The book I'm reading features a character with hair so greasy that it stains the shoulders of his jacket. He lives in filth. He murders at will. He is willing to let a whole shipload of people expire from thirst. He is unremittingly repulsive, yet I just can't look away. Why?
Maybe it's because he's a pirate, and we love pirates. God only knows why, but we do.
The book is Peter and the Starcatchers by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson, a modern retelling of Peter Pan, and the character is Black Stache. Black Stache joins a pantheon of pirates real and imagined. Blackbeard, Long John Silver, Jean Lafitte, Captain Hook, Jack Sparrow... we may not know much about the historical men and we may not have read the book where the fictional pirates were born, but we know them, nonetheless. They were pirates, therefore they lived outside the law. Who among us doesn't envy that freedom, just a little?
I first brushed elbows with pirate lore when I was writing my fifth archeologist Faye Longchamp mystery, Floodgates. Jean Lafitte made a cameo appearance, so I read his biography in order to get his character right.
In my new release, Plunder, I invented my own pirates, so I was free to let my imagination run rampant. Gola George, an escaped slave, is the biggest and baddest buccaneer on the high seas. By contrast, his meek partner in crime, Henry the Mutineer, is the smartest pirate ever born. Perhaps they would have continued marauding until they died peacefully of old age, but for a single problem: Henry the Mutineer fell in love with Gola George.
My pirates have blood on their hands and their redeemable qualities are hard to spot but I still love them. We all wish we had the daring freedom of a pirate, but we're not willing to give up our scruples to get it. That doesn't mean that we can't enjoy their daring and cunning on the printed page. --Mary Anna Evans, author of Plunder (Poisoned Pen Press)