Sure, tropical breezes and icy mai tais are lovely. But if you’re a writer of thrillers, mysteries or gothic romance, there are few settings more delightfully and deeply unsettling than an island. What could be more atmospheric than panicky characters marooned by storms, waves and geographic isolation?
No wonder Agatha Christie loved the setting so much. So did Dashiell Hammett, whose fictional Couffignal Island sits in San Francisco Bay. Jen Wheeler‘s gothic romance unfolds in the Farallones. T. C. Boyle uses Anacapa and Santa Cruz islands for one of his books. And if the land of Dewey decimals is any guide, Catalina is a positive hotbed of stabby doings.
There’s just something about an island’s isolation that fires the imagination, says Wheeler, whose “The Light on Farallon Island” is set on those rugged rocks 27 miles off the coast. The Portland, Oregon, author and former Chowhound food writer found herself swept up in the lore and wonder of the craggy archipelago after reading Susan Casey’s “The Devil’s Teeth,” a nonfiction survival tale of surfer-scientists and great white sharks, and couldn’t shake the fascination.
“I’m a very solitary person, an introvert,” Wheeler says. “To me, the Farallones are really beautiful — teeming with wildlife and inhospitable to humans. You have to work hard to habitate the place. I like to imagine what kind of person would be drawn there.”
In Wheeler’s hands, the answer includes 19th-century lighthouse keepers, a teacher and the rough-and-tumble collectors who swept up murre eggs by the millions, devastating the bird population and making bank during the Gold Rush.
You can’t journey back in time to the Farallones, circa 1859, or set foot on those islands now, of course — it’s a marine sanctuary and off limits to the public. And you can’t outstrip the gunrunners of Couffignal Island either, except through the pages of a book.
So here’s just a sampling of mysteries and thrillers, divided by island inspiration.
Belvedere Island (maybe)
Written in 1925, Hammett’s pre-Sam Spade story, “The Gutting of Couffignal,” stars a cynical gumshoe (of course) assigned to guard wedding gifts at a swanky island colony, when the sound of gunfire and wild explosions suddenly fills the air. The islanders — wealthy retirees, vacationing aristocrats and a Russian princess among them — soon discover themselves marooned, the wooden bridge to the mainland in flames and boats cast adrift, with only our intrepid private eye on hand to save the day. (Spoiler: He does.)
It’s a rollicking read and a fast one, with action set on a fictional island on San Pablo Bay. We think the wedge-shaped island and exclusive colony are Belvedere and Corinthian Islands, a couple of bays over. Developed as a summer retreat for the wealthy in 1890, Belvedere is connected to Tiburon by two causeways now — but a century ago, a wooden drawbridge did the transportation honors, and the raising of that bridge each spring to release arks and sailboats into the open water is still known today, Tiburon historians say, as Opening Day on the Bay.
Catalina Island
Catalina is a sweet, sun-kissed destination for any vacationer. It’s just mystery writers who gaze upon the sandy strand looking for caches for corpses.
For Los Angeles-based author Rachel Howzell Hall, Catalina is “a spot for the best locked-room story, except it’s an island.” The frantic page-turning action in her 2023 novel, “What Never Happened,” revolves around obit writer Colette “Coco” Weber, who returns to Catalina 20 years after her family was murdered. What awaits isn’t exactly sunshine and sand — more like buried secrets, a violent home invasion and a serial killer — and there’s no way to escape, except by reading faster.
The island is the setting for more mayhem this spring in a sunnier — but still murderous — follow-up to Catherine Mack’s witty best-seller, “Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies.” Published last year and swiftly optioned for a TV series, the book-about-a-book sent amateur sleuth Eleanor Dash and her ex on an ill-fated, but very funny Italian book tour for Eleanor’s first novel, “When in Rome.”
The sequel, “No One Was Supposed to Die at This Wedding,” picks up the thread — you might want to take notes here — with a wrap party for the movie version of “When in Rome” starring Eleanor’s childhood bestie, who is marrying the actor playing Eleanor’s ex. But things go seriously awry when Eleanor discovers a body at the wedding reception at Avalon’s Descanso Beach Club. Also, there’s a hurricane coming “because of course there is,” Eleanor tells the reader.
The Farallones
The briny spray and pungent aroma of the Farallon Islands wafts off the pages of Wheeler’s “The Light on Farallon Island.” This historic gothic novel, an Oregon Book Awards finalist, weaves rich detail into the tale of Lucy, a young woman who has fled her past not just to the West Coast but 27 miles beyond, taking a job teaching the lighthouse keepers’ children.
There’s some poetic license, of course, but the book takes inspiration from several real life events, including the 1858 Lucas shipwreck and a desperate, storm-swept crossing in the 1890s. And fans of gothic romance will swoon over the echoes of Bronte’s “Jane Eyre.”
“I didn’t set out to pay homage to them,” Wheeler says. “That arose organically from the character and nature of the Farallones themselves. I was especially captivated by the image of them at their foggiest and wildest and darkest — they felt so inherently Gothic with the island itself standing in for the forbidding stone manor and miles of empty ocean in place of desolate moors. To put it more fancifully, the Farallones went straight to my heart and met Jane there.”
Treasure Island
Rupert Holmes may well be the multi-hyphenate to end all multi-hyphenates — a novelist, playwright, composer, arranger, producer and prolific songwriter who has won two Edgar awards for his mysteries, five Tony awards for his “Mystery of Edwin Drood” and a double-take (ours, when we learned this) for the multi-platinum “Escape,” better known as the “Pina Colada Song,” as well as other Billboard hits.
He also wrote “Swing,” a stylish, noir-ish murder-meets-jazz mystery set on Treasure Island during the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939-40. As the book opens, tenor sax man Ray Sherwood and his Jack Donovan Orchestra bandmates are checking in at Berkeley’s Claremont Hotel, when he receives a mysterious message from a UC Berkeley coed — a composer in search of an arranger. But when Sherwood goes to rendezvous with her on the Expo grounds, he arrives just in time to see a young woman plunge to her death from the Expo’s iconic Tower of the Sun.
Twisty mysteries abound, along with references to cat’s pajamas, wartime spies and plenty of jazz — not only in the swing-era, Expo setting but on the accompanying CD, where Holmes’ songs provide both atmosphere and clues.