Island Genres, Genre Islands

Conceptualisation and Representation in Popular Fiction

Ralph Crane, Lisa Fletcher

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781783482078
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

'Island Genres, Genre Islands' moves the debate about literature and place onto new ground by exploring the island settings of bestsellers. Through a focus on four key genres—crime fiction, thrillers, popular romance fiction, and fantasy fiction—Crane and Fletcher show that genre is fundamental to both the textual representation of real and imagined islands and to actual knowledges and experiences of islands. The book offers broad, comparative readings of the significance of islandness in each of the four genres as well as detailed case studies of major authors and texts. These include chapters on Agatha’s Christie’s islands, the role of the island in ‘Bondspace,’ the romantic islophilia of Nora Roberts’s Three Sisters Island series, and the archipelagic geography of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea. Crane and Fletcher’s book will appeal to specialists in literary studies and cultural geography, as well as in island studies.

Part I

Island Crime, Crime Islands

Chapter One

The Body on the Island

The Insular Geography of Crime Fiction

Islands are everywhere in the atlas of crime fiction.

Agatha Christie sets three of her golden age mysteries on islands in Britain and the Bahamas. Nevada Barr’s park ranger detective Anna Pigeon solves crimes on several islands: Lake Superior’s Isle Royale (twice); Cumberland Island, off the Georgia coast; the group of tiny islands that make up the Dry Tortugas National Park off Key West; and the fictional Boar Island on the edge of the Acadia National Park in Maine. Pacific islands provide the locations for mystery series by John Enright, G. W. Kent, and Marianne Wheelaghan. Hawai’i is the setting for Earl Derr Biggers’s first Charlie Chan mystery, The House Without a Key (1925), and Chip Hughes’s Surfing Detective Mystery, Murder on Moloka’i (2004), straddles several islands of the Hawaiian archipelago. Paul Thomas’s series featuring the Maori Detective Sergeant Tito Ihaka is set in New Zealand, as are four of Ngaio Marsh’s Inspector Alleyn detective novels, and David Owen’s Pufferfish series featuring Detective Inspector Franz Heineken is set in Tasmania. Garry Disher uses both Tasmania and Vanuatu as settings in Port Vila Blues (1996), the fifth of his series of eight hardboiled crime capers featuring the resourceful thief Wyatt; Sam Levitt’s third outing takes him to Corsica in Peter Mayle’s The Corsican Caper (2014); and Chris Ewan’s The Good Thief’s Guide to Venice (2011), the fourth in his series of comic capers featuring part-time crime writer and part-time thief, Charlie Howard, is set in Italy’s island city. Donna Leon’s Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery series, also set in Venice, which began in 1992 with Death in La Fenice, now runs to twenty-five novels, and Sicily is the setting for Andrea Camilleri’s numerous Inspector Montalbano crime novels. Inspector Singh investigates a murder in the island city-state of Singapore in Shamini Flint’s The Singapore School of Villainy (2010), the third volume of her Asian cozy crime series, and another in Bali in A Bali Conspiracy Most Foul (2009), while each novel in Sandy Frances Duncan and George Szanto’s cozy Islands Investigations International Mystery series is set on one of the islands off the coast of British Columbia and Washington State. Peter May’s stand-alone crime novel, Entry Island (2014), is set in the Magdalen Islands situated between Newfoundland and Nova Scotia in the Gulf of St Lawrence, while Tangier Island, off the coast of Virginia, is the setting for Patricia Cornwell’s police caper, Isle of Dogs (2001), and Susan M. Boyer’s cozy Liz Talbot Mystery Series is set on the fictional Stella Maris, an island off the South Carolina coast. Leonardo Padura’s quartet of crime novels featuring Inspector Mario Conde, which opens with Havana Blue (2000), is set in Cuba.

M. M. Kaye chose island locations for three of her colonial-era mystery novels Death in Cyprus (rev. 1984; originally published as Death Walked in Cyprus, 1956), Death in Zanzibar (rev. 1983; originally published as The House of Shade, 1959), and Death in the Andamans (rev. 1985; originally published as Nights on the Island, 1960). Crime fiction set on islands in the Mediterranean includes Marcello Fois’s Sardinian mystery, The Advocate (1998); Marco Vichi’s Inspector Bordelli mystery, Death in Sardinia (2004); Mark Mills’s The Information Officer (2009), set on Malta during the Second World War; Daniel Silva’s crime thriller, The English Girl (2013), set largely in Corsica; and the sixth outing of M. C. Beaton’s cozy Agatha Raisin series, Agatha Raisin and the Terrible Tourist (1997) is set on Cyprus. Anne Zouroudi’s seven Mysteries of the Greek Detective series, each themed around one of the seven deadly sins, are set mainly in the Greek islands, beginning with The Messenger of Athens (2007), set on the fictional island of Thiminos.

Islands also feature prominently in a range of Scandinavian crime novels. In Swedish crime fiction, which dominates the list of Scandinavian crime available in English, the island of Valo in the Fjällbacka archipelago is the setting for Buried Angels (2011), the eighth book in Camilla Lackberg’s series featuring Detective Hedström and his wife, crime writer Erica Falck; Mari Jungstedt’s Unseen (2006), set on the island of Gotland, is the first in a series featuring Detective Superintendent Anders Knutas and journalist Johan Berg; and Johan Theorin’s Echoes from the Dead (2007) is the first in a quartet set predominantly on the Baltic island of Örland. Arnaldur Indridason’s numerous Detective Erlendur crime novels are set in Iceland, as are those of his compatriot, Yrsa Sigurdardottir, which feature the lawyer Thora Gudmundsdottir as their central character. Danish crime fiction author Jussi Adler-Olson’s The Hanging Girl (2015), his sixth Department Q novel, sees Copenhagen Detective Carl Morck investigate a cold case on the remote island of Bornholm. The Last Refuge (2014) by Scottish writer Craig Robertson is set in the Faroe Islands (an autonomous nation within the Kingdom of Denmark, situated about half way between Iceland and Norway).

The small islands around the coast of the Great Britain—the islands off the larger island—provide the settings for numerous British crime fictions. The best known of these are undoubtedly Ann Cleeves’s Shetland series (two quartets), featuring Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez, and Peter May’s Lewis trilogy, set in the Outer Hebrides, featuring Detective Inspector Fin MacLeod. Continuing round the coast in an anti-clockwise direction, the Isle of Man is the setting for Chris Ewan’s Safe House (2012). Gillian E. Hamer’s self-published Crimson Shore (2104) is set on the island of Anglesey off the North Wales coast, while Mark Billingham’s The Bones Beneath (2014), part of his D. I. Tom Thorne series, takes place predominantly on Bardsey Island, the fourth largest island off Wales. In P. D. James’s The Lighthouse (2005), the thirteenth book in her classic Adam Dalgliesh Mystery series, Dalgliesh is called in to investigate a mysterious death on the imaginary Combe Island off the Cornish coast, and in The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982) Cordelia Gray investigates a murder on the fictional Courcy Island off the Dorset coast, while Elizabeth George chooses the English Channel island of Guernsey as the setting for A Place of Hiding (2003). Guernsey is also the location for Canadian author Jill Downie’s Moretti and Fall Mystery series, which debuted with Daggers and Men’s Smiles (2011). The Isle of Wight is a key location for several of Pauline Rowson’s D. I. Andy Horton Marine Mystery series, including Blood on the Sand (2010), while Tom Bale created a fictitious island in Chichester Harbour as the titular setting for Terror’s Reach (2010). The island setting in Margery Allingham’s Mystery Mile (1930) is based on the real Mersea Island, which lies just off the Essex coast. Scolt Head Island, off the North Norfolk coast, provides the scene of the crime in Jim Kelly’s Death’s Door (2012), the fourth instalment in his D. I. Peter Shaw and D. S. George Valentine series. Further up the east coast, Sheila Quigley’s trilogy of D. I. Mike Yorke novels—Thorn in My Side (2011), Nowhere Man (2012), and The Final Countdown (2013)—is based on and around Northumberland’s Holy Island, and M. C. Beaton’s Death of a Snob (1992) takes Hamish Macbeth to the fictitious island of Eileencraig off the coast of Sutherland in the Scottish Highlands.

While there are a number of excellent crime novels set in Ireland—including Matt McGuire’s Belfast-based D. S. O’Neill novels, Dark Dawn (2012) and When Sorrows Come (2014), and the six Dublin-based Quirke Mysteries by Benjamin Black (John Banville’s nom de crime)—these capture the tenor of the cities in which they are set rather than that of Ireland as an island. The same is true of the bulk of British crime fiction: a sense of place is always important but not a sense of mainland Britain as island place. So, too, in Australia, where island crime fiction is focused on islands such as Tasmania, “the island off the island” as Heineken calls it in Pig’s Head (1994), the first of Owen’s Pufferfish mysteries,¹ or Thursday Island, an island in the Torres Strait Islands archipelago which provides the setting for Catherine Titasey’s debut crime fiction, My Island Homicide (2013).

The allure of islands as settings for crime fiction is succinctly summed up by Barbara Pezzotti in her section on island locations in The Importance of Place in Contemporary Italian Crime Fiction:

The island is an ideal setting for a detective story. The sense of mystery it generates is a vital element for crime fiction. Moreover, an island provides a crime writer with a small community where many of the inhabitants are interrelated, where secrets are deeply hidden, and from which a quick escape can be physically difficult or impossible.²

For Pezzotti, the island itself lends mystery to the mystery. Islands have long been associated with paradise on the one h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Illustration Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Reading Genre Islands
• Part I: Island Crime, Crime Islands
• Part II: Island Thrillers, Thriller Islands
• Part III: Island Romance, Romance Islands
• Part IV: Island Fantasy, Fantasy Islands
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index