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CAPTAIN WILLIAM GILBERT
Nautical novels for the adventurer
About Captain William Gilbert
William Gilbert first experienced professional seafaring as a teenager on a tramp tanker out of sweltering Houston for a thrilling voyage through Panama to the Far East and then Saudi Arabia and the Mediterranean and back to the United States, fuelling at Gibraltar, and then crossing the Atlantic in a massive storm and threading through the oil rigs of the Mexican Gulf to the same berth at which he’d joined six months’ earlier; a trip described in his top seller, Supertanker Circumnavigation.
After qualifying as a third officer, he spent several years on cape-size bulk carriers, during the crisis period when one of this type of vessel was sinking every few weeks, due to a combination of wear and tear, poor design and poor loading practices.
Having survived this, he spent ten years in the home trade around Europe, obtaining his Master Mariner’s licence, before the decline of the British merchant navy finally overtook him.
This was followed by fifteen years’ service on the superyachts of the mega rich.

Nominee for the Mountbatten Award 2020
GARNET AND PETUNIA: THE SERIES

Garnet and Petunia:
The Junior Minister
Bangkok. A disgraced British politician has apparently died in the Crimson Ass, an S and M bar in Patpong. British detective Garnet and his transsexual, Thai assistant, Petunia, are asked by the British authorities to investigate. While dealing with their case, they are distracted by a woman-killer who has appeared on the scene and seems to have known Garnet.

Garnet and Petunia:
The Matinée Idol
Filippo, the faded Italian film star, a super-successful, cynical, Hollywood producer and a mysterious woman are up to something; a British civil servant wants someone to find her missing, much younger wife; a Jewish businessman’s daughter has been found with her throat slashed; a high-profile, Iranian strip club owner’s American car has been found abandoned and splattered with blood; and a South London gangster has been found in a Bangkok red light district with some of his genitals missing, wearing surprisingly high-end lingerie, and Garnet is under pressure from his nemesis in the Eastend underworld, doing the South Londoners a favour, to get it solved or his partner, Petunia, will not be so beautiful for much longer. Garnet and Petunia wade through the expatriate flotsam which fills the neon-lit streets of Bangkok’s tourist districts, doing their best to help the Thai police solve the irritating crises which the foreign population causes, identifying victims and finding guilty parties.

Garnet and Petunia:
The Juvenile Delinquent
Thailand. Someone is stalking the streets of Bangkok, slashing the faces of the women involved with Shane, an Australian gangster with facial tattoos. A Beautiful seventeen-year-old Thai wife lives in a mansion and cuckolds her eighty-year-old husband. A Taiwanese millionaire’s wife is found lying on the pavement beneath their seventeenth-floor apartment, wearing only a scarlet G-string. Garnet and Petunia trace events and try to avoid becoming victims themselves.

Garnet and Petunia:
The Russians
A British seaman has gone missing in Bangkok. A ship has gone missing in China and bodies have been found floating. The sinister third secretary at the British Embassy seems keen for Garnet and Petunia to assist his opposite number at the Russian Embassy in the hunt for the Russian’s brother, who was involved in some Russian naval disaster. The trail leads Garnet from the Yellow Sea to balmy Southern Thailand and through borderline-criminal shipyards.
OTHER BOOKS BY CAPTAIN WILLIAM GILBERT

Circumnavigation
In the nineteen-eighties, William Gilbert joined his first tramp tanker as a trainee officer in Houston. The trip turned out to be a five month circumnavigation via the Panama and Suez canals. This is the story of that journey and of the tight knit society on board as it passed through far flung and exotic locales.

Cuba Port of Call
In the mid-nineties, William Gilbert was mate on a little freighter trading between Santo Domingo , Vera Cruz and Havana. Having signed off, he decided to spend some months living in Cuba just when it was beginning to emerge from its Soviet-supported era of oppression and open up a little to the world. Drifting around the western half of the country, mingling with everyone from cabaret artistes to embryonic property developers, farmers to black market traders, he found the warmth and generosity of the Cuban people to be limitless and the country itself to be a beautiful time-warp.

Marie of Gizo and Other Stories of the Solomons
Missionaries, colonial officials, traders, Australians on the run and exotic island women mingle in the jungles and on the beaches of the last unspoiled Pacific paradise while facing the threat of the political and economic change which the outside world wants to force on them.