The Story of the Story: The Isle of Devils
No book springs forth fully formed like Athena from the brow of Zeus. It has to evolve out of a series of ideas until it finally takes the shape that you think is best. The process may rarely be as quick as lightning, but often is a long and winding road. Each of my books has its own origin tale…
The genesis for the Isle of Devils comes from something I read once and which has stuck with me ever since. In 2002, having already re-read Agatha Christie’s monumental Death on the Nile (1937), I was reading Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody series of historical mysteries in preparation for a trip where I planned to take my eighty-year old grandmother Emily on a cruise down the Nile (unfortunately we didn’t stay at the Winter Palace Hotel in Luxor, where Christie wrote the story). When I got to the sixth book in the series, The Last Camel Died at Noon (1991), I found in the introductory acknowledgements the statement: “I am an admirer of the romances of Sir Henry Rider Haggard. He was a master of a form of fiction that is, alas, seldom produced in these degenerate days; having run out of books to read, I decided to write one myself. It is meant as an affectionate, admiring, and nostalgic tribute.”
For some reason, I have never been able to get that simple sentiment out of my head, and I finally decided to do something about it. While a rare peevish individual may occasionally make limpid claims otherwise, it is not much of a stretch to definitively say that Sherlock Holmes is the greatest detective to ever be set down in print. Meanwhile, Dame Christie’s Belgian Hercule Poirot is but a pale, farcical imitation of the Master. And yet, it is equally easy to postulate that the single greatest detective story does not belong to Holmes. I think that title safely lies with Murder on the Orient Express (1934). Everything about it is perfect, from its origins at the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul, Turkey, the southern terminus of that now-famous railway line, to its exotic setting and cast, to its brilliant distortion of the traditional trial by jury, to its magnanimous conclusion. I’ve been reading mysteries ever since I finished the Orient Express, and while I’ve found some brilliant ones in their own rights, I’ve never unearthed one that has tried to capture its same spirit. Hence the Peters’ quote. And that’s how I decided to try my hand at a good old-fashioned mystery….
There’s more to the tale, of course. I also couldn’t get the story of Chushingura, the Japanese legend of the Forty-Seven Ronin. The true tale of a group of leaderless samurai who avenge their fallen lord’s honor by patiently waiting and planning for two years to kill the man responsible. It’s a fantastic tale that I feel transcends culture and could be transplantable to any time and place. My earliest attempt at writing this tale did involve the French Foreign Legion, but it was set in one of the great mansions of pre-1906 San Francisco. And the critical battle where the betrayal occurred was that of Balaclava, when the Light Brigade was sent into the Valley of Death. The tone of the outline (it never progressed much beyond that) was obviously heavily influenced by Tennyson’s famous poem, so much so that I had tentatively titled it “The Charge of Murder.”
Half a league half a league
Half a league onward
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred:
‘Forward, the Light Brigade
Charge for the guns’ he said
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldiers knew
Some one had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do & die,
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley’d and thunder’d;
Storm’d at with shot & shell,
Boldly they rode & well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.
Great stuff! But this idea eventually stalled out, both for lack of a distinctive detective, as well as stumbling too much against the weight of history, for the Crimean War is too well documented for the facts to be easily altered to fit the confines of a murder mystery novel. It was tucked away into a file entitled simply: “Ideas,” and left to incubate for many years until the right protagonist and setting could be found.
And then it hit me. The greatest series of detective stories are those belonging to Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. But Holmes alone was not great. His two tales of individual investigations (The Adventures of the Blanched Soldier & the Lion’s Mane) rank towards the bottom of his scintillating escapades. He only achieved true greatness in the presence of his friend and biographer, Dr. John H. Watson. And yet, Holmes’ brilliance often shone so bright that Watson appeared dim in its shadow. It is my belief, however, that nothing could be further from the truth. Holmes would not have been content with a bumbling fool by his side! Dr. Watson was brave, intelligent, honest, and a genuine hero in his own right. I felt that he deserved an adventure all to himself, and so I wrote the story of his first adventure, before he had ever heard the name Sherlock Holmes. But of course, I borrowed heavily from the themes, words, and objects found in the Holmes and Watson stories to lend as much authenticity to the tale as possible.
As for the setting, it could only be Bermuda, that magnificent, lush, sub-tropical outpost of the great British Empire. Within Bermuda, the obvious choice was St. George’s, the oldest continuously inhibited (non-native) town in the New World. And in St. George’s, the old Globe Hotel (now possible to visit in its current iteration as the National Trust Museum) seemed to have the ambiance most similar to the fabled Orient Express. Throw in a hurricane (in place of the Yugoslavian snowstorm) to strand the travelers, and voilà! I cannot claim to have finished The Isle of Devils in a locale as exotic as the Pera Palace Hotel, but I am happy to say that the book was outlined in its entirety, and the first words set down, in the cedar-paneled library at the Aicardi Estate at Bridge House, Southampton Parish, with its beautiful setting overlooking Ely’s Harbor and the famous Somerset Bridge (reputedly the smallest working drawbridge in the world). Close enough.
