Brando: actor, recluse and now pulp-fiction author

NEW YORK - Actor Marlon Brando has been immortalized in film for playing a Mafia boss, a luckless boxer and a rebellious biker, but 14 months after his death he is now also an author of a swashbuckling pirate novel.

"Fan-Tan," a pulp fiction novel authored by Brando and a longtime associate, movie director Donald Cammell, arrived on bookshelves this week after their unfinished manuscript was polished by film historian David Thomson and published by Random House imprint Alfred A. Knopf.

The book offers Brando fans a rare insight into the reclusive star's love of the South Pacific and of Asian women and is a work the actor did not want published.

Thomson admits the book he finished is no classic.

"It's not profound literature, but it's an adventure story and quite a good adventure story, very unexpected coming from Brando," Thomson told Reuters. "It tells us a lot about him."

Brando fell in love with the South Pacific while filming the 1962 classic "Mutiny on the Bounty" in Tahiti. He later bought his own South Pacific island and, in 1979, proposed to Cammell that they collaborate on a pirate story.

"He made the South Seas a great part of his life. Clearly this story comes out of the books he read and the things he learned about the seas during his time out there," Thomson said. "He was also crazy about Asian women."

Set in 1927, the book tells the story of a sea captain named Anatole "Annie" Doultry who, while serving time in a Hong Kong prison, saves the life of a prisoner. On his release he learns he has won the gratitude of that prisoner's boss, a beautiful gangster named Madame Lai Choi San.

Madame Lai proposes that Anatole join her in a robbery of a British-owned ship carrying a fortune in silver. Unable to resist, he gets swept up in a tale of pirates, a typhoon, a scorching sex scene and hand-to-hand combat.

Publishers Weekly gave an upbeat review, saying "the stylish result will delight readers who love movies, Marlon Brando, sea stories, Chinese pirates or adventure tales."

The Washington Post was less enthused. "It is the wreck you would expect. It is also the wreck you wouldn't expect -- an exceedingly strange, high-stepping, low-stooping tale that pulses fitfully with talent -- all of it Cammell's."

Brando conceived of the story's main character -- an outsized 50-something sea captain with more than a passing resemblance to the increasingly outsized actor.

Originally destined to be a film treatment, Brando's contributions consisted of improvising scenes. The actual work of writing fell to Cammell, the director of several obscure 1970s films best known for his movie "Performance."

Cammell spent years transforming the draft into a novel and pitched then-London based editor Sonny Mehta, but Brando pulled the plug on the project after he, as usual, lost all interest.

Thomson said their friendship had soured years earlier when a middle-aged Cammell had an affair with a 14-year-old girl named China Kong -- the daughter of one of Brando's mistresses.

Cammell shot himself in 1996. After Brando died last summer, Kong approached Mehta, now with Knopf in New York, with the manuscript. Mehta turned to Thomson to edit Cammell's opus and write the final chapter.

Peter Manso, author of the definitive 1995 biography, "Brando: the Biography" maintained Brando never intended the book to be published. The fact that it was, Manso said, in part vindicated his fears toward the end of his life that his estate would be abused.

- REUTERS