Murder in Bermuda: A Tale of Crime & History

A newly re-published book that has been in circulation for 80 years sheds new light on Bermuda’s earlier days, in a tale of fiction that covers the story of an almost unheard act of crime on the island. Called Murder in Bermuda, the book follows an array of characters around the island as local police attempt to stop what appears to be a serial killer.

The book’s official description said, “While placidly pedaling his bicycle on the morning before Easter, Constable Simmons, a twenty-year veteran of the Bermuda Police Force, discovers a beautiful woman’s lifeless body on Snake Road. She has been stabbed to death. Incongruously, a bouquet of lilies lies by her side. From this slender clue of the Easter lilies an intricately interlaced murder problem quickly blossoms in Bermuda. Soon another person, a man this time, is found dead in Hamilton, the territorial capital. He has been struck down by mercury bichloride.

“Can the intrepid Bermuda Police Force send Death, a most unwelcome visitor, packing, before a third victim is found? A pioneering police procedural crime novel, Willoughby Sharp’s Murder in Bermuda focuses not on the investigative activities of a solitary super-detective, but rather on those of several ordinary policemen. The author, who at the time he wrote the novel lived with his family in Bermuda, also presents his readers with appealing local color and a tricky, fair play problem that is in the best tradition of Golden Age detective fiction.”

Originally published in 1933, Murder in Bermuda provides readers with, as a contemporary reviewer stated, “as complicated and satisfying a mystery as one could hope to find.”

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