Nassau and the Bahamas: Death in Paradise

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Funky Nassau – capital of the Bahamas, beauty spot of the Caribbean, a British colony until 1973. Officially the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, it is comprised of around 700 islands (though only 30 are inhabited) with the capital, Nassau, located on the island of New Providence. Sun, sea, cocktails, hedonism, tourism, off-shore banking, tax dodging and a real life murder scandal plus plenty of crime fiction…

Let’s ease ourselves in gently to the Bahamas with a few cozies, as if into the beautiful warm waters of the Caribbean or a bubbling luxury hotel hot tub…

Dorothy Dunnett’s Operation Nassau is the fourth in the Dolly mystery series – the Dolly being a yacht owned by portrait painter Johnson Johnson that sails into town. Here Johnson is drawn into an espionage caper involving a savvy and tough young Scottish woman and a poisoned British secret agent. Other Dolly mysteries have ventured to Madeira, Ibiza, Rome, Split and Marrakesh. JP Roselle’s Murder in Nassau (2017) involves a teenage boy chasing treasure and investigating a murder in Nassau (suitable for YA readers incidentally) while Barb Mihalchick’s Murder in the Bahamas, Twice Again (2021) follows a series of murders that screw up a planned honeymoon in Nassau. 

Tanya R Taylor’s The Cornelius Saga is a 16-book series that involves murder and investigations but also witches and ghosts. Book five is called The Contract: Murder in the Bahamas (2017) and sees main recurring character Mira Cullen in the Bahamas attempting to solve a decades old mystery. To be fair you probably need to read the series from the start to make sense of this novel, though it does get the story to the Bahamas. 

Don Bruns’s Bahamas Burnout (2009) is a very different sort of book to either fantasy investigations or cozy crimes. Rock and roll journo Mick Sever heads to Nassau, home of the legendary Highland Studio. Great, until it’s destroyed in a devastating fire. Someone wants to stop the music. Book #3 in the Mick Sever series. 

In Jeffery Deaver’s The Kill Room (2013) New York DA’s Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs hit the Bahamas to solve a major crime – the assassination of a US citizen who had been targeted by the United States government in a major case. On the ground they discover there is no crime scene investigation, no evidence, and no co-operation from the local Bahamian police. Left to their own devices but also it seems someone doesn’t want them poking around the islands.

Plenty of Bahamas-set crimes seem to involve yachts. Will Peters’s The Nassau Incident (2005) sees Bill Randolph, a successful but disillusioned advertising executive, buy a yacht and sails the Caribbean with a girlfriend. Leaving a bar in Nassau one night, he witnesses a murder, is chased, but eludes the assailant. But then the murderer comes after him and the action moves from Nassau to Freeport (the main city on Grand Bahama, an island off the Florida coast). white slavery, drugs, assassins, the FBI and organised crime all feature. 

Laura and Alan Holford’s Swimming with Pigs (2024) is one of the odder titles this column has ever featured. But apparently swimming with pigs in the beautiful blue waters of the Bahamas is actually a thing (google it!!). Now a retired London copper is working security on a luxury cruise in the West Indies, but of course a murder occurs, and he has to solve it. Pigs may not fly, but they do apparently swim!! Alan Holford was a detective in London’s Metropolitan Police for thirty years. 

And a psychological thriller set in the exclusive world of the Bahamas’s private islands. Sian Gilbert’s She Started It (2024) sees Poppy Greer getting married and inviting four of her old schoolmates are to be her trusted bridesmaids. Free first-class ticket to white sands and bottomless cocktails on a private Caribbean island? But over the years since school the women have changed – dramatically! “Lord of the Flies meets And Then There Were None . . . but with Instagram and too much Prosecco” has to be one of the book marketing slogans of the decade!

There is one looming true crime case in the Bahamas that has inspired a legion of books, conspiracy theories, conflicting accounts and involves everyone from the Duke of Windsor, one of the world’s richest men, corrupt Miami cops and, perhaps, Meyer Lansky too. I’m talking about the Harry Oakes murder. Here’s the skinny in brief – Sir Harry Oakes, 68, was born and raised in Maine, had become the possessor of a Canadian gold-mine fortune and a British title making him the wealthiest peer in the British Empire, He lived in the Bahamas to avoid taxes and made many investments there in property, agriculture, airports etc. In 1943 he was bludgeoned to death in the bedroom of Westbourne, his bougainvillea-adorned Nassau estate. From the looks of the crime scene, he’d also been set on fire. The case was a wartime scandal. The former King (the one that abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson) Edward VIII, now the Duke of Windsor was the wartime governor of the Bahamas (a British colony). He called in some cops from Miami and sidelined the local detectives. What was up – financial shenanigans involving the Duke and Nassau’s wealthiest? Meyer Lansky and the Mafia looking to turn the Bahamas into a version of their Cuban/Vegas dreams? No definitive answer has ever been found but there has been a hell of a lot of speculation. 

Here then a random selection of Harry Oakes murder books if you feel interested in diving down this particular true crime rabbit hole – Alfred de Marigny’s A Conspiracy of Clowns (1990); James Leasor’s Who Killed Sir Harry Oakes? (2016); John Marquis’s Blood and Fire: The Duke of Windsor and the Strange Murder of Sir Harry Oakes (2006); Sheryl Macdonald’s Murder! (2009). To my knowledge there are at least another dozen or so books on the case and at least two more in production that I know about as I write. Seems like the fascination with Oakes’s murder, the Duke of Windsor and Lansky’s involvement and the seedy underbelly of wartime Nassau still fascinates readers.

And finally….an oldie and a goodie. Desmond Bagley was an English journalist and novelist known for his prolific output of bestselling thrillers in the vein of Hammond Innes and Alastair Maclean. He lived around the world and often wrote about places he knew – South Africa and various other African countries mostly. He published about 20 thrillers that all sold well, and a few got made into movies. He made a decent living from his writing and, in 1979, took a holiday with his wife in the Bahamas. The trip inspired him to write a novel – Bahama Crisis (1982 and the last published before his death – though a few works came posthumously). Tom Mangan is a wealthy white Bahamian who has made his fortune in the island’s tourism business. An old school fiend visits – also wealthy – and wants to invest in a new tourism venture with Tom. Their families get along, all seems simpatico. Then disaster – a yacht with Mangan’s wife and one of his daughters mysteriously disappears, and the body of his daughter washes up on a beach hundreds of miles from where the yacht should have been. Things start to go wrong with his business – labor strikes, food sickness outbreaks in his hotels, broken luggage carousels, arson, an oil slick on the beaches. What the hell is going on? 

Bahama Crisis is over 40 years old now but still a good read and, of course, anything that threatens the idyllic image of Bahama’s tourism industry is a major catastrophe. Remember Billy McFarland and the disaster of the Fyre Festival in 2017 – on the Bahamian island of Great Exuma! 

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