Island Genres, Genre Islands: Conceptualisation and Representation in Popular Fiction
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Island Genres, Genre Islands: Conceptualisation and Representation in Popular Fiction
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783482078 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 02/03/2017 |
| Series: | Rethinking the Island |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Lisa Fletcher is Associate Professor of English at the University of Tasmania. She is the author of Historical Romance Fiction: Heterosexuality and Performativity (2008) and the editor of Popular Fiction and Spatiality: Reading Genre Settings (2016). Her current research focuses on popular fiction in the twenty-first century.
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Island Genres, Genre Islands
Conceptualisation and Representation in Popular Fiction
By Ralph Crane, Lisa Fletcher
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2017 Ralph Crane and Lisa FletcherAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-207-8
CHAPTER 1
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 AdlerOlson'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, 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.
For Pezzotti, the island itself lends mystery to the mystery. Islands have long been associated with paradise on the one hand, and prison on the other — a dichotomy that is exploited to good effect by many crime writers, from Christie to Cleeves. In this chapter we want to explore the prevalence of stereotypical island topologies in the popular imagination, the meaning and significance of which cannot be taken for granted.
In countless crime novels readers — and in many cases the detective, too — first encounter the island from a distance, as a bounded and isolated space, and frequently an air of mystery veils that initial sighting. In the first chapter of Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island (2003), "islands appeared out of the fading dusk, huddled together, as if they'd been caught at something," alerting the reader to the potential of the island as a crime scene, and its peculiar culpability. There is a clear suggestion here that places produce stories. More than an issue of the personification of landscape for symbolic effect, this view of the island signals the agency of place. Not only can islands function as settings, they can also operate on the level of character, and influence plot. In May's Entry Island, the titular island is revealed to both the reader and to Detective Sime MacKenzie as a remote, bounded space, which is again invested with agency:
stretched out on the far side of the bay, the sun only now rising above a gathering of dark morning cloud beyond it. The island drew Sime's focus and held it there, almost trancelike, as the sun sent its reflection careening towards him, creating what was almost a halo effect around the island itself. There was something magical about it. Almost mystical.
Sime and the other members of the investigating team already know a body awaits them, but they do not know what to anticipate in terms of the island itself. During the course of the novel, as Entry Island reveals itself to him, so Sime moves towards solving the crime; an understanding of the one goes hand-in-hand with an understanding of the other. Knowledge of the island, its geography and its culture, is invariably a prerequisite to solving an island crime: the author must ensure that both the detective and the reader are able to make sense of the island — to read the island — during the course of the novel. Thus island crime fiction contains not just two stories, "the story of the crime and the story of the investigation" identified by Tzvetan Todorov in his classic essay "The Typology of Detective Fiction," but also the story of the island.
Similarly, in Billingham's The Bones Beneath the reader first encounters the remote Welsh island known to the English as Bardsey Island and to the Welsh as Ynes Enlli, the Island of Tides, as Tom Thorne and his team escort the psychopath Stuart Nicklin back to the island so that he can reveal the whereabouts of a corpse he buried twenty-five years ago: "The first view was of cliffs and the snowflake specks of wheeling seabirds against the black crags. The island was shaped like a giant, humpbacked tadpole; no more than a mile from end to end and about half as wide." Thorne and his team know there is a body on the small island, but, unusually, they do not know where it lies. Knowledge of the island is invested in the killer, Nicklin, rather than in the detective, and a sense of foreboding is built up through the description of the island as a "giant, humpbacked tadpole," with the seabirds "wheeling" ominously "against the black crags."
While the detective may or may not know that a body awaits him or her, the reader of island crime fiction is always already alert to the potential of the island as a crime scene. Neither Hercule Poirot nor Miss Marple anticipate a body when they embark on their island sojourns in Evil Under the Sun (1941) and A Caribbean Mystery (1964), respectively, and in both instances Christie's detective is already on the island at the time of the murder. In Raven Black (2006), the first novel in Cleeves's Shetland series, Jimmy Perez is stationed on Mainland, the largest, most populous island of Shetland and the centre of the archipelago's sea and air connections. And even though the members of the Inverness investigation team have to be flown in from Aberdeen, their arrival into Lerwick is not described beyond the observation that their plane was running late. But the very fact of their arrival from elsewhere sets them apart as outsiders whose ability to decipher the geography, history, and culture of the island is necessarily limited. Similarly, at the outset of The Blackhouse (2011), the first volume of May's Lewis trilogy, we encounter Fin MacLeod returning to home territory, to the island of his birth, so his arrival is muted: "Fin had barely lifted his bag from the luggage carousel when a large hand grabbed the handle and took it from him." When George Gunn, the policeman who has taken his bag, tells him that he will "probably see a few changes," Fin is presented to the reader as someone with knowledge of the island, an insider, but no longer an intimate one. In both novels, the sense of the island is established early through references to geography and meteorology. In Raven Black the remoteness of the islands, which must be reached by ferry or plane, is emphasised when the investigation team arrives too late for the body to be shipped back to Aberdeen on that evening's ferry. And in both novels the reader is introduced to the islands, the Shetland Islands and the Outer Hebrides, through references to the weather which defines life there: "In Shetland, when there was no wind it was shocking," while Fin is reminded that on Lewis there is "One thing that never changes [...]. The wind. Never gets tired of blowing." In Raven Black and The Blackhouse the islands are first encountered from near rather than far, reflecting the proximity of the detective, and lending a heightened sense of insularity to the ever-present awareness of bounded space. Islands initiate particular types of story, particular modes of storytelling, and generate a sense of closeness, of intimate proxemics, that can be detected in various genres, but most obviously in crime fiction and popular romance.
In Owen's Pig's Head, while Tasmania is not first viewed as a bounded space, its sense of islanded isolation is nevertheless established in the opening sentence, "You cannot enter this state by road," and reinforced shortly thereafter through reference to Tasmania as a "sea-locked state." Indeed, Owen never allows the reader to forget the island geography of his setting through multiple, comic, and ultimately overdone allusions to Tasmania as: the "Apple Isle"; the "Gentle Isle"; the "Divided Isle"; the "Friendly Isle"; the "Delectable Isle"; the "Sceptered ... Isle"; the "Penal Isle"; the "Holiday Isle"; the "Southern Isle"; the "Quiet Isle"; the "Green Isle"; the "Left-Off-the-Map Isle"; the "Unimportant Isle"; the "Resilient Isle"; the "Surprising Isle"; and, along with New Zealand (the "Shaky Isles"), a "Piffly Isle."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Island Genres, Genre Islands by Ralph Crane, Lisa Fletcher. Copyright © 2017 Ralph Crane and Lisa Fletcher. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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