Edward Chupack spent his career as a real estate lawyer in Chicago. His first novel, Silver: My Own Tale as Written by Me with a Goodly Amount of Murder, published in 2008, gives the narrator’s chair to one of fiction’s great villains: Long John Silver, the one-legged pirate of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
The novel
The book is presented as Silver’s own account, written in chains aboard a ship as he awaits judgment. He tells his life story, from boyhood to the hunt for Captain Flint’s treasure, filling in what Stevenson left out. Chupack’s Silver is vain, funny, menacing and unreliable, which is exactly right. Stevenson’s Silver is memorable because he is likable even when he is terrible, and Chupack keeps that charm while making the murder in the subtitle very real.
The language takes some adjusting to, rich with period idiom and pirate swagger, but readers who settle in will find a clever, dark adventure that respects its source.
The inevitable joke
Because of the author’s day job, readers kept asking him a version of the same question: what is the difference between pirates and lawyers? Chupack has written that he does not resent the joke, but he does resent the idea behind it, that lawyers are just thieves with paperwork. Lawyers, he argues, are the opposite of pirates. They are bound by the law and by strict ethical duties to their clients.
There is an irony there that the novel enjoys. Real pirate crews often sailed under written articles, signed contracts governing shares and discipline. Even pirates, it turns out, needed something like lawyers.
Verdict
A confident debut and an entertaining companion to Treasure Island. Read Stevenson first, then let Silver tell you why you got him wrong.
Sources: Chupack, Edward, Encyclopedia.com; Long John Silver, Wikipedia; Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, Project Gutenberg.
