Pirate Latitudes, a Review

The great thing about dead writers, especially modern dead writers, is that their work lives after them. That is, previously unknown manuscripts surface in their estates and get published. Sometimes, the resultant book self-evidently demonstrates why the author kept it hidden while alive (but didn’t have the heart to throw it out -- we writers are in love with our own words). Other times, the book turns out to be as good as any in his oeuvre.

Robert Ludlum has made a second career as a dead writer, with several Bourne stories coming out based on his character and/or notes. Kurt Vonnegut’s estate has released some very classy stuff, including a new book soon to be published, “While Mortals Sleep”
(slated to be in stores December 25, 2011, four and a half years after his passing),. And Michael Crichton, who passed away in 2008, left behind the completed manuscript to a gem among ripping good yarns called “Pirate Latitudes.”

Unlike “Prey,” the last book Crichton published before his untimely death, which felt disjointed and too busy to be effective, “Pirate Latitudes” is a tightly told, linear story with a strong, straightforward focus. It is not great literature, nor does it pretend to be. It is an adventure story told in real time, without the aid of scientific input or twists and turns, about one man in particular and the other people who inhabit his very specific world.

Set in the Caribbean of 1665, the story follows the exploits of English Captain Charles Hunter and his handpicked crew of sixty men and one woman, who are privateers(not pirates) on a mission to capture a treasure laden Spanish Galleon out from under the noses of a well armed garrison on a difficult island and, as it turns out, a Man of War commanded by Hunter’s sworn enemy Gazalla.

The delight is in seeing the adventure unfold, step by step, in a logical linear progression. These are rough men and women, used to rough ways, and Crichton makes no apologies to our modern sensibilities in portraying life and death in the Pirate Latitudes. Hunter and his crew face danger after danger -- from the Spanish, the weather, natives of the region, even a Kraken. But the greatest danger comes from his own government and a self-righteous bureaucrat with delusions of grandeur.

Hunter is a ruthless leader, cunning strategist, and at the same time a charming and charismatic personality, very popular with the ladies. Every secondary character is drawn carefully as well, though each in turn serves mostly to amplify Hunter’s determination and talents. The result is a genuine page turner locked in a real world fifty years before the likes of Blackbeard and Captain Kidd or Ann Bonny and Mary Read -- a Pirates of the Caribbean based on true stories and feeling genuine from first to last. To touch that world, to feel that time and place with all its hardness and terror, and yet survive the experience, Crichton presents us an exciting, fulfilling read.

One can only hope there are other pieces in the dead man’s chest.