Our Fascination with Pirates by Matt Cost

Argh, matey. Walk the plank. Dead men tell no tales. Hoist the Jolly Roger. Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest, yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum. Shiver me timbers. Crack on!

The world has always had a fascination with pirates. What is the hook that makes just about everybody from young to old love a pirate?

Blackbeard. Anne Bonney. Calico Jack Rackham. Mary Read. Black Sam Bellamy. Henry Morgan. Black Bart Roberts. —Yes, there seems to be a blackness to many of the names. One for his beard, one for his hair, and one for his disposition.

For me, I believe that my love of pirates began when I was almost four years old. At the time, my mother owned a bookstore in Henniker, New Hampshire, and we lived above it. Not yet school age meant that young me spent a fair amount of time at North of Boston.

The bookshop was nestled on the Contoocook River and just across the bridge was New England College. There was a group of students from there that befriended me and would come hang out during the day. We would pass the time arguing about what color the sun, sky, trees, and other things were on each particular day. I was using my imagination. I now realize they probably had other help.

One day, this group of college students, took me on treasure hunt. We followed a series of clues to a park around the corner from North of Boston. Wedged into a pile of rocks was a small treasure chest filled with gold doubloons (the best kind with chocolate inside) and water pistols amongst other things. Quite some booty!

What reader has never turned the pages of Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson? Welcome to the world of deserted tropical islands, treasure maps marked with an X, and one-legged pirates with a talking parrot on their shoulders! I suppose that I was Jim Hawkins on my young pirate adventure, but I’m not sure which college students were Captain Flint, Long John Silver, Billy Bones, or Ben Gunn.

This century has introduced us to The Pirates of the Caribbean and Captain Jack Sparrow. Four more sequels followed this huge blockbuster hit. In the movie, Johnny Depp embodies the film’s essential fantasy, that a pirate’s life is exciting and unfettered. Of course, if that were true, there wouldn’t be so many peg legs, hooks for hands, and eye patches.

 

These are the pirate pieces of my life that made me so excited to write my upcoming Pirate Trap about a modern-day treasure hunt for long lost buried treasure. Clay Wolfe, Baylee Baker, and Port Essex become consumed by pirate and booty frenzy. It will be available on March 27th.

 

Matt Cost was a history major at Trinity College. He owned a mystery bookstore, a video store, and a gym, before serving a ten-year sentence as a junior high school teacher. In 2014 he was released and began writing. And that’s what he does. He writes histories and mysteries.

Cost has published five books in the Mainely Mystery series, with the fifth, Mainely Wicked, just released in August of 2023. He has also published four books in the Clay Wolfe Trap series, with the fifth, Pirate Trap, due out March 27th, 2024.

For historical novels, Cost has published At Every Hazard and its sequel, Love in a Time of Hate, as well as I am Cuba. In April of 2023, Cost combined his love of histories and mysteries into a historical PI mystery set in 1923 Brooklyn, Velma Gone Awry. City Gone Askew will follow in July of 2024.

Cost now lives in Brunswick, Maine, with his wife, Harper. There are four grown children: Brittany, Pearson, Miranda, and Ryan. A chocolate Lab and a basset hound round out the mix. He now spends his days at the computer, writing.