Mary Horlock on The Safest Place in the World.

‘There was something magical about an island—the mere word suggested fantasy. You lost touch with the world—an island was a world of its own. A world, perhaps, from which you might never return.’

So thought Dr. Armstrong, one of the characters in Agatha Christie’s classic novel And Then There Were None. The story is now familiar: a group of strangers are invited to a mysterious island where they are then stranded and killed off one by one. It’s a kind of locked-room mystery, but by using the setting of on an island, cut off from the rest of the world, Christie increases her characters’ isolation, ramping up the atmosphere of fear and paranoia. 

To re-read the novel now it’s surprisingly dark, but islands can be dark, and I think I’m allowed to say that since I’ve lived on two. They are these fragments of land adrift from the wider world, always a little out of step with it. Whether it’s a tropical haven or a windswept stretch of rock, an island is a border, exposed to the sea on all sides. To be able to see your limits should be reassuring and novels set on islands, particularly crime novels, have that comforting lure. The natural boundaries of cliff and shore shape and contain the narrative. We have a set number of people and places. It is like a puzzle or a game, and also, like a smaller version of our own world. We can put it under the microscope, poke it and prod it and pull it apart. 

But the limits are a danger, too. The island is at the mercy of the elements and can throw up all kinds of surprises: a bad storm, something strange on the beach. In And Then There Were None, just like in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies or more recently Alex Garland’s The Beach, our characters find themselves on an island that is not their home, and with life’s normal rules suspended, things quickly fall apart. 

Inevitably perhaps, I’m interested in islanders as much as islands. Islanders often feel like outsiders. By choice or birth, they live on the fringes. This makes them good observers and also, narrators. My father’s family were from the Isle of Wight, and my grandmother, who lived in house looking out over the Solent, would regale me with stories of wreckers and smugglers who were apparently my ancestors. 

When I was seven we moved to Guernsey, an even smaller island in the English Channel. ‘There’s no crime on Guernsey,’ my mother would say (which is often what someone says in a crime novel just before they die). But she’d then point out - quite rightly, I should add - that on a tiny island where everyone knows everyone else, why bother to commit a crime when you’d be swiftly caught? To me, that sounded rather like an invitation. 

My new novel, The Stranger’s Companion, is based on a true crime, a real-life mystery that happened on the island of Sark in 1933. Now Sark, to those who don’t know, is an island even smaller than Guernsey. It measures three and half miles long and has no cars or streetlights to this day. In 1933 it had a population of 500, two telephones and only three wireless sets on the whole island. Unsurprisingly, it had become a haven for shell-shocked veterans of the last War, and was regularly advertised as the perfect place to escape the more ‘disturbing elements of modern civilisation.’ Then the clothes of a man and woman were found on a cliff edge, with no sign of their owners. Despite days-long searches over the cliffs and coves, nobody was found and nobody was reported missing. It caused quite a sensation in the press precisely because it seemed so unlikely. Sark was ‘the Island Where Nothing Ever Happens’ and yet something obviously had. 

The story and the way it caught everyone’s attention points to the truth at the heart of island mysteries - whether real or invented. We think we are on safe ground, but we’re not. Bad things happen everywhere, sometimes in places where we least expect them to happen. All we can do is create the frame to contain and make sense of them.

The Stranger's Companion by Mary Horlock (John Murray/Baskerville) Out Now.

October 1933. With a population of five hundred souls, isolated Sark has a reputation for being 'the island where nothing ever happens'. Until, one day, the neatly folded clothes of an unknown man and woman are discovered abandoned at a coastal beauty spot. As the search for the missing couple catches the attention of first the local and then national newspapers, Sark finds itself front-page news. When young islander Phyllis Carey returns to Sark from England she throws herself into solving the mystery. As Phyll digs through swirls of gossip, ghost stories and dark rumours in search of the truth, she crosses paths with Everard Hyde, a surprise visitor from her past. As press coverage builds to fever pitch, long-suppressed secrets from Phyll's and Everard's shared, shadowy history begin to surface.

More information may be found on her website. 

The Enduring Appeal of the Ghost Story

My third novel, Hazardous Spirits, takes place in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1923. It follows a woman, Evelyn Hazard, whose husband, Robert announces one day out of the blue that he has acquired an unexpected talent for speaking to the spirits of the dead. While nursing a loss of her own, Eveyln has to navigate a new world of Spiritualists and high-society eccentrics as she tries to determine if her husband is a fraud, unwell, or perhaps most frighteningly, if he’s telling the truth.

I wrote a large part of the novel during the Covid-19 national lockdowns in the UK, and perhaps like many people forced to spend longer physically in their homes than ever before, my thoughts turned to ghost stories. We have a powerful history of ghost stories in the UK, and across the nation there are many contenders battling it out for the title of the ‘most haunted’ castle, pub or hotel. Perhaps it’s the gloomy weather that has driven people indoors around a crackling fire, perhaps it's a hangover from the macabre inheritance of the Victorian imagination, or an awareness of the many layers of historical turbulence that saturate even the most humble village. Whatever the cause, ghost stories are a popular tradition across the UK, and the appeal of a spooky tale only increases as the days grow shorter. 

When the events of Hazardous Spirits open in 1923, the characters are trying to cope with a world that is not unlike our current moment, almost exactly 100 years later. In the early 1920s, society was still suffering the after-effects of the combined trauma of WW1 and the 1918 -1920 flu epidemic. In this moment, appetite for the esoteric became particularly popular, and the Spiritualist movement reached arguably the peak of its appeal, as people sought comfort for their grief.

Spiritualism as a movement emerged in response to the public mediumship of two young women, Kate and Maggie Fox in America in the late 1840s, who claimed the ability to channel spirits though rapping and knocking noises. The movement grew in popularity and influence on both sides of the Atlantic, adopted by some as a religious practice within a Spiritualist church, and for others a social phenomenon that promised thrilling and comforting messages from mediums in touch with disembodied spirits.

An example of one prominent Scottish advocate for Spiritualism is Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 – 1930) who is most well remembered as the creator of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Doyle became involved in Spiritualist circles from the end of the 1880s and by 1916 he was more publicly associated with the movement. The loss of several close family members, including his son, Arthur Alleyne Kingsley, due to injuries inflicted by the war only served to reinforce Doyle’s belief in Spiritualism. Doyle went on to write several non-fiction books about Spiritualism, and in 1922 published The Coming of the Fairies, which defended the infamous set of photographs of allegedly real fairies taken by another pair of young female relatives, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths.

Both Kate and Maggie Fox and Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths eventually renounced their gifts for communing with the supernatural. Kate and Maggie Fox produced the ‘knocking’ sounds of their spiritual counterparts by clicking their joints. Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths created their fairies initially as a hoax, by cutting out and posing with paper images held up by hatpins. But the stories catalysed by these young women had for a time seized the popular imagination, promising that a new horizon of spiritual encounters was only a few moments away.

Ultimately, the appeal of a good ghost story makes similar promises; familiar enough to be recognisable, with enough suggestion of the otherworldly to be spine-chilling. In Hazardous Spirits, it is just this kind of slippery struggle between falsehood and reality that makes Evelyn’s questions about her husband so difficult to answer. Throughout the novel, Evelyn changes her mind often about the possibility of life persisting beyond death, finding it hard to trust even her own instincts. As a reader, I have always felt that tales of the supernatural are often at their most terrifying when the hint of the paranormal interrupts and transforms the everyday. And as a writer, I’m interested in exploring the uncanny sense that what has previously been hidden may suddenly be revealed. After all, what could be more frightening than the ghost of your own secrets? 

Hazadous Spirits by Anbara Salam. (John Murray Press) Out Now

Edinburgh, 1923Evelyn Hazard is a young woman living a comfortable and unremarkable middle-class life. One day, her quiet existence is shattered when her steady, reliable husband Robert makes a startling announcement: he can communicate with the deadAs the couple are pulled into the spiritualist movement that emerged following the mass deaths caused by the First World War and the Spanish Flu, Evelyn's life becomes increasingly unsettled as dark secrets from her past threaten to surface.Faced with the prospect of losing all that is dear to her, Evelyn finds herself asking: is the man she loves a fraud, a madman or - most frighteningly - is he telling the truth?A gothic literary mystery, written in sparkling prose, Hazardous Spirits evokes the spirit of 1920s Edinburgh, in all its bohemian vibrancy.

More information about Anbara Salam and her work can be found on her website. You can also follow her on “X” at @anbara_salam and on nstagram @anbarasalam

Books to Look Forward to from John Murray Publishers

 January 2021

'Kill us? They've never needed to kill us,' said Lamb. 'I mean, look at us. What would be the point?'  A year after a calamitous blunder by the Russian secret service left a British citizen dead from novichok poisoning, Diana Taverner is on the warpath. What seems a gutless response from the government has pushed the Service's First Desk into mounting her own counter-offensive - but she's had to make a deal with the devil first. And given that the devil in question is arch-manipulator Peter Judd, she could be about to lose control of everything she's fought for.  Meanwhile, still reeling from recent losses, the slow horses are worried they've been pushed further into the cold. Slough House has been wiped from Service records, and fatal accidents keep happening. No wonder Jackson Lamb's crew are feeling paranoid. But have they actually been targeted?  With a new populist movement taking a grip on London's streets, and the old order ensuring that everything's for sale to the highest bidder, the world's an uncomfortable place for those deemed surplus to requirements. The wise move would be to find a safe place and wait for the troubles to pass.  But the slow horses aren't famed for making wise decisions.  Slough House is by Mick Herron.

May 2021

Aunti Poldi and the Madonna is by Mario Giorando.  There’s only one Auntie Poldi: bewigged, cursing, and knocking back a shot of grappa before breakfast . . . or is there? A nun leaps to her death shortly after participating in a seemingly routine exorcism. But when a priest with an almost unholy level of sex appeal turns up at her door, Auntie Poldi is shocked to hear that she’s a suspect in their case. Who is the woman being exorcised, and where has she disappeared to? And why in the world did she claim to be Poldi? No one is as they seem (and sound) in this hilarious new mystery featuring Sicily’s sultriest sleuth.

Knowledge is power, and the tech company Public Square knows a lot. But who else can access all that information? Reporter William Carver is not tech-savvy, but he needs to learn fast – the people he cares about are in danger. From the Chilean mines where they dig for raw materials that enable tech revolution, to the streets of Hong Kong where anti-government protesters are fighting against the Chinese State, to the research laboratories of Silicon Valley where personal data is being mined everyday – A Cursed Place is by Peter Hanington and is a thrilling saga set against the global forces that shape our times.

June 2021

Our Friends in Beijing is by John Simpson.  Old friends, new enemies.  Jon Swift is in trouble again. His journalism career is in freefall. He is too old to be part of the new world order and he has never learned to suck up to those in charge. But experience has taught him to trust his instincts.   When, for the first time in years, Jon runs into Lin Lifeng in a cafe in Oxford he wonders if the meeting is a coincidence. When Lin asks him to pass on a coded message, he knows it's not. Once a radical student who helped Jon broadcast the atrocities of Tiananmen Square, Lin is now a well-dressed party official with his own agenda.   Travelling to Beijing, Jon starts to follow a tangled web in which it is hard to know who are friends and who are enemies. As he ricochets across the country, Jon seeks to make sense of the ways in which China's past and present are colliding - and what that means for the future of the country and the world. Under the watchful eyes of an international network of spies, double-agents and politicians, all with a ruthless desire for power, Jon is in a high-stakes race to expose the truth, before it's too late.