This is an essay I contributed to a colleague’s mystery blog last year, and it contains a lot of info about me as well as the subject I was asked to address (mysteries set on islands). I’m reprinting it here as one of my first blog posts:
“A LOCKED ROOM WITH A VIEW”
by Tom Savage
If you were to search the wide world to find the perfect geographical location for a murder mystery or suspense story, you would be hard put to find a scene of the crime more suitable than an island. I should know: I’m a mystery writer, and I grew up on one.
Children absorb the details of their surroundings, none more than fledgling writers. Arriving in St. Thomas, U. S. Virgin Islands, from mainland America at the impressionable age of nine, I was struck by the island’s staggering beauty, and I reveled in the hills and dales and water, water everywhere. But I was also aware, even then, that there was something rather sinister about the set-up. Unless you have immediate access to a boat or a plane, you’re stuck there with nowhere else to go. One of my first feelings in my new home was a vague, undefined sense of claustrophobia. I didn’t know that word then, but I would learn it.