Hands up, anyone who read Moonfleet (a swashbuckling adventure novel by J. Meade Falkner that was required reading in Canadian schools during the 1950s and 1960s). Remember the scene in which John accidentally puts his hand through the rotten wood of a coffin and pulls out what he thinks is a piece of seaweed, except it turns out to be the beard of a corpse? Take that, ye lily-livered, land-lubbering, milk-and-water readers of series horror. This is the real stuff.

Iain Lawrence, the B.C. author of The Smugglers,/I>, credits Moonfleet as one of the books that inspired him to write nautical adventure, and he is a splendid successor to that tradition. John Spencer, 16, is given charge of a schooner called Dragon by his merchant father. The ship’s mission is to load a cargo of wool and take it to London. However, things get complicated even before the ship’s departure, what with a hold-up, an attempted murder, and a successful murder. Then the ship gets under way and a corpse appears in the water, following in the ship’s wake and spooking the crew. At this point the mysterious, grizzled old sea salt whom John and his father met at a remote inn and hired as the ship’s captain is revealed to be not all that he seems. If this last detail sounds familiar then, yes, Lawrence also acknowledges his debt to Treasure Island and to the Kipling poem “A Smuggler’s Song.”

With all these literary antecedents, The Smugglers0 could have turned out to be a pastiche. But it isn’t. Throughout the tortuous plot, with its trip to France, brandy smuggling, storms, inland cellars that smell mysteriously of the sea, threats of pirates, double-crossing, gunfire, and sword play, Lawrence reveals that he has fully mastered the conventions of the genre and made them his own. And his 1990s writing is shorter, tighter, and faster-paced than Robert Louis Stevenson’s or J. Meade Falkner’s.

Looking back over the classics like Treasure Island and Moonfleet, I’ve concluded that these conventions consist of tech talk, low lighting, and insufficient information. Tech talk in passages such as “I stood my trick at the wheel in the faint light of the binnacle box, on a deck that heaved and quivered” makes us feel welcome in the 18th century, included in the competence of our hero, and in good narrative hands. Low lighting is the secret of the story’s atmosphere and tension: in a coach ride by moonlight, a room lit only by a small fire, one lantern in the shadowy hold of a ship, not to mention fog and the water-blurred pages of an important document. We lean forward into the story and squint as we try to see the whole picture. The psychological equivalent of low lighting is the plot device of insufficient information. John simply has no idea whom to trust. Does the captain really have special instructions from John’s father? Which member of the crew whispers a warning to John in the dark hold? Is Dasher a kindly eccentric or a murderous highwayman? These dilemmas, combined with John’s habit of consistently re-entering danger zones, keep us on the edge of our seats.

What prevents the book from being formulaic or manipulative is the crisp writing. Listen to the first sentence: “We raced across Kent in a coach-and-four, from London toward the sea.” The chapter is titled “The Highwayman,” and indeed this opening could be the first stanza of a narrative poem, its dactylic swing echoing the hoofbeats of the horses.

Here is a description of the ship’s dragon figurehead as the vessel plows through the waves: “The wooden jaws rose and fell. They seemed to bite at the waves, to chew them into froth. The head vanished altogether, then leapt from the sea, straining water through the teeth. The yellow eyes shone fierce with spray as the enormous head reared up, then plunged again. And in the sounds of the water, the dragon seemed to roar and breathe.” This Gothic description fulfills two ends. First it begs to be read aloud. This is a book for the cottage, for reading by firelight or flashlight, for all ages. Chapters that conclude with lines like “And before another dawn had risen, one of us aboard her would die upon her decks” leave readers and listeners wanting more. Secondly, the descriptive passage introduces us to a detail that figures later in a neat plot device. I couldn’t find one loose end in this cleverly constructed story. Why isn’t Mr. Spencer killed by the point-blank-range gunshot? Poor blind Sally Pye, what will become of her? It’s all woven in by the end.

So pack your bags with Moonfleet, Treasure Island, Daphne Du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn, and Lawrence’s equally delicious 1998 companion novel, The Wreckers. Then you will find out the whole story of why John’s father walks with a cane. But be warned. It has something to do with rats.