Sunday, October 03, 2021

Book review - "Captain Blood" by Rafael Sabatini

 A cracker of a book. Once I got used to Sabatini's slightly old time-y prose (his dialogue was first rate) it was a great yarn - establishing Blood, getting him falsely convicted quickly, shoving him out to the West Indies and turning pirate etc etc.

I thought the 1935 Warner Bros adaptation was first rate - keeping the early structure and lots of dialogue, but wrapping it up early. In this one Blood finds a guy who has come out to offer him a commission... but this new bloke likes Arabella and there's all this extra section where Blood goes to serve the King of France and fights with a dodgy Frenchman (it repeats the section with the pirate) and serves the kind of Spain.

A very good pirate book.

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