Island Mysteries

For a small country, Scotland has a disproportionate share of coastline. This is due not only to the jagged geography of its mainland shores – all those sticky-in sea lochs and sticky-out peninsulas – but also its numerous islands, most of which lie off the west coast. Having dealt in my previous two Leo Moran detective novels with the mountains and lochs of Argyll, and the pastures and forests of Galloway, I wanted to sample another Scottish landscape, the island, and it got me thinking about island mysteries I have enjoyed.
My books feature elements of the supernatural, and the classic 1973 folk-horror movie The Wicker Man (see earlier blog!) draws its tension from being set on an island. It was based on a novel by David Pinner called Ritual, although the book is set in Cornwall. In the film, a policeman, Sergeant Howie – played by Edward Woodward, sets off from the mainland to investigate a disappearance on the fictional Hebridean island of Summerisle. All the inhabitants are in the thrall of a pagan cult, so there are no allies to be found for the sole force of law and order – and, because of a malfunctional (presumably sabotaged) seaplane engine, there is no escape from the islanders’ sinister designs. I recently watched a television thriller/horror series called The Third Day, starring Jude Law and Naomie Harris, which draws on The Wicker Man in that it is also set on an island whose inhabitants are immersed in a bizarre religion. Instead of a broken engine, a causeway which floods at high tide is its isolating device. Both works incorporate crime and detection, and both involve a missing child.
Turning to detective novels, I suppose Enid Blyton gave me my first taste of island mysteries in her Famous Five series, because a couple of the adventures feature Kirrin Island, owned by the character George’s family. Perhaps Agatha Christie’s darkest book is And Then There Were None. Eight people are invited to a small Devon island by hosts who refuse to reveal themselves. The bodies start piling up and the paranoia grows. It transpires that the guests are being found out by their past sins, and the enclosed geography adds to the sense of reckoning.
Tartan Noir has its fair share of island mysteries. The first in Peter May’s Lewis Trilogy, The Blackhouse, also describes characters’ pasts catching up with them, not least that of the protagonist Fin MacLeod, who travels from Edinburgh to his childhood home of Lewis to investigate a grisly murder. May is skilled at evoking a sense of place, a brooding, lonely landscape cut off from civilisation. Louise Welsh’s Naming the Bones involves a professor setting off for the island of Lismore to investigate the death of an obscure poet who died there, apparantely by suicide, decades ago. Welsh describes a wind-blasted place haunted by a hint of the occult, and portrays the ancient rivalries and secrets which plague the isolated community. Ann Cleeves’ Shetland books also evoke a bleak, lonesome backdrop in which the secrets of the past are buried as though in the very peat bogs of the terrain. They were made into an acclaimed BBC drama starring Douglas Henshall.
There is a particular ambience to the Scottish island as a setting. They are generally sparsely populated and often volcanic, with striking rocky features. If you walk to an obscure corner you can have an edge-of-the-world feeling. Yet Craig Robertson’s The Last Refuge takes us out of Scotland to the even more remote Faroe Islands, and tells of desolate places scourged by oppressive weather and populated by thuggish birds. The reader isn’t sure what the protagonist and narrator John Callum is escaping from, and is only given glimpses through nightmares and flashbacks. Alcohol adds to the feeling of paranoia.
Considering these films and books, and my own experiences of researching and writing an island detective novel, has enabled me to identify certain recurring elements. At the outset, there is the crossing of a threshold – a body of water – from one realm to another. Certain gothic ingredients crop up in island crime fiction, not least the protagonist departing the urban, ordered, ‘civilised’ world for the rural, ‘backward’, untamed, superstitious one. The gothic often features mysterious, reclusive figures living alone in an atmospheric abode, and an island ramps up that sense of withdrawal and isolation. In my island adventure, The Mystery of the Strange Piper, my P.I. Leo Moran goes to a fictional Scottish island called Sonna. Don’t bother looking for it on the map, because I made it up. It is, however, closely based on a well-known Firth of Clyde holiday isle (I am afraid there are no prizes for guessing which one!). At the start of the book, Leo muses upon the peculiar anticipation of an island sojourn:
Leo listened to the rapid throb of the diesel engines and the churn as the bow cut the waves, and felt the thrill that comes with crossing a body of water, the anticipation of stepping onto a different, confined, insular world.
And later:
He considered how an island is a singular entity. Its own kingdom within its sea-lapped confines with its particular history and politics and class divides and tragedies and rivalries. A country in miniature with its uniquely varied topography, its capital city merely a small town, every parish like a county, every farm like a parish. Its highlands loom as large in the circumscribed imagination as the Cairngorms, its freshwaters as mightily as Loch Lomond.
Leo is told more than once that islands can be places where people go to escape, perhaps from a tragic or shameful past, or perhaps from the law or justice. Often, they want to be left alone. He has been summoned to Sonna by an old university chum by the name of Marcus Troughton to investigate a series of deaths on the island, and it transpires that the man has never gotten over an ancient, doomed love affair, and lives out his days moping in his crumbling, eccentric house. Other characters are still haunted by the death of a teenager in 1989 after they took part in an occult ritual, and acrimony persists over that terrible night (this is the main plot driver). Everyone is as trapped by their history as they are by the island. The detective tries to not only bring light to bear on events, but also to compel people to face up to their past. And, of course, the hero can him or herself toil under the atmosphere of claustrophobia and the fear of being trapped. Islands are places where strangers can feel conspicuous, especially if they are poking their noses into painful or shameful episodes. In small rural communities – or at least in fictional ones, locals can be testy and may close ranks to outsiders in order to keep secrets safe, and on an island, where one is quite literally cut off from the main body of the population, these traits can be accentuated. Islands are also places where it is more difficult for a criminal to get away with something; unless you have your own boat, plane or helicopter, you are forced to funnel yourself onto the ferry service if you want to flee the scene.
So, there you have it: detectives and islands go together like fish and chips. Anyway, I must fly – there’s an old episode of Bergerac coming on the Freeview!
 
A version of this article appeared in the Crime Writers’ Association’s monthly magazine Red Herrings, November 2021 issue.
The third in the Leo Moran series, The Mystery of the Strange Piper, is out now! By it at The Mystery of the Strange Piper – Backpage Press
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