Astrodene's Historic Naval fiction is pleased to have obtained an Interview with Mark Keating, author of the recently released The Pirate Devlin.

What inspired you to begin writing?

It was mostly out of frustration. I was in one of those lulls where I didn’t have a book primed and wanted to try something different. I tried to find some pirate fiction, as a change of pace, but came up short on finding any that satisfied. I thought that if there wasn’t one that engaged me I’d try and write one. I’d never written anything before but I knew what I liked to read so I did it out of pleasure thinking it would just be a pastime. It wasn’t that I thought I could write, just that I had no reason to believe that I couldn’t.

After a few weeks I was enjoying it so much that every evening stretched way past midnight and when I was about halfway through I gave it to some friends and they came back with positive responses and they wanted more.

I think that's the hardest part of writing: the moment when you give it to someone else for, what is essentially, judgement. I never thought that the first book I wrote would be picked up within two weeks of my finishing it. It's still a blur. I've been lucky.

Although his diary is now Samuel Pepys’s most famous work, it was unknown until long after his death. He only published one book in his lifetime, Memoires relating to the state of the Royal Navy of England, for ten years, determin'd December 1688, his account of the administration of the Navy from 1679 until his dismissal from office with regime change in 1688. It was published in 1690. With the exception of a 1971 edition titled Pepys' Memoires of the Royal Navy, 1679-1688, it has been out of print since 1908.

A new hardcover edition titled Pepy's Memoires of the Royal Navy, 1690 with a  new introduction by David Davies which explains the political controversy that formed the background to the book’s publication, and shows how Pepys manipulated his mastery of arcane information (indeed, he would have made an ideal spin-doctor to a modern government), was released yesterday in the UK and will be released on 15 June 2010 in the US

The Paperback version of Captain of Rome by John Stack is now listed. 

It is due to be released on 7 January 2010.