Authors say Maine islands can conjure ideas of romance, escapism, drama and suspense. Here a boy takes a leap of faith into a quarry on Vinalhaven. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer, file

A Maine island is a good place for a murder.

It can also be a great place to find quirky characters, romances among people who grew up together or a terrifying sense of isolation. Authors from here and away say the main reason so many kinds of novels take place on a Maine island is that the setting elevates and amplifies stories in ways other places just don’t.

“I think part of it is you have to be a very specific type of person to live on an island in Maine. It’s not the easiest way of life, and that lends itself to some very colorful characters, great supporting characters,” said Vermont author Rochelle Bilow, whose romance “Effie Olsen’s Summer Special” came out in April and is set on a Maine island inspired by Vinalhaven. “Most of us don’t live on an island, so there’s an element of escapism.”

Another new Maine island-set novel is “Everyone Knows But You,” a murder mystery by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tom Ricks that came out in June. It’s set on a couple of Maine islands, Isle Au Haut and a larger island modeled after Deer Isle, where Ricks spends summers. The rest of the year he lives in Austin, Texas.

Portland author Lewis Robinson has a new novel coming out in September called “The Islanders,” about a leadership program for youths run by the super-wealthy residents of fictional Whaleback Island, inspired partly by Hurricane Island.

There seems to be at least a couple of new Maine island-set novels every year. Authors say the setting works beautifully to amplify themes and heighten drama and tension. Everyone on an island is interdependent, knows everyone’s history and secrets, and there’s nowhere to run and hide.

“An island community is like a family system, with its own culture that exists independently from everything else,” said Robinson, who grew up in Yarmouth and has spent time on several Maine islands. “As any problems mount, everyone is confined on the island and that just heightens the tensions and pressures that exist.”

Portland author Lewis Robinson’s book “The Islanders” comes out in September. Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer

A Maine island is also a great place for what writers refer to as a “locked room mystery,” where a group of murder suspects – including the murderer – are confined to one space. Agatha Christie was a master of the technique, using a British island for her 1939 classic “And Then There Were None.”

One recent example is the 2023 thriller “The Engagement Party” by HelenKay Dimon, written under the name Darby Kane. It’s about group of people who went to Bowdoin College together and are invited to an engagement party on a private Maine island. Once on the island, the guests find a dead man in the trunk of a car with a note that says it’s “time to tell the truth” about the suspicious death of one of their Bowdoin classmates 12 years earlier.

Dimon, who lives in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, decided to put her story on “a swanky Maine island” before she had ever visited the state’s coast. She had visited the North Woods as a teenager and liked how different, isolated and remote Maine felt. When she decided to write the book, she and her husband took a drive up the coast from Portland to Camden – including a stop at Bowdoin – to get a feel for the coastline. She also looked at real estate listings online, to see what Maine islands are selling for these days.

“My story takes place in October, so I liked the idea that storms would start rolling in and that businesses in (coastal and island towns) sometimes close up around then. It adds to the sense of isolation, which adds to the suspense,” said Dimon. “That isolated feeling is something you try to tap into when you write a thriller.”

Another example of a Maine island being used as sort of a locked room is “The Disinvited Guest” by Carol Goodman, which came out in 2022. Goodman, who lives in Red Hook, in New York state’s Hudson River Valley, set her story during “a future pandemic” with members of a wealthy family seeking refuge from disease on their private Maine island. But long-held family secrets are uncovered, and strange and deadly things start to happen.

Goodman’s inspiration came from her own visit in 2019 to a writer’s retreat on tiny Norton Island, off the coast from the Down East towns of Jonesport and Beals. She also had read about islands in the Gulf of Maine that had been used to quarantine immigrants coming over from Europe in the 1800s, especially during the Irish potato famine. She liked the idea that a Maine island’s isolation could both offer protection and provide opportunities for danger.

“An island heightens that sense of isolation. When you seek isolation for safety, on an island, you can also be putting yourself in a danger,” said Goodman.

Norton Island, the inspiration for the setting of “The Disinvited Guest.” Photo courtesy of Carol Goodman

Robinson’s novel “The Islanders” uses isolation as a way to hide something. In this case, a group of wealthy conservative folks have started a leadership school on Whaleback Island. The book follows the young people as they start to discover what they’re being trained for. Danger ensues.

“Without any outside forces, it’s interesting to see what people confined (on an island) will do under pressure,” said Robinson.

Robinson’s book is being published by Maine-based Islandport Press. The publishing company was started some 25 years ago by former journalist Dean Lunt, who grew up in the small town of Frenchboro on Long Island, near Mount Desert Island. Lunt has published many island books over the years, including his own history of Frenchboro, “Hauling by Hand: The Life & Times of a Maine Island.”

In recent years, Islandport has been re-issuing the novels of Ruth Moore, who became a New York Times bestselling author in the 1940s by setting novels on Maine islands and small coastal towns. It was something she knew a lot about, having grown up on Great Gott Island near Acadia National Park. Her stories of island life often focused on how a little thing – slights or grudges, high school basketball games, someone getting a new furnace – can turn into a big thing when it happens in the small, hyper-focused world of an island community.

“I think islands are just inherently interesting to people because you just don’t know what it’s like until you live there,” said Lunt. “It can be a dark and hiding place for some. It can be a romantic daydream for some. I think a lot of people have this idea that they might like to live on one.”

A contemporary of Moore’s who also wrote about the little details of Maine island life was Elisabeth Oglivie, who grew up near Boston, spent summers on Criehaven in outer Penobscot Bay and as an adult moved to Gay Island, off of Cushing. She wrote eight novels set on Bennett’s Island, modeled on Criehaven.

Working on a Maine island – fishing, especially – is often a theme in novels. Author Elizabeth Gilbert, best-known for the memoir “Eat, Pray, Love,” wrote a novel in 2000 called “Stern Men,” about feuding lobstermen from Maine islands.

Another theme that comes up in many Maine-set novels is class, with wealthy outsiders clashing with modest-income local folks. Washington, D.C.-based author Sarah Blake’s 2019 novel “The Guest Book” touches on themes of both class and race on a family’s private island retreat off the Maine coast. The island is based on tiny Leadbetter Island, near Vinalhaven, which has been in Blake’s family since the 1930s.

Rochelle Bilow’s latest book is a romance on a Maine island inspired by Vinalhaven. Photo by Amelia Marie Photography

“It’s about this old WASP family that has used the island over the years as both a retreat and a place to codify isolation and privilege,” said Blake. “A private island can be sort of like one family’s own kingdom. It’s an expression of the family.”

Then, of course, there are Maine island stories about romance and the charm of quaint little island towns where we’d all like to live. In Bilow’s romance, “Effie Olsen’s Summer Special,” the title character left her small island hometown – Alder Isle, based on Vinalhaven – as soon as she could. Now, she’s had to return home unwillingly after working as a chef in restaurants around the world. She applies to work at a restaurant on the island, where she encounters her one-time best friend from years ago, Ernie Callahan, who also works there.

Bilow, who grew up in Syracuse, New York, and lives in Stowe, Vermont, said she had a friend from Maine who suggested Vinalhaven as a perfect island setting for a small-town romance. She spent a couple of weeks there in 2021 to get to know the place, before writing the book.

Bilow said romance novels usually include certain tropes that are familiar and comforting to romance readers. The trick is to put a new spin on the tropes. In this case, one of the tropes is “heroine unwillingly comes home to small town.” The twist is that the small town is a charming and beautiful Maine island, and the heroine begins to see its virtues.

“It’s small enough that you might have found it suffocating or boring when you were young, but now as an adult, you can see all that’s good in it,” Bilow said.