Cast Adrift

Nick Madrid #6

by Peter Guttridge

When gentle journalist Nick Madrid??'s foray into stunt work on a low-budget pirate movie finds him fighting for his life with modern-day pirates (their motto: "shoot first, you won???t need to ask questions later"), equally ruthless salvage divers (intent on looting the loot from the sunken ship of the notorious Captain Kidd), and a whole host of dangerous watery creatures, walking the plank suddenly seems like the best option. Nick and his best friend, Bridget are in the West Indies working on Blackheart, a musical film biography of the notorious, mass-murdering, raping, and pillaging pirate Blackbeard. But with the frankly oddball cast and the impossible pairing of "low budget" with "film made on water," it doesn???t take long for their movie stardom ambitions to flounder. If the unfortunate Nick didn???t already have enough to deal with, he and Bridget become shipwrecked on an island with the sole surviving member of the gone horribly, horribly wrong Survivor-like TV game show, Cast Adrift. Faced with their biggest danger to date and no way of escape, could this be the end of the intrepid duo?

Genres: Mystery

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Peter Guttridge is the Royal Literary Fund writing fellow at Southampton University and teaches creative writing. Between 1998 and 2002, he was the director of the Brighton Literature Festival. Since 1998, he has been the mystery reviewer for The Observer, one of Britain's most prestigious Sunday newspapers. He lives in Sussex on the edge of the South Downs National Park.

Reviews

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

"The King of Crime Comedy" -- Shots Magazine boasts the cover, so, natch, dreaming of Colin Watson and Simon Brett and Robert Barnard and a bucketload of others, I grabbed Cast Adrift. I can't tell you how disappointed I was. This has to be the ghastliest book I've read in a very long time. It's a late entry in the Nick Madrid series; I can only assume the earlier entries were a whole hell of a lot better, as described by various worthies, plus trade journals like Publishing News, who're quoted on the back of the book. Heaven forfend all the praise might have anything to do with Guttridge's job as Crime Fiction Reviews Editor for The Observer.

Nick Madrid and his frightful pal Bridget are in Mexico on the set of a budget-strapped pirate-movie musical. Everyone's screwing everyone else and that's jolly hilarious. Nick's not very good at screwing -- how much more hilarity can you bear? -- but he manages to bed all sorts of wonderfully lovely babes anyway: reader, my ribs are just one big solid ache. There are homosexual, Rastafarian, Elgar-loving modern-day pirates. Oh, spare me, spare me; nothing like a few prejudice-reinforcing jokes about gays, eh? And I'm just mentioning the good bits.

Oh, and there are appalling displays of ignorance/carelessness. The dinosaurs apparently died out a mere six million years ago (page 100; and, no, it's not a typo, because this wrong datum is repeated on the next page). Our hero listens to the end of BBC Radio 4's Today programme at 9am (page 162) . . . which might seem reasonable enough until you realize he's doing the listening in Mexico, which is displaced by several hours from GMT. And so on. In the normal way, this is the kind of stuff you expect the copyeditor to have picked up, if no one else did; but on the basis of a few scattered evidences I suspect the copyeditor here was confronted by a nightmare, and performed something herculean to clear up as much as s/he did.

Why didn't I just throw Cast Adrift at the wall after the first 50 pages or so? I'd have proved my manly stamina by then. Well, I guess I kept going because, perhaps half a dozen times during the book, I did actually laugh. That was enough to delude me into the futile hope that surely things must get better. Er . . .

[Shannon · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Left Coast Crime conference must have been held out in left field the year they awarded this one a Lefty. I finished in only because I made a goal to read all the Lefty Award winners this year and because my favorite library had to bring a copy 2/3 of the way across the country to fill my interlibrary loan request.

[Olwen White · Rating 1 out of 5]

Billed as a comedy, the author relies on nudity and embarrassment for laughs rather than humour. It was not really a crime novel, it was more of a holiday sex romp with no obvious plot.