A question: What do William Shakespeare, Jules Verne, Agatha Christie, Peter May and Enid Blyton all have in common? And the answer? They’ve all used islands as settings for some of their most exciting and memorable works.
Just think of those raging storms of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Or the terror of being trapped on an island with an unknown murderer as in Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. Then there’s those bleak, elemental, wind-swept landscapes of Peter May’s Lewis trilogy. And of course, that youthful delight in sailing, swimming and the great outdoors (with a smuggler or two thrown in for good measure) in Enid Blyton’s The Island of Adventure. All examples of that long-standing urge authors have to set their writings in a self-contained and very specific world. And islands fit that bill perfectly.
Scotland’s islands are no exception. We’re blessed with a great many of them. Some lie close to the mainland and so-called civilisation. Others lie far out to sea, beyond the distant horizon. Some sit almost within striking distance of their neighbours. Others in splendid isolation. Yet all with very different landscapes, customs, beliefs and even language. Perfect settings to fuel the imaginations of authors. Over the centuries they’ve provided inspiration for myths, legends and even today’s crime writers. And it’s the works of some of these that I examine in this article in issue 96 of iScot Magazine.
“It was a dark and stormy night …” I wonder how many stories have opened with those famous words? Words first penned by American author Washington Irvine in 1809. Although much parodied, it’s an opening phrase that was used to great effect by Madeleine L’Engle in her ground-breaking novel A Wrinkle in Time, a book that had a profound influence on me as a child. L’Engle opened the door to a whole generation of children in the 1960s onwards with her stories that combined science fiction and fantasy with the spiritual and questions of good and evil. The first in a series, the book went on to win many literary awards and be dramatised for stage, radio, television and film.
Scotland, with its wealth of islands, has long been fruitful territory for crime writers, perhaps the best known being Peter May and Ann Cleeves, featuring the Hebrides and Shetland respectively. But there are many others and in the current issue of Scottish Islands Explorer I look at novels by two Scottish authors, Lin Anderson and Craig Robertson, who use distinctive and very different island settings for their characters’ dark deeds!