled a trio of baby dinosaurs back from the Late Cretaceous period; and there’s been – or perhaps about to be – a murder. Plus, January is prone to all-too-realistic glimpses of her dead lover, Mena. It’s a locked-room conundrum wrapped in a science-fiction thriller that evokes comparisons with Doctor Who, Douglas Adams, and John Scalzi’s Lock In among many other pop-culture touchstones. There are also spot-on swipes at corrupt political and business leaders; even the concept of “checks and balances” gets a bit of a working over. It’s a mind-bending pleasure to accompany January and her drone, Ruby – who boasts a Kiwi accent and dry-as-bone humor that matches January’s note for note – on their mystery-and-suspense-infused quest.

[This interview has been edited and condensed.]

Daneet Steffens: I noticed Paradox Hotel is dedicated to Tom Spanbauer, the Dangerous Writing founder. Why this book, to him?

Rob Hart: Well Tom is easily my favorite writer ever. He was a really formative writer for me. I was also lucky: five or six years ago, I took a class with him in Portland in his basement, me and a bunch of other writers, some of whom I’m still in contact with because it was a really special experience. There are a lot of things that influenced Paradox Hotel but there was something specific about one of Tom’s books, Now Is the Hour – it’s the way he opened the book by asking a question that he’s going to answer later on. I loved the way that developed, and it influenced a little bit how I structured Paradox Hotel: that was really important to my process in understanding how to build out the story.

DS: Was there an original inspiration for Paradox Hotel?

RH: I had gone to this interactive theater experience in New York called Sleep No More which I’m a huge fan of. It’s structured as a play that you explore, following different actors and different scenes. It starts in a hotel and expands out: all of sudden you’re in a graveyard or a psych ward or a forest. And I thought, “Man! Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a hotel where you could go into a room and it was five minutes later or ten minutes ago?” I went home and opened a Google doc and wrote “time-travel hotel,” and then closed it. I do that whenever I have an idea – I’ll start a Google doc and rough something out: sometimes I come back to it, sometimes I don’t. This one kept sticking with me especially because I love time-travel stories.

DS: So this was a few years ago?

RH: Yes. After The Warehouse I tried to write a whole other book, and it just wasn’t coming together. Me and my editor were going back and forth on it and I just didn’t have it – it was a little too sprawling, the characters weren’t really working. I had this time-travel hotel thing in the back of my head, and finally I said, “No, I think I should do this,” and the whole thing just clicked for me. Which is nice.

DS: January Cole reminded me of Ash McKenna a bit in terms of her sharp-edged humor and her fragility. Did you recognize that similarity while you were writing her? Or was it more about the noir-private-investigator trope?

RH: It’s a bit of the trope. But also, I wrote this series about this young tough guy who’s a fast-talker and big fighter but also emotionally stunted and really trying to grow up into a fully formed person. There was a part of me that was like, “You know, I did this with a guy. I’m kind of curious to try out this voice and this style with a woman.” I thought it would be a fun challenge for me in terms of trying to nail that voice and that perspective. I do see the similarities; I also think there are differences. Ash was a lot younger, January’s older. They’re both dealing with grief but in very different ways – Ash was trying to live up to this example that his dad set, whereas January just doesn’t want to let go of this thing that she lost, and, as a mechanism of being in this hotel, she doesn’t have to. It was fun finding both the similarities and the differences between those perspectives.

DS: The secondary characters are really wonderful – I was particularly partial to Brandon the particle-physics-trained porter. Did you have a favorite?

RH: I mean, my favorite was Ruby – I love a goofy, wisecracking robot. Ruby was also a function of January needing someone to bounce off of because otherwise January’s alone for most of the book. She needed a sidekick, and a robot sidekick is always a pretty safe bet. But I loved all the secondary characters: I loved writing Mena, and Brandon was a lot of fun, a good example of how when you go to a luxury hotel there’s a very clear difference between the cliental and the staff. I liked this idea of playing with themes of classism because I can’t not write about that kind of stuff. And I do think we are in a place where you can have a really advanced degree and still have trouble getting a job, or just surviving.

DS: Are there particular elements that compel you to work in noir?

RH: You can find fun thriller elements in it and it’s predicated around this idea of being really quick and snappy and smart and clever. But I think there’s a hyperreality to noir where you’re seeing people at their worst, and that’s when you can learn the most about them. It’s about the darkness under the surface, which is something I’m always interested in scratching at. In a general sense, I always try to look at the bigger picture in terms of where these problems are coming from. The last Ash McKenna book was about the heroin crisis on Staten Island which is a very real thing, a very big problem. But I made sure to point out that the problem is not about the street-level users, but about the pharmaceutical companies that made these crazy painkillers and then did everything they could to cover up data about them being terribly addictive. That’s always interesting to me, looking for the root of these problems: when you’re looking at the root of any kind of street-level crime, it’s always some rich asshole who wanted to make a profit. We do have trickle-down economics in America, but the trickle is a steady stream of urine.

DS: And in Paradox, January’s flash assessments are so sharp. She’s the heart of the book, a hard-nosed investigator who recognizes the bigger problems for what they are, who’s also struggling with this incredible loss.

RH: That’s the fun thing about writing characters like that: how good they are at one thing, and how damaged they are at all these other things. Her being Unstuck in time and seeing things out of order often makes her a better investigator because sometimes she sees things before they’re going to happen. I just love characters like that – really intelligent characters who are so smart, but why they can’t deal with their own shit? I like exploring that conflict of how they can be so incisive about everything but themselves.

DS: Did she ever do anything that surprise you?

RH: I knew what the emotional payoff was going to be and I knew sort of in a general sense what the endgame of the book was, but there were a few things that came into the game much later that, yeah, I got a lot deeper on this than I thought I would. And I felt really good about that. It’s always easy to get lost in the fun goofy stuff, but by the end of the book I felt like I did a really okay job with the emotional aspect. It’s a nice feeling.

DS: The book has a lovely sense of the ridiculous to it, lots of quipping and punning, sarcasm and snark. At one point, during a semi-slapstick dinosaur chase, a character yells, “’This is like a Benny Hill video’” which, for someone who recognizes the reference, it’s one that has an immediate and visceral impact. But the next line was a zinger too because a younger character yells back, “’I don’t get that reference.’” That made me laugh. The way you use humor, it goes a long way to alleviating the horrific stuff that’s going on, the starkness of the noir, the violence, the behaviour of some of the characters.

RH: Yeah it was kind of tough to find that balance. That’s always my goal – I want to write about grief and letting go, about why billionaires are evil and privatization of public works is bad, but at the same time I want to have fun with it and make it entertaining. It’s like, how do I make this entertaining without making it so ridiculous that you can’t really lock into it? My agent, when I initially pitched this book to him, was like, “No way. No. This sounds ridiculous.” And I said, “But it makes sense in my head.” I pitched it poorly; I understood when he told me not to pursue it. But when the other book wasn’t working, I went back to him and stamped my feet and said, “I have to do this,” and he said, “Okay, man. Whatever.” And Publishers Weekly gave it a star and we were so excited! I said, “I told you. I told you it was going to be okay.”

DS: Returning to secondary characters for a minute, there are some fascinating women in the hotel’s history, including the woman who invents time travel.

RH: Yes, I loved the idea that this woman invents time travel, one of the greatest innovations in human history, and they still named the timeport after Albert Einstein – that is very much a thing that would happen. And it was fun to play with those elements from the past and build in a low-key mystery there. Actually, all these characters were so much fun to write. I’ve got a sequel idea kicking around right now and we’re gonna see how that goes. It will depend on how this one does.

DS: I was hoping there might be a sequel! Anything you can tell me about it?

RH: I’m not going to say too much but I will say that I’ve talked to a couple of people about it. Paradox Hotel is being developed for TV by Working Title. I had a meeting with the guy who’s writing the pilot and I was spit-balling the idea to him. It’s a slightly different take on the time-travel trope from what I did in Paradox, but it would be really fun if it came together.

DS: What else are you working on now?

RH: I’m working on a comic book with a friend, Alex Segura, and another comic book that I’m talking to a press about – I would like to get into comic work. Alex and I are also working on a novel: we have a really fun idea for a sci-fi novel that’s basically le Carré in space. Me and Alex, we collaborate really well: we’re 99.9 percent simpatico on everything. We were both reporters so we understand that the story has to win in the end. And I’m contemplating my next book: I’ve got a couple of ideas, and there’s one that I’m mostly zoned in on. But if Paradox gets picked up for TV in the next few months or the book does bangin’ business, then it might behoove me to start on the sequel. So I’m working on a few side hustles and having some fun trying different things. I’m not under a ton of pressure, but I’m definitely getting to the point where I need to start to narrow it down.

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