Published: November 01, 2007 04:19 pm            

New book: Third ‘Peter Pan’ prequel swooping in

NEW YORK — It started with one question from Ridley Pearson’s daughter: “How did Peter meet Captain Hook in the first place?”

That question inspired others about J.M Barrie’s “Peter Pan,” the captivating tale about a boy and his adventures on the island of Never Land: Why doesn’t Peter get older? How did he learn to fly? Where did Tinker Bell come from?

Pearson, a best-selling suspense writer, set out to find the answers, teaming up with humor columnist Dave Barry to write a prequel trilogy to Peter Pan. The first book “Peter and the Starcatchers” was published in 2004. The adventure concludes with “Peter and The Sec-ret of Rundoon,” out this month.

“When we started this, we never expected that we would end up with three books,” said Barry, 60, who has two children, ages 27 and 7, and lives in Miami. “We thought we would have one little book, a kid’s book.”

But they needed many, many pages to tell the tale behind the tale of the boy who never grows up, Pearson said.

“We wrote this 500-page manuscript and we got as far as the creation of Tinker Bell, but we still didn’t answer a whole bunch of stuff,” said Pearson, 54, who lives in St. Louis and has two girls ages 9 and 10. “So in the second book, we dealt with the shadows, and in this third book, we’ve really tried to pull this all together in an action format.”

The books have developed a following — the first two spent a combined 18 months on The New York Times Best Sellers list — and a Broadway version of “Peter and the Star Catchers” is being developed.

While many U.S. children know the Disney version of Peter Pan — and Disney publishes these books — they are not familiar with the Barrie story, which was first presented as a play in 1904. And they definitely don’t know that Barry and Pearson are famous authors.

No matter — they like a good story.

“He (Peter Pan) can fly — kids would love to be able to fly,” said Barry. “He doesn’t have any grown up telling him what to do. He lives a life of pure adventure, there’s all these magical things going on around him, and he never really gets hurt, and he can’t grow old.”

With their different writing backgrounds — crime and humor — Pearson and Barry seem like an unlikely pair for collaboration on a fantasy book, a genre they say has ripened because of the success of Harry Potter. The two met 15 years ago as members of The Rock Bottom Remainders, a band made up of famous authors. Neither one had written a children’s book before.

“We give a lot of thanks to J.K. Rowling,” said Barry, “The idea that kids will actually read long books — read a book because the story is fun, not because it teaches them or has some lesson in it. We try to have the good guys win and the bad guys lose but that’s about as far as we go with preaching.”

The two say they work together outlining their books and then divide up the characters, each writing chapters based on who stars in them.

Pirate ships sailed on the stage at Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital of New York-Presbyterian, where the two had a reading Monday and handed out “Keep the Secret” black wristbands to patients and local school children.

“It’s magical,” said Danielle Bennett, 8, about her love for Peter Pan. She said she liked the “fairies and flying people.”

“I like how he fights,” said Samantha Leon, a fourth-grader at P.S. 4 Duke Ellington School in New York, “how brave he is, how careful he is when it comes to problems.”

Barry recalled seeing a kid reading his second book last year when he was dropping his daughter off at elementary school.

“I go up to her, tapped her on the shoulder, and said, ‘You know I wrote that book,’” he said. “She goes, ‘Oh’ and goes back to reading. She didn’t care at all that the author of the book was there. She wanted to go back to the story. In a way, that’s the best kind of reader. They live for your book.”

        

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