Cast Adrift [Hardcover]

Nick and his best friend, Bridget, are in the West Indies working on a musical film biography of the notorious pirate Blackbeard. But the presence of modern-day pirates, equally ruthless salvage divers and a whole host of dangerous watery creatures, find them fighting for their lives.

It began four years ago with me doodling with some silly lyrics for an imagined musical about Blackbeard, the psycopathic pirate who terrorised the coast of Carolina and Georgia back when. I liked the idea of writing a novel based around Hollywood's two least popular genres - the musical and the pirate movie. At the time there hadn't been a successful film in either genre for decades. (The most recent pirate movie, Cutthroat Island, a vanity project for Geena Davis directed by her husband, had sunk with all hands.) For various reasons I got diverted from the novel. (One of the main reasons was the work I was doing on a straight crime series set in Brighton - or perhaps I should say non-comic as straight and Brighton might seem like a contradiction in terms.) By the time I came back to Cast Adrift Moulin Rouge had been a hit musical (though a one-off) and the wonderful Pirates of the Caribbean had been a box-office smash. Suddenly, Cast Adrift is relevant! Well, maybe... Happy reading.

Peter Guttridge has been called The King of Crime Comedy by Shots magazine and Essential Reading by The Times for his satirical crime series featuring Nick Madrid and Bridget Frost. His favourite review, however, is one that he doesn't understand. Of No Laughing Matter, Guttridge's debut novel, one critic wrote: this is a funny novel masquerading as a very funny novel. Huh?? Peter Guttridge is the crime fiction reviewer for The Observer and the RLF Writing Fellow at Southampton University.

Chapter One
"Don’t be irate
I’m just a pirate
It’s what I was destined to be
I’ve pillaged and killed
I’m rather self-willed
But there’s also a nice side of me"

At least this time I didn’t have a lobster clamped to my testicles. Instead, I was 30 feet underwater looking at a fast-approaching sea monster. An enormous fish, six feet long, heavy, its cruel teeth bared. It was scything through a mass of brightly coloured snapper and surgeon fish en route to me.
Ask me again, Bridget, I thought to myself. Ask me again how I’d like being in the movies.
"How would you like being in the movies, Nick Madrid?"
Bridget Frost, aka the Bitch of the Broadsheets, my best friend, constant goad and accomplice in many an unlikely adventure, leaned over the table, grinned and smacked her lips. I looked at her then past her to the long white curve of beach below. The sun was bright, the sky was blue, it was too hot to do anything but sit here in the shade, drink pina coladas and smile at the perks of being a freelance journalist with a best friend who is also a commissioning editor.
I waved my hand vaguely around. "Bridget, you got me down here to write a movie location piece. Now you’re suggesting I could be the next Jude Law."
"You wish," she said, leaning back and stretching, thereby attracting rapid eye-swivels from every other man in the bar. "No, what I was suggesting - what I’ve already suggested in fact - is that you take over as stunt man."
She leaned forward to display her breasts in a different way as I choked on my pina colada. I know it’s not a fashionable drink these days but when in Mexico – the Caribbean shores of the Yucatan to be precise – you drink the local grog. I was saving the tequila for later.
"Yeah right."
"You know how to use a sword – well, after a fashion – and since this is a pirate movie there’s going to be lots of that. You’re supple because of that stupid yoga you do."
"Astanga vinyasa is NOT stupid."
"Yeah, yeah. Plus because of your – quote – yoga breathing, you can stay underwater for a long time – which is definitely a plus for a pirate movie."
"Are you saying the movie doesn’t have stuntmen?"
"Stuntman – this is low budget movie-making remember."
I raised an eyebrow.
"We did have a stuntman, big hunk called Larry, but he upped and went two evenings ago. Nobody’s seen hide nor hair of him since."
"Why’d he leave?"
"No one knows – just disappeared. I was talking to Dwight and suggested – on account of the fact he’s desperate – that he use you. At least until a real stuntman can be hired."
"You know how to build someone up and put them right down again don’t you? And Dwight is up for it?"
"If I suggest it, why wouldn’t he be?" she said, with what could only be described as a leer.