No Book Is An Island (But Some Good Ones Are Set On Them)
By Stacie Grey
I love an island book. A group of people trapped in a remote location, each with secrets and histories of their own, who begin dying one by one? I’m there.
The prototypical island book is, of course, And Then There Were None. (Also, the prime example of how your first idea for a title isn’t necessarily the best.) In Agatha Christie’s classic novel of suspense, ten victims—or really, nine victims and one killer—are lured to an island where they are trapped, presented with a list of their crimes, and killed. It was a sensation from the moment of its publication, and though other similar books came before, it stands as the direct or indirect inspiration for the many that have followed.
The island book doesn’t have to be on an island, though it helps. The important thing is that no one else could get in to commit the murders, and more than that, the characters are unable to get away from the place. The killer must be one of them, who could strike again at any moment, and the fact that everyone knows that drives their tension and paranoia. That’s one way the island book differs from its wider category of the closed circle[1] mystery—in the closed circle, it’s clear that one of the people in the house/dormitory/party/etc. must be the murderer, but there’s less of a sense of being trapped or the inevitability of more deaths to come.
The format of the island mystery has proved itself to be particularly amenable to variation, even if modern technology has made it harder to truly isolate your characters away from help. Bad weather and natural disasters can help—even Christie had a storm to help her cut off her characters—but other options are available. Like the avalanche that traps the tech-company employees in Ruth Ware’s One By One, or how in The Lighthouse, a rare procedural take on the genre, P.D. James finds a twist that seems oddly prescient for having been written in 2005.
Why is the island book so enduringly popular? There’s a comfort in the familiar, of course, even if it’s a familiar horror, but I would say there’s more to it than that. One way of looking at crime fiction is that it’s a way to explore human nature under extreme conditions, realistic or otherwise. The exaggerated suspicion and paranoia of the island book make for a useful way to illustrate how those same emotions drive our everyday failings and bad decisions, and there’s something satisfying about seeing the worst in human nature splashed across the page. (And, occasionally, the pavement.)
Part of that satisfaction, in many cases, comes from the orderly justice of the deaths. In They All Fall Down, Rachel Howzell Hall borrows another trick from Christie, having the killer work through their victims both in order of increasing severity of their crimes (under the reasoning that to stay longer in this tortuous situation is the greater punishment) and in manners that align with the seven deadly sins they had each committed. In a way, it’s another approach to the old trope of traditional mysteries being about bringing order to a disordered world. There’s a brutal order here, and our enjoyment of it as readers is complicated by the tension between our sympathy for the protagonists as we follow them through the story and the desire to see the circle closed.
After all, everyone in an island book has been brought to the place of their doom for a reason, and even if the person who is pulling the strings is ultimately the biggest monster of all, almost none of the characters are truly innocent. And isn’t that true of all of us?
Bio:
Stacie Grey is the author of SHE LEFT, a thriller coming in May 2024 from Poisoned Pen, in which a woman who was the only survivor of a mass killing twenty years ago travels to a remote mountain lodge at the invitation of a journalist who is writing about the murders, only to find that nothing about the event is as it seems. Stacie lives in Alameda, California, with her husband and dog. In what passes for normal life, she works in biotech research. She mostly posts to Instagram, Threads, and Mastodon, and occasionally writes a newsletter. She is currently learning to play the Murder, She Wrote theme on the harp.
[1] In this instance, I’m using “closed circle” to describe mysteries in which there are a limited number of suspects who could have committed the crime. I realize that the modern trend is to call these “locked room” mysteries. I prefer the traditional definition for that—a locked room mystery is centered on an impossible crime, such as a person who has been killed in a room that has been locked from the inside, with no way for anyone to get in or out. Actual locked room mysteries are fairly rare, found in the classic stories by John Dickson Carr or the more modern books by Gigi Pandian. However, I’m aware that this, like the space in “a lot” and the idea that “literally” doesn’t mean “figuratively, but with emphasis,” is a battle I’m destined to lose.
Click here for more blog posts!