I wrote this piece for Goodreads on Saturday, 19 April, 2014, a couple of hours after reading the book.
Author: William Arden
Published: 1982
I read Purple Pirate for the first time today,
despite the many warnings about it. It has several of the traits that readers
have come to expect from a William Arden title. The characterization is very
good, with the gang of crooks being formed by quite a heterogeneous bunch.
Major Karnes, the peppery leader, provides the criminal brain and also the comedy.
However, his giant henchman Hubert is a little too similar to Turk in Dead
Man’s Riddle, another Arden story. More comedy is provided in the form of a
boat excursion that is meant to convey the thrill of being a genuine pirate but
is a miserable failure. Some readers seem to have been upset by this maritime
adventure, which takes up most of chapters 4 and 6, but I found it highly
amusing. The story is a page turner with a couple of red herrings. However,
when the solution is given and the story comes to an end, you can see that some
of the mysteries were simply meaningless, with holes in the plot a mile wide.
Another problem is that the theme of the title, the pirate, is not really
central to the plot. But to call it The Mystery of Why People are Hauling Bags
of Dirt Around Rocky Beach wouldn’t have been very catchy. It’s a passable
story, much better in the reading than in the conclusion. And at least there
was no crook in a rubber mask snarling at “them darn kids”, the Scooby Doo
style plot device that had plagued some of Arden’s previous 3I books. I’d give
it the following grades out of five:
Villains 4
Humour 5
Mystery 2
Characterization 4
Solution 3
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