You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
A rag-tag team of buccaneers on a mission to steal a fantastically wealthy pirate galleon is the subject of the final novel completed by the late Michael Crichton.
Pirate Latitudes will be published on 16th November in hardback priced £18.99. Crichton completed the novel before he died from cancer in November 2008. Julia Wisdom, publishing director at HarperCollins, said the novel was from "a brilliant thinker, very imaginative, bright and clued up".
She said: "He's done dinosaurs, nanobots and here he is doing pirates." It is set in Jamaica in the 1660s, in an outpost of British power amid Spanish-controlled waters in the Caribbean. Charles II's ruling governor, Sir James Almont, hears a rumour of a fantastically wealthy pirate galleon stowed at a near-impregnable Spanish stronghold.
Despite the risks and the fact that he is acting completely against British government policy, he employs privateer Captain Charles Hunter to put together a team of buccaneers to seize the vessel. "A band of nefarious fellows," as Wisdom describes them, must not only battle the Spanish fleet, but hurricanes, cannibal tribes and sea monsters. Meanwhile, Sir James must contend with a "by the book bastard" sent from London to check up on him.
Wisdom said: "It's a straightforward, old-school period adventure but there are some typically really strange pieces of information that Crichton throws in there. Like how to make a slow-burning fuse out of rat intestine."
Crichton wrote Pirate Latitudes alongside his last novel, Next, which was published in 2007.
HarperCollins is currently searching for a writer to complete the "technothriller" Crichton was working on before he died. It is hoped that the book will be published in autumn 2010.
Wisdom said that Crichton's strength as an author was that he had an innate sense of what the reader wanted. She said: "What he did was combine a visionary sense of what is about to happen or engage people whether in science, the military or even office politics. He's a very good old-school storyteller but he also throws in a lot of information so you feel you are learning something."