Laurie King - Pirate King - A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes

I took another swallow from my bottle, nestled into my furs in a haze of drug and moving picture, and was startled out of my wits when my husband’s name appeared on the flickering screen.

Buster Keaton in “Sherlock Jr”

I jammed the cap onto the small bottle and launched it overboard: too late.

Sherlock Jr was, bizarrely, a similar film-within-a-film, the embedded adventure of a young fantasist whose nap-time clamber onto a cinema screen translates into a picture by the “Veronal Film Company.” The audience around me laughed uproariously, but it made me quite dizzy to watch Keaton’s phlegmatic battering by a rapid change of scenery. It was no less disorientating when he became a Crime Crushing Criminologist with an assistant named Gillette faced by a pretty girl, a dastardly foe, a criminal butler, and the most astonishing sleight of hand and stunt-work that I had ever seen. I blinked, decided that I was plastered to the gills, and waited for the next film to be as hallucinatory.

But that one was called The Perfect Flapper , and although many of the characters projected onto the sheet were drunk, I was clearly not.

I went the rest of the voyage without benefit of opiates. Sobriety did not help: I remained ensnared in a make-believe world.

* * *

Eventually, on a dreary, sleet-spattered November morning a thousand storm-swelled miles from that untidy Covent Garden office, I wove down the Lisboan gangway in search of a poetical individual. It being 1924, and the weedy, artistic look being all the fashion even in this distant enclave, there were several melancholics who fitted the description. I eliminated those bearing expensive accoutrements – two wrapped in thick overcoats and one sheltered under an elaborate silken umbrella – since any man taking stray translator jobs was unlikely to have generous resources. When I had also dismissed those men already in groups, I was left with three persons. One looked far too eager: He had to be waiting for a loved one. Another looked as if he should be in bed: If that was my man, his pallid languor suggested it would be less work to learn the language myself. When my boot touched down on the solid dock, I elbowed my way through the crowd to the undernourished, bespectacled figure that remained.

“Senhor Pessoa?” I asked.

He dashed the stub of a hand-rolled cigarette to the ground and snatched off his hat. “Miss Johns?”

“Her replacement, Miss Russell,” I said. “Is all ready?”

“I booked cars for the day, as you requested,” he replied, “although as foreigners, you should have been safe enough …” A disturbance behind my back made his voice trail away and his jaw ease open.

I did not need to turn around to know what he was seeing, although I did. There is an undeniable fascination with oncoming catastrophes, a basic human inability to tear one’s eyes away from runaway lorries, banana peels on crowded pavements, and overbalancing waiters with over-laden trays. Such was what stood now at the top of the gangway.

Between the built-up shoes and the oversized hat, the man now taking his place in the miraculously vacant passageway barely cleared five feet, but by his attitude, he towered over all he surveyed. The sun seemed briefly to emerge from the gloom, although that could have been the effect of the newcomer’s brilliant white fur coat, his equally brilliant teeth, and the enormous diamond on his right pinkie finger, which had been expertly mounted so as to adorn a finger considerably narrower than the stone itself.

Randolph St John Warminster-Fflytte, founder and sole director of Fflytte Films, the man on whose boyish shoulders the future of the British film industry sat, Hollywood’s coming rival, whose five generations of family fortune were riding on the surviving heir’s keen understanding of the taste of the common man.

From all I had seen of him on the voyage from England, which was rather a lot, the wager was close to being a sure thing. Fflytte had spent his youth embracing the taste of the masses; now he had more in common with his young would-be actors than with the likes of Barrymore and the generation trained by stage.

Fflytte had made his name (“Fflyttes of Freshness!”) with three pictures that cumulatively did for pirates what Valentino had done for rajahs and desert sheiks. As the girls had said, Valentino had even been mooted for the current project, when it was being thought of as a modern version of The Pirates of Penzance but without the songs (this being cinema and therefore, in 1924, blessedly without sound – although I had no doubt technology would catch up with us before long, inflicting audiences with a flood of opera-movies and driving tin-ears like me out of cinema houses forever). However, when Fflytte managed to smuggle Valentino into an elaborately negotiated secret meeting (secret due to the draconian contracts tying actors to their studios) the two men ended up staring at each other in mutual incomprehension, Valentino not understanding Fflytte’s English accent and the Englishman unable to decipher whatever language it was that Valentino spoke. The meeting was not a success.

Instead, Fflytte would make his own star. His eye had lit upon a rather stupid young man with symmetrical features and luscious hair whose chief ability was an imitation Valentino intensity, a gaze that struck me as dyspeptic although the average film-goer reacted with the breathlessness of a blow to the solar plexus. Daniel Marks (“Making his Marks!” “Hitting the Marks!” et cetera) had a more important knack: He never, ever, made Fflytte feel short.

Even now, the actor automatically took up a position well behind his director at the gangway’s head, so that any photographs from below would place them on an equal plane: famous director, dashing young man in fashionable soft cap, beautiful girl in flapper clothes and drooping spit-curls furiously chewing her chronic wad of Doublemint. One would have thought them Americans, although all three were British; but for the weather, the trio might have been getting off a train in Los Angeles.

However, there were no photographers, to the irritation of the man in the white coat. And far from the sun coming out, the rain gathered its petulance and threw itself at the fur and the hat.

Fflytte, Marks, and Bibi, the leading lady – just Bibi, no surname – slid down the boards and dove into the first of the waiting motorcars.

Marks might be Fflytte’s invention, but Bibi was the most prominent of several near-stars stolen outright from Valentino’s own Famous Players-Lasky company earlier that year. It was a coup that had shaken the California studios and dubbed Fflytte with his current (and appropriate) nom de cinéma: The Pirate.

I watched the car take away my blueblood piratical employer and his two prized possessions, and turned to Mr Pessoa. Both of us reached up to wipe the rain from our spectacles. He, and his coat, looked sodden through.

“I’ll introduce you when we meet them at the hotel,” I told him. “First, we have to see to the rest of the lunatic asylum.”

Mr Pessoa looked startled, clearly wondering if his English had failed him, but I just waved him at the motley crew gathered on the decks before committing themselves to foreign territory, and we got to work.

PIRATE KING: And honorary members of our band we do elect you!

THE FIRST ORDER of our Lisbon business was to hire actors to play the pirates – although we might have been hiring actors to play actors who played pirates, who were actually pirates who …

As Hale had suggested, it was better not to think about it too closely.

As I understood matters, Fflytte’s initial impulse had been to use actors from Morocco itself – I was already sick of the word Realism -but Hale had convinced the director that finding people both decorative and capable of acting in front of a camera, in a country so backward it had no motorcars until ten years previously, threatened to consume a dangerous amount of time and hence money. They had compromised on collecting actors along the way.