Rum Goings On: Mysteries Set in the Caribbean

Miss Marple surprisingly swaps her usual chintz-and-scones Middle-Class English village for cocktails in coconut shells at a luxury resort on the fictional island of St Honore in this 1964 novel.

Luckily, unexplained deaths occur wherever the silver-haired spinster is residing and soon a cheery retired British Army officer is found dead in his room.

Not long afterward, the maid who discovered the body is dead, too and Miss Marple is digging around for clues relating to a photo in the deceased Major’s wallet, all the while avoiding sunburn and arsenic-laced Cuba Libras. 

“The USA’s Agatha Christie” reached the Caribbean before the English Queen of Crime with this historic 1961 murder mystery.

Set during the American Revolution on plantations in South Carolina and Jamaica, Enemy in the House is a suitably steamy concoction featuring a secret marriage, a contested inheritance that leads to murder, and an escape through the mountain forests.

In 1940, Eberhart toured the West Indian island extensively. Jamaica is also the setting for her mystery Speak No Evil.

Thorogood is the creator of the smash hit BBC mystery series Death in Paradise, featuring fish-out-of-water London copper, Richard Poole investigating crimes on the fictional British Caribbean territory of Saint Marie.

In this spin-off novel—one of four—Poole is his usual grumpy self as he sets about solving a murder in the style of a Golden Age detective (all the suspects generally get arranged in some suitable drawing room), while complaining about the heat and the fact he has to interact with French people.

Canadian-American author Chercover’s 2012 mystery features Tom Bailey the amiable owner of a fishing charter in the Bahamas who has a side hustle in people smuggling. 

One day Bailey is approached by a stranger who offers him a life-changing sum to get him into Haiti and back out again.

But who is the mystery man, and will Bailey live long enough to enjoy the fruits of his labor, assuming, of course, that he can pull the job off in the first place?

As well as translating George Simenon’s Maigret novels into English, Californian Blochman was also a prolific writer of mystery novels and short stories and was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America in 1948.

In this outing from 1940, Blochman cannily anticipates the future involvement of CIA and United Fruit in dodgy dealings around the Caribbean, in a novel that centers on a dispute between American-backed banana farmers and German coffee growers that quickly turns deadly.

Prolific British mystery writer Moyes owned a holiday home on the British Virgin Islands and her amiable sleuth, Inspector Henry Tibbett is frequently called in to investigate crimes on their fictional equivalent—the British Seaward Islands.

In this adventure, Tibbett, accompanied by his cheery and intelligent wife, Emmy is sent to the West Indies to investigate the disappearance of a wealthy old lady.

Soon the detective himself has gone missing and it’s left to the sharp-witted Emmy to find out where he’s gone and who took him there.

New Yorker Lariar is best remembered as a skilled and witty cartoonist, but he also moonlighted as a writer of hardboiled mysteries featuring fast-talking guys and smoldering dames.

In this entertaining outing, the fourth featuring New York PI Steve Conacher, the trail of a vampy heiress artist sees our sleuth aboard a luxury cruise to San Juan.

On board, Conacher meets a seductive young woman who seems willing to help him find his prize and much more besides.

 Unfortunately, she quickly winds up dead, leaving the wise-cracking gumshoe with a double mystery to solve.

In the 1930s Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marquand wrote a series of novels featuring the tough and ruthless, Mr Moto, a secret agent for Imperial Japan.

Generally posing as a harmless eccentric, Mr Moto plays on the prevailing Western assumptions about the Japanese to get the upper hand.

In this adventure, he finds himself on a Caribbean Island trying to buy some top-secret night-bomber technology from a dubious Frenchman.

Last Laugh, Mr Moto was published just a few months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, after which the once popular Japanese spy (played in the movies by Peter Lorre) unsurprisingly went silent for fifteen years.

Henderson’s regular amateur sleuth, New York photographer, Lucy Ripken makes her debut in this easy-going and fun novel set in a deluxe Jamaican naturist resort.

Eager to escape her unhappy love life, the 30-something Ripken takes an assignment to cover the opening of a swanky new hotel on the Caribbean island, but her plans for a relaxing working break are quickly thrown off when she discovers a corpse in her hot tub.