Charlie Small – The Perfumed Pirates of Perfidy

Charlie Small's The Perfumed Pirates of Perfidy is a swashbuckling explorer's journal for 7 year olds, in which a boy who's very late home for tea gets himself captured by a band of lady pirates.

What happens

Charlie wakes up at the pirates' dinner table, having scoffed their food and nodded off. They are not pleased. They don't like boys and they don't like thieves, and their captain wants to hang him from the yardarm.

So Charlie bets he can climb the rigging faster than their best sailor. Their best sailor turns out to be Bobo, a spiteful mandrill. (He wins by yelling that her tail's on fire. She hasn't got a tail.)

That buys him a job instead. Cabin boy. His list of chores is as long as his arm and spelt very badly, from "Get brekfust for hole crew" to reading the captain her bedtime story.

There's a LOT to love here. Wriggling Stew, which needs fifty eels that won't keep still. A giant sea slug that climbs aboard and gets seen off with a whole barrel of chilli powder. A key to his cell made of toffee, cast in a bar of soap.

The pirates themselves are a hoot. They used to be pirates' wives, stuck at home doing the cleaning while their husbands went off adventuring, so they set off to sea themselves. Captain Cut-throat's real name is Ivy, and nobody is allowed to say so.

And she's pinched Charlie's phone. She thinks it's a magic box, and the speaking clock leaves her completely amazed.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The jokes sit right next to some grisly bits. A passenger is made to walk the plank with his pockets full of gold (Charlie throws him a barrel to float on). The captain tells how a cook who stole food was lowered into a sea full of flesh-eating fish. And the giant slug crushes and swallows some of the crew.

A child who takes those things to heart might find them hard to shake off. One who loves a bit of gruesome will think it's brilliant, and Charlie's cheerful diary voice keeps it all feeling like a romp.

This is Charlie's second journal and it carries straight on from the first, so start with Gorilla City if you can.

What to read next

If they're still hungry for pirates after that, Pirates Past Noon whisks Jack and Annie from a rainy afternoon to a sunny beach, just as a ship flying the skull and crossbones sails into view.