The Falklands Islands (Islas to the Argentinians) is an archipelago in the South Atlantic. There’s East Falkland and West and 776 smaller islands but most people, about 3,500 islanders, live in and around Stanley on East Falkland. The islands govern themselves though their security is guaranteed by the UK and of course many will remember the Falklands War, a ten-week undeclared war between Argentina and the UK in 1982 over control of the Falkland Islands and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. So plenty of action for a remote spot but any crime writing?
Well, going back to 1960, there’s The Falkland Islands Mystery written by an author who chose the sobriquet Sea-Lion. Sea-Lion was actually Captain Geoffrey Martin Bennett of the Royal Navy who started writing mysteries in 1945 when still in service and so needed a pseudonymous pen name. Nazis of the hoped for Fourth Reich are organising in South America and threatening British territory in the Falklands. To be fair The Falkland Islands Mystery may not have aged particularly well, but there’s some good descriptions of the rather wild seas that surround the islands.
The 1982 war, which the Argentinian writer Jorge Louis Borges famously described as “two bald men arguing over a comb”, inspired Edward Wilson’s South Atlantic Requiem (2022), which is actually the sixth novel in the excellent eight book William Catesby spy series. It’s 1982 and Catesby (unfortunately sharing the same name as one of the conspirators behind the Gunpowder Plot to blow up the British Parliament in 1605), a rather perfunctory spy, is sent to Argentina by Downing Street to prevent Argentina from obtaining more lethal French-made Exocet missiles. All set against the feverish evolving conflict between the Argentinian dictators and Mrs Thatcher.
More up to date and much talked about and praised is Sharon Bolton’s Little Black Lies from 2015. A terrible situation – a moment’s carelessness, a tragic accident – and your two children are dead. But was it an accident, were supposed friends involved and what does living in a small Falkland Island community mean when you can’t escape anyone and every chance encounter is an agonizing reminder of what you’ve lost and drives a desire for revenge.
Some more crime and thriller novels with Falkland Island connections….
Of course Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt has been to the Falklands…. Shock Wave (2017) has Dirk exploring for a 150-year-old British shipwrecked on the way to an Australian penal colony and the survivors discover diamonds on the tropical island where they wash up, Maeve Fletcher, one of their descendants, is stranded on an island in Antarctica with a party of passengers after their cruise ship seemingly abandons them. As ever the plot and story bounce around – in this case including the Falklands, the west coast of Canada and the Tasman Sea.
John Nichols’s Exclusion Zone (1998) imagines a restarting of the Falklands conflict in 1999 as world power compete for the oil-rich gem South Atlantic. The Royal Air Force and a Royal Navy nuclear submarine appear as Argentine jet fighters penetrate the Exclusion Zone.
Author R.S. Burnett grew up in the Falkland Islands and began his writing career with the Islands’ weekly newspaper, Penguin News. After moving to London and spending over a decade working for the Daily Mirror, Burnett is now a freelance journalist and lives once again in the Falklands. Whiteout (2025) is his first novel and is about being lost on the Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica, south of the Falklands and then hearing on the BBC World Service that there’s been a nuclear strike on the UK. Who is the enemy, how do you survive, and if you do who will you meet when you escape? Burnett is carrying on a similar theme in his forthcoming 2026 book, Deception Island. On a small boat in the remote South Atlantic Abbie and her team are on a rescue mission to Deception Island, a sunken volcano about to blow and needs evacuating. But when they land on the island they find it completely deserted. As they search for signs of life other strange things start to happen: the radio is cut-off and then their boat disappears…
And finally, a novel from Argentinian writer Carlos Gamerro (translated by Ian Barnett), The Islands (1998 in Spanish and 2012 in English). Gamerro is a Buenos Aires-based writer who has written half a dozen novels, the best known of which is The Islands. It’s Buenos Aires in 1992 and Hacker Felipe Félix is summoned by the industrial magnate Fausto Tamerlán and tasked with finding the witnesses to a very public crime. Rejecting the mission is not an option. After a decade spent immersed in drugs and virtual realities, trying to forget the freezing trench in which he passed the Falklands War, Félix is forced to confront the city around him and realises to his shock that the war never really ended. The Islands is a detective novel, a cyber-thriller, an inner-city road trip and a war memoir of the 1982 conflict. It’s also by turns funny, poignant and surreal and one of the few accounts we have in English of how the raw recruits on the “other side”, the Argentinian side felt about the war. As well as a successful novel The Islands has been adapted as a hit play for the theatre.
The Falklands remain rather trapped in the past – the past of the British colonialism, of competing empires in the South Atlantic, of being a political rallying point for the Argentinian junta of the Generals and a side plot of The Dirty War in the country. It’s still contested country – Falklands/Malvinas remains a sticking point between the UK and Argentina, especially when the two football teams meet! It is also a theme running through much of the crime and thriller writing about the archipelago. Stuck between Lo don and Buenos Aires the Falklands can feel a long, long way from anywhere, but suddenly in history have often become quite important.
