Any novelist will tell you the construction of a novel boils down to the trifactor of characters, plot and setting. But setting is so often seen as the poor relation, merely a framework for the characters and plot to work their way through the pages.
Not for the mystery writer; they are well aware the setting is the bones and blood of the plot, and the characters’ accomplice or antagonist. In many ways, setting is a character in its own right, and there is no setting more evocative than a remote island. Drop the reader into a tropical paradise in the Caribbean or a frozen rock in the North Sea, and they are instantly, deliciously, there…and at the mercy of the mystery writer.
I love island mysteries. I love islands. Those little dots on a map that capture the collective human imagination in a far greater way than their size really warrants. Whether a tropical paradise or a bleak, cold island, they are strangely recognizable and offer an escape from our own reality.
And in a mystery writer’s hands they can be havens or hellscapes for the characters and readers’ alike. A paradise of sun, sand, and fun for the whole family hides danger beneath the surface of gin-clear water, while the lure of solitude on a rugged, wild landscape can descend into a chilling nightmare. Both settings compel the characters and readers to step willingly onto familiar, yet unsettling shores, with no idea of what—or whom—lurks behind the swaying palms or twisted pines.
In many ways an island setting is a cheat sheet for mystery writers. A bigger tapestry of the locked-room trope that imposes isolation, unfriendly geography, and no hope of outside help, whilst forcing confrontation with no possibility of escape.
Throw in a bunch of hapless characters and the die is cast. This, too, can be a cheat sheet for writers and can go in three ways: The close-knit community where everyone knows everyone is an incubator of familiarity breeding contempt – just ripe for the unravelling of an old, festering feud to culminate in murder. Or an outsider arrives on the island and stirs up those simmering old feuds with a similar outcome. And finally, a group of strangers is thrown together in a strange, invariably hostile, environment with no escape.
This creates a claustrophobic world of deadly secrets waiting to erupt like a pestilence, where nobody knows the others will react when their limits are tested. And of course, one (or more) will have a murderous agenda.
It’s astonishing the amount of human history that is visible on islands. I’m fortunate to live in Scotland with its masses of little islands, and I am ceaselessly amazed by the sheer volume of history each island has accumulated.
The wars that have been waged over a tiny parcel of inaccessible land, the massive religious buildings or castles built for only a tiny community, and the folklore that has grown in isolation, unique to each island. And, of course, the almost ubiquitous manor house with a gruesome past that some wealthy lord or other built on a tiny rock in the middle of the ocean just because he could, who then left a tantalizing old blood-drenched mystery to be solved by later generations.
The sheer weight of each island’s history can be felt in the very bones and peat of these specks of land and is so often a writer’s delight to be used and abused at all—something I am often guilty of.
The topography of islands plays a massive role in mysteries. The sheer cliffs that evolved just for a body to be thrown over, the raging waves that push a fish-nibbled corpse onto a Caribbean beach, or a peat bog on an island in the Minch waiting to consume an unsuspecting victim. All these things are possible for a mainland mystery too, but the implications are far worse for a small community on an island to confront.
Above all, the psychological impact of an island’s isolation is a mystery writer’s best friend. Humans are social creatures and we don’t do well in isolation. There are, of course, the sheer horrors of being shipwrecked all alone on an island, but the mystery writer will focus on the small island communities or a small group of strangers.
Even small communities of long standing need an influx of new blood, not merely to avoid the horrors of inbreeding, but to stimulate the community and allow natural growth. But the outsider arriving in a closed community will first have a painful transition, and this is inevitably the pressure point a mystery writer will develop, ripping apart the old structure with a grisly murder or haunting, and put it all back together, for better or worse, into a new order.
It varies slightly with a group of strangers thrown together on a remote island. The psychological impact of isolation is more visceral, as hidden motives and secrets are uncovered and the characters are forced to confront their inner demons, with the added self-awareness of just how far they are willing to go to survive. The descent into feral behavior is quicker without the lack of prior knowledge of how others will behave when pushed beyond their moral and ethical constraints, and the reader—and the other characters—can’t trust anyone, not even themselves.
Island mysteries are, in some ways, a comfort read. As a fictional setting, it creates an expectation for the reader, and dictates the limits of how far the mystery writer can push those expectations.
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