I may have won a prize for reading the most obscure book of the year. It's The Wicked Trade by Jan Needle. Maybe not most obscure. Just very obscure.

Few readers have heard of Jan Needle, native of Portsmouth, England, an author with a lifelong interest in naval history, as the publisher puts it. He has published four novels under a pseudonym, written award-winning children's books and worked on TV scripts. He has two sea-going novels under his Needle name, A Fine Boy for Killing and The Wicked Trade.

These novels star William Bentley, survivor of a mutiny in the first, now serving on a beat up old tub in the Thames -- along with a drunken crew and dissipated captain. "Wicked trade" of the title refers to the Impress Service, whose unpopular job was kidnaping British seamen from taverns and merchant vessels and forcing them, in chains, to join the Royal Navy.

The book is entertainingly long-winded, perhaps best read by the light of a sputtering candle. The effect could be enhanced by reading it in a musty cabin below decks. You can smell the river, and it doesn't smell good. Squirming in your hempen hammock you fight a rat for a piece of cheese. Still, you turn the pages.

Never mind the plot -- it's the usual thing -- love licit and otherwise, flying cannonballs, storms, stayed backsails and sprung yards, flapping halyards and flying tackle blocks, double dealing in the smuggling trade, sputtering flintlocks, horses pounding muddy roads, ambushes, deaths by hanging, drowning, beating, burning and entombment; plus double-dealing aristocrats and beetle-browed boatswains. You see how it goes.

The reader who like me acquires a taste for moldy bread may lose affection for lighter confections. My imagination was impaled years ago by the masters of this kind of writing, Patrick O'Brian and C. S. Forester. No matter how many contemporary novels come my way, I always sneak back, usually late at night when even the cats are dozing, into the pleasingly musty world of historical adventure.

Already I have one eye (the other is covered by a greasy leather patch) on my next guilty pleasure: Richard Woodman's An Eye of the Fleet, number one in a series of 14 novels starring a naval officer named Nathaniel Drinkwater. Publisher Sheridan House notes:

"Most of Drinkwater's exploits are based on shreds of fact and each chapter is set precisely in time. This gives a sense of reality to the stories. These are therefore not so much historical fiction, as a parallel reality. They could have happened, one feels; in fact they probably did, but were left out of the official histories."

Under the heading Mariner's Library Fiction Classics Sheridan House publishes Richard Woodman, plus many other good writers. McBooks Press in Ithaca, New York, also has dozens of novels in its Nautical Fiction line. All are available in reasonably priced paperback editions. Check out these publishers next time you are hungry for some moldy cheese or a good case of scurvy, mate.

Aired Friday June 15, 2001 at 8:35 am and Sunday June 17, 2001 at 6:55 pm

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NOTES

Nathaniel Drinkwater's (fictional) biography:

He was born on 28 October 1762 to impoverished parents. He went to sea in the British frigate Cyclops in 1779 and saw his first action at the Moonlight battle of January 1780. During the period of peace after the American Revolution, he married Elizabeth Bower, rejoining the Royal Navy in 1792, shortly before the outbreak of the War of the French Revolution. His service as a master's mate was in small cruisers such as the cutter KESTREL and the brig-sloop HELLEBORE. During this period he was present at the Battle of Camperdown and voyaged as far as the Red Sea, where he took part in the bombardment of Kosseir and cut out a French frigate, the ANTIGONE, from an Arabian Bay. Promoted lieutenant he was put in command of the bomb-vessel VIRAGO in which he fought at Copenhagen under Nelson before being promoted commander. Idle during the Peace of Amiens, he was sent into the Arctic Ocean escorting the annual fleet of Whalers in the ship-sloop MELUSINE. Made post-captain, Drinkwater served in the Trafalgar campaign and was taken prisoner. In 1807 he was sent into the Baltic on a secret mission from which he returned successfully, only to be dispatched into the Pacific, finally returning to Britain to be dispatched on another secret mission to Hamburg. Drinkwater was put in charge of the Admiralty's Secret Department after the death of Lord Dungarth, his old patron, and managed to frustrate a number of Franco-American plans to sabotage the British war effort. His death, at the ripe old age of 81 in 1843, is not unrelated with the introduction of steam.

Drinkwater is one of the many dogged British sea-captains whose exploits denied the French empire the dominance of Europe. His patron Lord Dungarth cleverly keeps his protege out of line-of-battleships so that Drinkwater retains that freedom of action that Dungarth knows he will exploit to his country's advantage. During his long service life Drinkwater is wounded a number of times, is unfaithful to his wife only once - with a beautiful American - and yet maintains a curious love/hate relationship with a French woman, wife and later, thanks to Drinkwater himself, widow of his most implacable French enemy, Edouard Santhonax. In the Royal Navy of his day, Drinkwater makes his fair share of friends and enemies. As a commander he is strict, but not unkind, willing to praise a man, but equally willing to flog him if he transgresses the rules and usage of the Naval Service.