Marlon Brando & Donald Cammell: Fan-Tan

The best thing this "rollicking, swashbuckling, delectable romp of a novel" — as the cover blurb describes it — has going for it is the fact that its authors are two dead celebrities.

Maybe the names of the authors didn't register initially. Take another look. Marlon Brando: Academy awards for On the Waterfront and The Godfather. Donald Cammell: less famous, true, but director of cult films Performance and Wild Side.

What on earth were they doing writing a sort of second-rate James Clavell oriental thriller? For that matter, how has it come to be published after their deaths?

The answers to those questions are arguably more interesting than the book itself.

It seems that way back in 1979 Brando conceived the idea of a film about a middle-aged Scots-American sea captain — played, of course, by himself — who joins up with a band of pirates led by a beautiful but ferocious Chinese woman.

To help with the script he turned to his old friend Cammell.

The on-again, off-again collaboration between the two — mainly conducted in the surreal atmosphere of Brando's private island in the Pacific — ended inevitably in disagreement.

But it did produce a couple of hundred pages of story plus an outline of how it might end.

After the legal issues between the two were resolved by their appearance in the great courtroom in the sky, Cammell's widow sent the manuscript to a publisher, a writer was engaged to finish it and the rest is pulp fiction.

Well, to be more precise, it is a rollicking, swashbuckling delectable romp of a story about a middle-aged Scots sea captain who gets involved in a daring raid on a freighter by a band of pirates led by a beautiful but ferocious Chinese woman, steals the loot for himself and sails into the sunset with her in hot pursuit.

Could be a vehicle for Tom Cruise and Lucy Liu.

* William Heinemann, $36.95