Michael Crichton jumps the squid

Cover of Pirate Latitudes: A Novel

Until the gigantic glowing green sea monster wraps its slimy tentacles around the ship and attempts to eat it, Michael Crichton’s Pirate Latitudes is just your standard swashbuckling buccaneer novel, containing:

• Bold, dashing pirate-captain hero

• His colorful, ethnically mixed crew

• Fat, just-asking-for-it Spanish treasure galleon, guarded by

• Fiendishly sadistic, overconfident don and his horde of conveniently inattentive flunkies

• Aristocratic, spunky English beauty in constant danger of being ravished by dastardly brutes

• Corrupt, gout-ridden governor of Caribbean island, happy to cut a deal with “privateers”

• Big, noisy hurricane

• Cutlasses, pistols, cannons, doubloons, treasure maps, exploding powder magazines, lusty wenches and bawds, brimming tankards of grog, mizzenmasts, yardarms, bowsprits, etc.

You’d think that would be enough. But no. Crichton (who is dead, by the way, and thus immune from the stinging lash of my erudite criticism) had to throw in a sea monster, too.

Unacceptable.

I don’t mind that he lifted the humongous squid (which Crichton calls a kraken, a beastie inhabiting ancient Scandinavian myths) from Jules Verne. Verne hasn’t used it much lately.

It’s that I’m a pirate purist. My iron rule, adopted only after years of somber deliberation, is that the actual pirate lifestyle of yore was sufficiently entertaining that you don’t need to jazz it up with preposterous special effects and supernatural beings. (In my view the ghost crew diminished Pirates of the Caribbean).

Maybe if you’re writing about insurance adjusters, you need phantom phantasmagoria. Pirates, no.

Worse, something about the squid chapter brought to mind the films of Ed Wood. Get a load of this bit as Hunter, our intrepid captain, is attacked by the squid while inside the ship:

At that moment, the lead-paned windows [MC’s always strong on research] shattered, and an enormous tentacle, thick as a tree trunk, snaked into the cabin…

Lady Sarah screamed. Hunter found an ax and hacked at the waving tentacle. Sickening green blood gushed in his face. The suckers brushed against his face, tearing his skin. The tentacle backed off, then snaked forward again, wrapping like a glowing green hose around his leg, throwing him to the deck. He was dragged along the floor to the window. He buried the ax in the decking to hold himself fast; the ax pulled free, and then Lady Sarah screamed again as Hunter was torn through the already broken glass of the window and outside, over the stern of the ship.

Even though it’s a book, I couldn’t help but envision a gang of laborers struggling off camera to heave a heavy rubber tentacle prop around on some cheesy Hollywood set, circa 1940.

OK, let us be charitable. Let us posit that, as seems likely, MC wrote Pirate Latitudes early in his career, decided it wasn’t up to snuff, snuffed it but was betrayed post mortem by his legatees. Hey, that could happen to any of us. Let us forgive him.

But not Steven Spielberg. He’s turning it into a movie. Cue the squid.