• The story of Hotel:
• The setting: the St. Gregory Hotel, the largest in New Orleans, Louisiana. From Monday to Friday. The Hotel is experiencing a crisis of being forced to be sold to a chain hotel owner.
高级英语（第三版）第一册第三课 Blackmail
Teaching Aims
a) To enable students to appreciate the story. b) To help students analyze the plot, theme and
characterization c) To help students enlarge vocabulary, esp.,
• The events: in the crisis, there are four knotty problems that face the Hotel managers: dealing with an attempted rape in a room; catching a thief operating in the hotel; several hundreds of dentists threatening to leave the hotel in protest against the hotel’ objection to serving a black dentist, and finally the case of the Duke of Croydon.
Synopsis (概要)/ Plot
• The Duke and the Duchess of Croydon occupy a luxury suite in St. Gregory Hotel in New Orleans. On Monday evening, while driving back with his wife, the Duchess, from a gambling house, the Duke knocks down a woman and her child. Both of them are killed. They drive away. The hit-and-run becomes sensational news in the city. Ogilvie, the chief house detective of the hotel, the blackmailer in the story, notices the battered car when it drives back into the garage of the hotel. Instead of reporting this to the police, he goes to see the Duke and the Duchess. He blackmails them for a large sum of money as the price of his keeping silent. The Duchess does not admit the crime until the detective produces a lot of evidences. Considering that only by removing the battered car can they be completely out of trouble, the Duchess offers to pay Ogilvie twice more than he has asked for and in return, he should drive the battered car to Chicago in the north. Ogilvie, under the lure of the large sum of money, takes the offer.
• The end: The novel ends with a pleasant surprise. A sick, old, eccentric man staying in the hotel turns out to be an extremely wealthy man from Montreal, Canada. Earlier, he fell seriously ill and was saved by Peter and his girlfriend. To show his gratitude and to repay their kindness, he buys the hotel from its former owner and makes Peter the new executive vice-president, with complete authority to run the hotel as he thinks fit.
Pre-reading questions 1) What happens in the story? 2) When is the climax of the story? 3) What is the theme of the story? 4) Who are the main characters?
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Major works :
Flight into Danger (with John Castle (1958) ) The Final Diagnosis (1959) In High Places (1960) Hotel (1965) Airport (1968) Wheels (1971) The Moneychangers (1975) Strong Medicine (1975) The Evening News (1990) Detective (1997)
colloquial English, slang and ungrammatical English.
Arthur Hailey (1920-2004)
----- Байду номын сангаасorn in England; ---- began his writing career while an
RAF（British Royal Air Force ） pilot during the Second World War; ----- became a Canadian citizen as well as British; -----Hailey's novels have been published in thirty-nine languages. -----An estimated 160 million copies are in print worldwide. ---- Most of his books have been made into films or TV series.