03/30/2025
Now on audiobook by PhantaSea Books! How piracy actually started in Somalia. Listen to the first five minutes for free! 🎧📖
📌 To commemorate the launch of the audiobook, the original 2012 author interview is being reposted here:
PhantaSea Books recently caught up with Quinn and asked him about the three books he co-wrote comprising The Somali Pirate Trilogy:
PhantaSea: Three years, three books, and 1,500 pages later, you're finally done telling The Somali Pirate Trilogy. What inspired you to write the story?
Quinn: Back in 2008, before Somali pirates were making any headlines, I befriended a Somali working at an international airport in California. He was a fairly recent immigrant and came from a Somalia coastal community. He told me about the struggle coastal Somalis were engaged in trying to combat the illegal fishing and toxic dumping occurring in the region - crimes all being waged very candidly against them by the international community. With no Coast Guard or navy to police Somalia's shores, he said, the locals' only recourse was to attempt to board the ships and demand their owners make compensatory payment for their illegal activities. This was usually reported as Somali piracy, but evidently, according to many well-documented accounts, the original pirates in Somali waters were these foreign "fish pirates" and toxic dumpers, not Somalis. The illegal fishing was a multi-million-dollar per year industry. The Somalis that would 'hijack' those illegal trawlers back then were common fishermen seeking just recompense for their lost livelihoods - not the criminal gangs that make up the bulk of Somali pirates today.
After confirming the poaching and toxic dumping had, in fact, been occurring regularly in Somalia's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), which in every other part of the world is protected by UN charter conventions pertaining to sovereign nearshore resource rights and environmental laws, I approached my informant about co-authoring a book from the Somali pirates' perspective, and he agreed it was a story that needed to be told. Thus he became my key confidant - or liaison, if you will - and provided unprecedented cultural insights to my research. He helped to frame the story in the context of his own personal experiences, having grown up in a Somali fisherman family.
PS: Are you referring to Noor Fayrus?
Quinn: Yes. The question everyone asks me is if he is real. Yes, Noor Fayrus exists, and yes, many of his experiences recounted in the first book actually occurred. But it is important to note three specific roles Noor took on in the crafting of this trilogy. Firstly, he served as a general mouthpiece for the mass of pirates in the field; secondly, he served as a cultural informant; and thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, he served as a propagandist for his cause, which was to inform the world about the crimes being committed against his people by the international community in the forms of illegal fishing and toxic dumping on his ancestral shores, both of which he had experienced first-hand, and which had been occurring in his country long before Somali pirates ever hijacked a ship for ransom.
PS: Somalia piracy has become a hot topic. What makes The Somali Pirate Trilogy different from other books focusing on the subject?
Quinn: I think what separates our trilogy from other books in the genre is Noor's detailed insights into Somali life, history, and customs, and the fact that book 1 was the first full-length novel on the subject. Moreover, our trilogy uniquely approaches Somalia piracy through an alternative perspective via someone who'd spent most of his life in the region. For me, to be perfectly honest, I was never into pirates, their lore, their history; neither traditional Caribbean pirates, the Barbary pirates, nor did I have any concept about Somali pirates. It was Noor who initially sparked my interest in the subject as a serious study. Then, after researching all I could about Somalia and Somali pirates - both the foreigners pillaging their seas, and the Somali locals fighting back against them - I wanted to know how, if at all, the Somali pirate story fit in thematically with the larger scope of pirate history. Thus, my research soon encompassed all things pirate, from classics such as 'Treasure Island' and 'Captain Blood', to the earliest accounts of seafaring and piracy in the Arabian Sea and beyond.
During the historically recent Captain Phillips drama, when the Western world was brushing off Somali pirates as little more than self-serving savages hell-bent on hijacking and thuggery, in my research of how Somalia piracy came to be, I began to see things very differently. I started to see why many coastal Somalis regarded their budhcad-badeed - their local fishermen-turned-pirates - as freedom fighters and heroes. Nobody dared portray them as such in prosaic literature, because the world consensus was (and still is) that Somali pirates were violent and dangerous criminals with nothing redeeming about them. But in learning about their genesis, and in seeing them collectively through the eyes of Noor Fayrus as individuals struggling against forces far deadlier than what most people would ever have to experience in their lifetimes, I knew that Somali pirates did have a place in romantic, 'heroic' literature. Their 'romance' was along the lines of Jean Valjean (Les Miserables) or Robin Hood; it concerned individuals dealing with oppression and tyranny on their own terms, the alternative being their own unjust death at the hands of superiorly powerful, exploitative forces.
PS: You realize how controversial this is. Are you not concerned the general public will reject it outright, perhaps even brand you treasonous?
Quinn: To begin with, I don't write seeking to conform to popular viewpoints; I don't water things down in order to sell more books. I am not profit driven, at least not as a primary cause. I write to tell a good story, and to expose truths regardless of the public or political sentiment of the day. In regard to The Somali Pirate Trilogy, this is a literary work. The rich world of imagery and action the high seas provide reinforced the feasibility of writing a compelling saga about Somali pirates that had not hitherto been explored. Horn of Africa pirates presented the opportunity to inject fresh imagery and lore into a timeworn genre, and by focusing on the early struggle of Somali fishermen against the original foreign poachers, I knew it could be crafted in such a way that might evoke the required sympathy to keep Western readers onboard. A risky endeavor, yes, but nevertheless the passion was there and so we pursued it, come hell or high water.
PS: How much of this trilogy is a verbatim transcription of Noor's story?
Quinn: The first book was mostly transcribed, but the choice to increasingly romanticize Noor's story was mine. For the most part, he was in agreement with this concept of moving the story progressively into the realms of myth and lore. We wanted to show the modern struggle of traditional Somali mariners in an epic fashion. We felt it important for the reader to first identify with the main characters, to see the crappy hands they've been dealt in life, so that when the action kicks into high gear, the reader will better understand the difficult decisions the protagonists (the Somalis) must make in order to survive. In this way, we hope to suspend the reader's preconceptions and judgments about the early Somali pirates long enough for them to identify with or sympathize with the pirates on some level. The intense action, more at play in books 2 and 3, serves primarily to keep the more ambivalent reader onboard, viz., to entertain them even if they disagree with the fundamental point-of-view being presented.
PS: Is this why the books are so visual?
Quinn: Exactly. Like a good movie, this trilogy first and foremost seeks to entertain visually through images and description, but in the meantime, the reader is gaining unique insights into Somalia culture and history, and is ultimately seeing a side to the Somali pirate story that the mainstream media has been denying them, namely, the darker story of First World crimes and meddling taking place on Somalia's seaboard.
PS: What was the writing process like?
Quinn: The first book was a 'passion play,' in that I researched and wrote it in three months flat. But that passion and rawness I think comes through and benefits the story with a sense of openness and urgency, as was precisely the vibe I was getting from Noor in the very beginning. Like the early days of coastal Somalis fighting against the imminent threats posed by foreign mariners, the race-against-time storytelling in the first book sort of reflects those realities in a commensurately dramatic fashion.
PS: And the second book? How did you pace that?
Quinn: For the second book, I took a few steps back to see how I could meld the tome in better with the greater canon of pirate lore. Thus, Dagger Dogs of Zayid is the most traditional pirate book, in literary terms, of the three. While evoking so many 'piratisms' in one book was risqué, ultimately the story of Noor Fayrus moves forward in leaps and bounds. There are many exciting new twists and characters in book 2, and readers more enamored to traditional pirate tales will be sufficiently satisfied with this modern take on a swashbuckling old genre.
PS: And the third book?
Quinn: The third book is my favorite because it covers the most ground in respect to time and events, and brings the saga to a chilling and completely unexpected conclusion. I think its popularity will grow as A.I. becomes more of a serious reality in the world.
PS: Why is that?
Quinn: Somali Pirate 3 deals with the future of Artificial Intelligence, and how that will play into national security and high-level decision making.
PS: Any last words?
Quinn: Now you're sounding like a pirate! Overall, the trilogy was a major effort for me to write. There were so many details I wanted to get down from such a vast range of sources, all branching out from Noor's original experiences in book 1. If you have flashbacks of any of the scenes you read, or if reading these books is anything like watching a movie, then I'm satisfied that I've succeeded as Noor's "ghost writer."
As for Noor Fayrus, that you now know his name and understand there's a Somali side to the real-life horror story taking place on his seaboard, that's enough for him. Read the first book and you'll see how this whole tragedy really began. It was not the Somalis. No, the original pirates were white and Asian criminals. The Somalis reacted. The rest is history...
PhantaSea Books: Thank you. We're looking forward to book 3.
Quinn Haber: Mahadsanid (Somali for "thank you").
Somewhere between 'Black Hawk Down' and 'Treasure Island' lies 'The Somali Pirate' — a dramatic adventure novel initially released in 2009. This is the first Somali pirate novel to hit the market, and has since become a classic land-and-sea story. The book centers on coastal resident Noor Fayrus,....
