Pirate King by Laurie R. King [2011]

In this latest adventure featuring the intrepid Mary Russell and her husband, Sherlock Holmes, New York Times bestselling author Laurie R. King takes readers into the frenetic world of silent films—where the pirates are real and the shooting isn’t all done with cameras.

In England’s young silent-film industry, the megalomaniacal Randolph Fflytte is king. Nevertheless, at the request of Scotland Yard, Mary Russell is dispatched to investigate rumors of criminal activities that swirl around Fflytte’s popular movie studio. So Russell is traveling undercover to Portugal, along with the film crew that is gearing up to shoot a cinematic extravaganza, Pirate King. Based on Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance, the project will either set the standard for moviemaking for a generation . . . or sink a boatload of careers.

Nothing seems amiss until the enormous company starts rehearsals in Lisbon, where the thirteen blond-haired, blue-eyed actresses whom Mary is bemusedly chaperoning meet the swarm of real buccaneers Fflytte has recruited to provide authenticity. But when the crew embarks for Morocco and the actual filming, Russell feels a building storm of trouble: a derelict boat, a film crew with secrets, ominous currents between the pirates, decks awash with budding romance—and now the pirates are ignoring Fflytte and answering only to their dangerous outlaw leader. Plus, there’s a spy on board. Where can Sherlock Holmes be? As movie make-believe becomes true terror, Russell and Holmes themselves may experience a final fadeout.

Pirate King is a Laurie King treasure chest—thrilling, intelligent, romantic, a swiftly unreeling masterpiece of suspense.

Author: Stuart Woods
Series: Mary Russell & Sherlock Holmes (Book 11)
Genre: Detective Fiction
Publisher: Bantam (September 6, 2011)
Media type: Kindle, Hardcover, Audio Book
Pages: 320 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0553807981
Preceded by: The God of the Hive
Publication date: September 6, 2011

Reader Review

An Adventure for Mary Russell (with Holmes)

Laurie King's Pirate King follows The God of the Hive: A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes as the 11th story in the series begun by The Beekeeper's Apprentice: Or On the Segregation of the Queen/A Novel of Suspense Featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes (Mary Russell Novels).

The Pirate King of the title is a reference to the Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert and Sullivan, a reference appropriate both in plot and motif. William S. Gilbert himself might have appreciated the ending, which mixes Gilbert's fairytale style with a mercantile Machiavellianism. It is much to her credit that Laurie King actually pulls it off. (Though some might disagree, the only part that seems implausible to me is the pace of those particular events.)

King's narrative is generally good and her descriptive skills a bit better. I found them actually moving in spots; others may disagree.

The story's weaknesses are the tangle of story layers necessary (a story about an adventure whilst filming a movie about the making of a play) and a certain formulaic feel to some of the Russell-Holmes scenes. One in particular has me wondering whether King lost touch with her characters or whether she is planning some future development. In my opinion, the best books in the series are the early ones that develop that relationship. At this point, it may be hard to sustain continued development, especially as King has castled Holmes queen-side, moving him well out of the reader's eye for most of the story.

Since the whole point of the series may have been to use Holmes as a launching-point for Russell, the stories may drift further and further from the Holmesian root. I think that a shame. I also think it a shame that Russell shadows Holmes so completely. The partnership of Russell and Holmes was a daring, outrageous stroke. It made the series in the beginning, and the forgetting of it may be the series's unmaking.

- by Reader in Matawan

 


Of parrots, pirates, and politics; of personae, poets, and plots

I love this series, I do, despite its fantastic premise and unlikely chronology. But the plots I imagine get in the way of the plots King provides for her readers.

And I confess: I see Mary Russell as a real person.

From the first book, The Beekeeper's Apprentice, the character of Russell transcends the hokey Holmes resurrection and the cosmic coincidences necessitated by the incorporation of those narratives into these tales. For me, the professional Russell isn't Holmes' partner, but the Oxford scholar who combines mathematics and theology, who works dawn til dusk in Bodley, who reads books while walking down the street. This Russell could stride from the real Somerville to its fictive shadow, Shrewsbury College, to engage Harriet Vane and her former tutors in exquisitely parsed SCR debates. The scholarly Russell could generate such fascinating narratives that I have come to resent the intrusion of Holmes into her life.

Not only am I guilty of regarding Mary Russell as a real person, but I further transgress by wishing her into the company of Dorothy Sayers -- think of the translation debates! -- of the Pankhursts, of the Reverend Maude Royden. Of Radclyffe Hall.

And this in novel, really for the first time, King gives Russell a good woman to respect, albeit a fictional woman.

King aids and abets my fantasy by making Russell the author of the series. And here the MRH of the novel's preface claims that she has vowed "that the accounts [of her adventures with Holmes] would be complete." Outraged, I broke the habit of a lifetime and flipped to the last page. OK, the dread words "to be continued" did not appear.

(This doesn't mean I've forgiven King for the last installments -- one, really, not two books, making this only the 10th in the series. King made Russell look bad.)

But this is a 5-star review.

Like Gaudy Night and King's stand-alone, Touchstone, this story's formulation of whodunnit is more philosophical and socio-historical than immediately red in tooth and claw. King steps back from the political concerns of the 1920s and takes into account the cultural tensions generated by post-industrial Europe's staggered advance into the 20th century. And the controlling metaphor she employs is pirates.

Pirates.

The absence of an article -- definite or in. -- in the title gives us a key to the plot: the transmutation of kingship from a cultural absolute to a social contract. We see this on a number of levels with the incorporation of Gilbert and Sullivan, the introduction of the new reality of film, the addition of a woman to Mycroft's nascent MI-6. We see it in the reverse piracy of the former colonies learning to fleece the former colonizers: The Empire Strikes Back.

And face it. All writers love pirates. King gives us quotes and allusions covering most of the 18th and 19th century English pirate narratives, and she makes genius use of the Gilbert and Sullivan mockeries. I did regret that she ignored the pirates who kidnap Hamlet and rescue Viola's twin, the pirate whose head saves Isabella's brother in Measure. To say nothing of the pirates who snatch Angelica in Ariosto's mad epic. (Not for nothing did Tom Stoppard claim Shakespeare's early title to be "Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter."

But had King pulled in another century or two of pirate allusions, the complaints of the blood-thirsty readers might have been even more strident.

This is an elegant mystery in the tradition of Sayers and Mary Stewart -- lots of lovely detail about foreign lands and exacting professions. Enjoy it for what it gloriously is: the unlikely adventures of a Sherlock who was born a woman.

- by Julia M. Walker



Is Sherlock Holmes on his way out of this series?

I loved the first book in Laurie R. King's Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series, The Beekeeper's Apprentice, and have read every book in the series as soon as it was published. I was delighted from the start of the series when the young bluestocking, Mary Russell, met up with Sherlock Holmes. Their partnership was filled with erudite and witty repartee, and they traveled the world together sleuthing in ingenious disguises and using elaborate ruses to escape peril.

But then something strange happened. King began separating Holmes and Russell. When this trend began, the books would describe each of the partners' doings, which were bookended with scenes of them together. Later on, though, their time together became strictly limited and Mary's separate role was emphasized.

Pirate King takes this trend even further. In this book, Holmes is entirely absent for a good two-thirds of the book and the pair are together for very few pages. I would estimate that scenes of the two of them together total only about 20 pages or so out of more than 300 pages.

Mary is persuaded by Holmes and Inspector Lestrade to go undercover as a director's assistant with Fflytte Films as they head to Lisbon and Morocco to make a silent film about Gilbert & Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance. "How can there be a silent film about an operetta?," I hear you ask. It turns out the project is about a film crew trying to make a film about The Pirates of Penzance. The play-within-a-play conceit becomes ever more elaborate, as Mary works with actors playing the parts of pirates, constables, British officers and coquettish daughters, and many of the actors turn out to be something other than what they seem.

Mary's task is to see what she can find out about Fflytte Films that might explain why crime seems to follow its films in ways related to the subject-matter of each film, and why the previous director's assistant disappeared before the crew left England for Portugal. A series of minor disasters besets the cast and crew in Lisbon, but real danger begins as their sailing ship approaches north Africa. In this third part of the book, Holmes has joined the cast incognito, as an actor playing the Major General, and he and Mary must rescue the party from grave danger. This third part of the book, which takes up a little over 70 pages, has all the derring-do, action and spirit that are lacking in the rest of the book. It is cleverly written in a way that I could imagine as a script for a silent film adventure story.

I'm puzzled why Laurie R. King has altered this series to de-emphasize the Russell/Holmes collaboration almost to the disappearing point. Having so much of the book devoted to Mary working alone forced it into an awkward first-person narrative that reads like a well-educated and earnest young businesswoman's travel diary. I wasn't particularly interested to read in detail about her dealings on behalf of and with the cast and crew, her seasickness, rehearsal travails and the like. (And I'll admit I was a little miffed by Mary's scornful attitude toward my beloved Gilbert & Sullivan.)

Though the book returned to the series' old form at the end, I couldn't help noticing that the subjects of Mary's investigation were mere afterthoughts in the resolution of the story. It made me wonder about the utility of so many of the previous pages detailing Mary's sleuthing.

Has Laurie R. King come to feel so restricted by the Russell/Holmes partnership that she separated them? Is the weight of Sherlock Holmes's legendary persona so burdensome that she wants to cut him loose? She's the creator and, of course, she's free to do that. But I'm one of those pesky fans who don't like to see a change in a series' winning formula.

- by Maine Colonial