When Michael Crichton died of cancer last year, he left in his files a complete manuscript, now published as Pirate Latitudes. Posthumous publications are a notoriously dicey proposition, even for writers as professional and competent as the author of Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain.
The good news here is that Pirate Latitudes doesn’t seem to have been assembled from drafts, notes and the input of after-the-fact collaborators. It reads like something its author would not have minded seeing published with a cover emblazoned with his name above the title.
Set in the Caribbean in 1665, Pirate Latitudes is pretty much a straight-ahead adventure story. It’s not an ironic pirate novel. It’s not a pirate novel with a secret gimmick. It’s simply an entertaining tale filled with crafty privateers, despicable villains, treasure hoards, double crosses and a sea monster. Go figure.
The protagonist of Pirate Latitudes is Captain Charles Hunter, Harvard graduate and privateer, who agrees to set off from Port Royal, Jamaica, in search of the Spanish galleon El Trinidad, rumored to be full of gold and anchored for repairs in a nearby, but very heavily fortified, harbor. He assembles a crew of specialists and devises a plan that will allow them to outwit Cazalla, the ruthless commander charged by Philip IV to protect the fortress. Of course, nothing goes as planned, and Hunter must contend with lopsided naval battles, a hurricane and the treachery of some of his confidants.
Crichton began his literary career as a medical student churning out short, clever thrillers with titles like Zero Cool and The Venom Business, published under the John Lange pen name and others. Pirate Latitudes exhibits a similar kind of freedom from high expectations. Unlike some of Crichton’s best-sellers, it isn’t burdened by a need to prove that global warming is a sham, that the Japanese might end up owning the US or that nanotechnology may be the death of us all. There are no appendices, no footnotes, no URLs for further research. Which is something of a relief.
Not that Pirate Latitudes doesn’t display Crichton’s long-abiding interest in technology, though focused this time on 17th-century gadgetry. Crichton wasn’t as steeped in maritime history as, say, Patrick O’Brian, author of Master and Commander and the other Aubrey-Maturin novels, but he acquits himself well enough in describing how slower-burning fuses can be made from opossum guts, how to survive a hurricane at sea and how to sabotage Danish cannons. The precision of the historical detail helps conceal the thinness of the characterizations, as everyone in the book, from
Hunter on down, is a type, not a three-dimensional individual.
It’s hard to say how Crichton’s many fans will react to Pirate Latitudes. There’s no big “Oh, wow!” moment in it, and parts of the plot feel rushed. But much of Crichton’s appeal, lost in some of his later work, lay in his boyishness, his enthusiasm for sci-fi and spy novels, his delight in killer dinosaurs and talking gorillas. Pirate Latitudes recaptures some of that verve, and this final novel proves to be a diverting coda to a remarkable popular writing career.
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