"Hook's Tale: Being The Account Of An Unjustly Villainized Pirate Written By Himself"

His biography is impressive. "John Pielmeier is a three-time Emmy- and Golden Globe-nominated playwright and screenwriter"; he wrote both play and screenplay for "Agnes Of God." Based in upstate New York, he has cousins in Chico.

Pielmeier keeps thinking of another, very troubled, biography, at least as presented by the Scottish novelist and playwright J. M. Barrie, in "Peter Pan," the first book Pielmeier learned to read. Barrie's Captain Hook, the pirate with the severed hand, pursued by a ticking crocodile, is Peter's arch-nemesis.

Barrie does note that "Hook" is "not his true name," which, it turns out, is James Cook, and before he died in 1940 he wrote a memoir. Serendipitously, Pielmeier finds the manuscript in an American library. It has now been restored and published as "Hook's Tale: Being The Account Of An Unjustly Villainized Pirate Written By Himself" ($25 in hardcover from Scribner; also for Amazon Kindle; see johnpielmeier.com). It's not quite a kid's story.

Cook is born in 1860, his father lost at sea. His mother drowns in a bathtub while he is away at Eton, and he is involuntarily "pressed into service" for Her Majesty's Royal Navy. Cook insists that the "sorry Scotsman" got it wrong about most everything, from the "jolly" Roger (named after the un-jolly captain, Roger Starkey) to Daisy the croc, Tink the fairy, Tiger Lily the princess, and Peter himself.

"Why, dear reader," Cook asks, "do you always insist on believing that sad little Scotsman, who only heard the story third-hand, instead of believing one who lived it? … I, on the other hand--which other hand, by the way, I am forced to use now to write, since my right one was underhandedly removed, leaving me but my sinister side to express my feelings--I on the other hand am writing a memoir, and cannot use the conveniences of fiction to paint a nicer, cleaner, simpler picture of how things happened."

Cook is a sympathetic character, driven by revenge, faced with the great question: Do you really want to grow up? The story is mischievous, rollicking, wryly funny, weirdly fantastic, and, yes, entirely true.