The Last Bookaneer

March 23, 2015
In the days before e-books, self-publishing, and fan fiction, publishing was an even riskier undertaking—or so Pearl (The Dante Club) makes an entertaining case for in his latest, ingenious literary caper. The author imagines the life of 19th-century manuscript thieves called bookaneers, who unscrupulously published others’ novels on their own, thereby depriving authors of their financial due. It is Pearl’s contention that a historical 1890s international copyright agreement would soon put an end to this illegal practice, and he imaginatively conjures up two such bookaneers, Pen Davenport and his assistant, Edgar Fergins, who embark on one last mission, traveling to Samoa to steal a dying Robert Louis Stevenson’s final manuscript, The Shovels of Newton French. Arriving at the author’s mountain compound, Davenport, in the guise of a travel writer, finds competition from a rival bookaneer named Belial, who is passing for a missionary. And so the race is on to take Stevenson’s purloined manuscript and return with it to New York before the new law goes into effect. But standing in the way of literary glory are cannibals, incarceration, German colonials, and a betrayal from beyond the grave. Pearl gives the bookaneers a lively fictitious history, including a flashback to the theft of Shelley’s Frankenstein, and populates it with a colorful cast of roguish characters, including Davenport’s former partner in crime, the lovely and enigmatic Kitten. In the end, this book is a loving testament to the enduring power of paper books.

Pearl's unusual story, and his invented term "bookaneer" that is part of it, are a wonderful blend of fact and fiction. Simon Vance and JD Jackson narrate the adventures of a dying breed of pirate in the 1800s who took advantage of the lax copyright laws to sell unpublished works of famous authors to publishers. Mr. Fergins recounts the story of "the last bookaneers," which includes a plan to steal Robert Louis Stevenson's final masterpiece. As Vance drives the twists and turns of this tale to Samoa and Stevenson's manor and back, he controls the prose and the well-developed characters with a firm but empathetic hand while Jackson adds drama and emotional flair. Rapt listening, especially for book lovers. S.C.A. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine