Dear Reader, Growing up in Texas, my gang of neighborhood kids would gather on Saturdays to act out movies like ROBIN HOOD, THE WOLF MAN, and CAPTAIN BLOOD. I discovered then that playing the bad guy was a lot more fun than being the hero. The villain always had the best lines and the big death scenes. Sword fighting was big in my back yard too. My brother, David, and I would practice with our broom handles and homemade wooden swords, choreographing sword fights we saw in Spartacus and destroying our mom’s prized shrubs as we fought the Skeleton Warriors from Jason and the Argonauts. And then there were Pirates. I loved Pirates. I wanted to be a Pirate. I read everything I could find about them: Classics Illustrated, Howard Pyle, Robert Lewis Stevenson, and of course there was Captain Hook! To this day, my Mother has the coat hanger wrapped and padded in black crepe paper that she fashioned into my first hook. I should have known then. The darker more complex characters were far more compelling to me than the shiny perfect heroes. They were pained, they were educated—even brilliant—and had great humanity in their evil. James Hook was always running in the background as I grew up. When my kids were born, they gave me the great gift of returning me to my inner child. Naturally, who should surface but Captain Hook. I did not want to write the Hook I had seen on stage and in the Disney cartoon. I wanted to write a real matinee idol blackguard, an adversary that could steal your soul and your childhood. As James Barrie wrote: “[Hook] is a blood-thirsty villain, all the more so because he is an educated man. The other pirates are rough scoundrels, but [Hook] can be horribly polite when he is most wicked.” I wanted to write the Captain Hook that James Barrie described. I gave him hopes and dreams and desires and fears. I gave him a great thirst and passion for knowledge and an infectious desire to explore and seek out the secrets of the world and the secrets of his own nature. I made him a force that others instinctively want to challenge. J.M. Barrie knew that Peter is in all of us—and so is Captain Hook. The good and the bad. The young and the old. The light and the dark. We may all want to be Peter Pan or Wendy or the Lost Boys or Tiger Lily when we are young, but what would the world be without Captain Hook? J.V.Hart Pound Ridge, NY 2005

In the spirit of the Peter Pan charitable legacy, a portion of the author’s royalties will go to the Peter Pan Children’s Fund, an organization that supports children’s hospitals through philanthropy programs.

The Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children (GOSH)