Silver: My Own Tale As Written by Me with a Goodly Amount of Murder » (Bargain)

Edward Chupack is an attorney for a major law firm. He lives near Chicago. This is his first novel.

To learn more about Long John Silver, please visit www.silverpirate.com.

I am Silver, and there is no other pirate like me on these waters.

This being the last testament of the infamous pirate Long John Silver, you would do well not to trust a word in its pages. Held captive aboard his own ship, the Linda Maria, he is to be taken to England, where he will hang at the king’s pleasure. But he has another plan: to tell a tale of treason, murder, a lost treasure that would rival King George’s own riches, and what really happened on Treasure Island . . . if Long John Silver is to be believed.

But is he?

His beginnings as a pickpocket on the streets of Bristol are as dark as the rest of his deliciously devious life. Taken to sea by the pirate captain Black John, Silver soon learns the arts of his trade: the sword, saber, and pistol. He makes his trade in plundering, cheating, ransacking, and murder—-more murders than he can bother to count. British, Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Portuguese all fall before him. He takes exceptional pleasure in murder, but never such pleasure as he finds in his search for a most uncommon treasure. To find that treasure he must heed the words of a dead man, solve the ciphers in a well-worn Bible, forgo the love of an extraordinary woman, and climb over the corpses of friend and foe alike to arrive at Treasure Island and find his fortune.

But Silver’s tricks are never done. Before he greets the hangman at Newgate Square, he will have one last secret to reveal. Hidden in these pages are clues that lead to his remarkable discovery. And although King George’s bounty for this notorious scourge may be handsome indeed, the captain who has captured Silver would not mind adding Silver’s riches to his own purse. He will let Silver tell his tale in the hope of learning clues to the treasure’s location. And if you were to mark his words as well, you might discover the whereabouts of that treasure yourself.

So we shall, for now, allow Long John Silver to spin his stories, tales of adventure and betrayal, gold and jewels, love and murder.

And he will never leave out the murder. Not Long John Silver.

The New York Times - Sarah Hughes

…this witty romp resembles nothing so much as George Macdonald Fraser's Flashman novels, with their deliberately antique 19th-century style. Like Flashman, Long John Silver makes no apologies for his behavior. And, like Fraser, Chupack makes no belated attempts to find heroism in an antihero…this isn't Treasure Island revisited, nor is it a sequel. Like the pirate he celebrates, Chupack has taken a bit here and a bit there, plundering Stevenson's novel to create something glitteringly original. In his essay "The Art of Writing," Stevenson admitted that Treasure Island was itself fashioned of gleanings from the works of Defoe, Poe and others. The man who unrepentantly declared that "stolen waters are proverbially sweet" would almost certainly have approved of Chupack's efforts.