Piratical prequels

Sir, Andrew Motion’s sequel to the story of Long John Silver and Treasure Island (extract, Mar 3, review, Mar 5), like Anthony Horowitz’s Sherlock Holmes story, is being received as though it were the first treatment of the characters by another hand.

In the case of Sherlock Holmes, pastiche adventures go back to the detective’s early days, and in recent decades have grown to a volume that I doubt one person could ever read.

I counted ten sequels and prequels to Stevenson’s pirate tale on my own bookshelf, and they are by no means all. Since my youth I have known Porto Bello Gold by Arthur D. Howden Smith, who in the 1920s obtained permission from the original author’s stepson, and R. F. Delderfield’s The Adventures of Ben Gunn.

Both tell the back story of the pirates and the island, and both were serialised by the BBC. More recently John Drake and Bjorn Larsson have recounted Silver’s adventures.

Roger Sansom
Hainault, Essex