In the Slick of the Cricket

Winner of Pushcart's Sixteenth Annual Editor's Book Award, this first book reveals the captain behind the Jaws epic―a man even more fascinating than the movie and novel based on his life. Russell Drumm, a local Long Island newspaper reporter, takes a five-day fishing trip aboard the charter boat Cricket II with Captain Frank Mundus, the godfather of Jaws. The trip's single charter is a Hawaiian developer and big-game hunter who has traveled all the way to Montauk, New York, so that the cantankerous Captain Mundus can guide him to the only trophy he lacks―a great white shark of the monster-size that Mundus has made his reputation catching. What begins as a short escape for Russell Drumm quickly turns into a storm-tossed odyssey in which Mundus, on the eve of his retirement, relives his forty years at sea. He recollects his ingenious methods, his weird collection of charter "Idiots," and his lasting bitterness toward Peter Benchley for never acknowledging him as the source of the Jaws story. From a few haunting obits and Captain Mundus's unending slick of stories, our reporter weaves a bleak, yet humorously portrayed vision of the apocalypse.