Works by
Randall S. Peffer
(Writer)

Biography/Memoirs

• Watermen  (1979)
  For three hundred years, generations of Tilghman Islanders have lived by harvesting the waters of Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay. They are watermen, an old English term for commercial fishermen, and their lives today retain much of the spirit and practice that characterized their land’s first Anglo-Saxon settlers. Watermen is the story of their lives told by Randy Peffer, a young writer who came to Tilghman Island in search of his ancestral roots and left a year later with the makings of a book.

Fiction

• Killing Neptune's Daughter (2004)
  Noelle Werlin, the beautiful wife of a rock 'n' roll legend, was never able to shake the ghosts of her past, but dying at the hands of one of those ghosts never crossed her mind.
  
  In Woods Hole on Cape Cod, Noelle grew up as Neptune de Oliveira's daughter Celestina-otherwise known as Tina the Tease. Changing her name and running away to New York as a teenager, she thought she could run away from her life of unspeakable sexual depravity on the cape.
  
  Tina's body is found with a marlin spike through her heart, raped, and sliced up. Her cocaine addicted, philandering, rockstar husband, Butch Werlin, is the NYPD's primary suspect. But the morbid class reunion of childhood boyfriends who congregate for Tina's funeral think other-wise. They think the murderer is actually from Woods Hole, and that somehow their high school buddy Billy Bagwell has been at the center of some gruesome web since their teenage years.
  
  This psycho-thriller carries Billy Bagwell deeper and deeper into long-repressed memories of 35-year-old crimes from the days when Billy was known as "Bagger, the crazy Bagman." As the days grow darker, Billy finds himself caught in a turbulent tide of past homoerotic encounters, lost innocence, rage, religion and lust.

• Provincetown Follies, Bangkok Blues (2006) -- Finalist 2006 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men's Mystery; Nominated, 2006 Lambda Literary Award for Male Fiction
  Luang kho ngu hao. Now I put my hand in the cobra's throat. Tuki Aparecio did not kill her lover. She did not burn down the Painted Lady... at least, not with fire. Tuki lit up the stage nightly, with her hair in braids and her glorious costumes; glittering, smoldering, singing her heart out for an audience who loved her. She brought the house down with her performances. But she's innocent of murder, innocent of arson...
  
  How can Michael DeCastro possibly hope to defend this beautiful drag queen, who brings with her a whole pack of nasty little secrets, straight from Bangkok's notorious tenderloin district? She speaks in aphorisms, the wisdom of the Buddha combined with the lyrics of Whitney Houston. She is fascinating. And Michael can't let her go to jail.

Travel

• New York: And Pennsylvania and New Jersey (1997) with Pete Souza
  Discover the region's best Driving Tours with National Geographic as your guide.
  
  Features the region's best routes and attractions, including:

  • Towns and cities, historical and cultural sites, natural areas, plus many surprises

  • Entertaining, insightful commentary

  • Useful travel tips

  • More than 120 original, color photographs

  • Detailed maps for each drive keyed to descriptions in text

  • Directions, mileages, and visitor information.

• Lonely Planet Puerto Rico (1999)
  Every Friday and Saturday night, music teases crowds into the streets of Old San Juan. Young people in Polo shirts and sheer dresses parade along the cobblestones. Perfecting their night moves, they sashay up the hill past the centuries-old Casa Blanca, ancestral home of the family of Juan Ponce de Leon - seeker of the legendary Fountain of Youth.
  
  Throngs gather on Calle San Sebastian, the street that rises above the sea and the restorations of the fortified city that has been the commercial hub of the Caribbean for more than 450 years. Here, wandering groups of musicians and dozens of bars, restaurants and clubs pump the sounds of salsa into the tropical night. Everyone moves to the syncopated rhythm of bongos, congas, maracas, cowbells, trumpets and song. And an island celebrates the fusion of elements that gave birth to a place, a culture, a race and a spirit that the world calls 'Puerto Rico', but islanders still know as Borinquen - the name the Taino Indians gave their island home before the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1493.
  
  Like the island's famous salsa - a spicy blend of Afro-Caribbean rhythms and big-band jazz - almost everything about Puerto Rico stands out as a dramatic and original yoking of opposites. Here, travelers will find strong and recognizable vestiges of Amerindian ancestors, Spanish conquistadores and West African slaves, as well as the political and economic influence of the USA - the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico's legal step-parent. The fusion of these strains is so distinctive that neither the place nor the culture can be mistaken for any other, and Puerto Rico claims a vitality and reputation that far exceeds the island's diminutive size.
  
  Just 35 miles wide and 100 miles long, Puerto Rico is the smallest of the Greater Antilles and stands as the keystone between the larger islands to the west and the long arch of the Lesser Antilles to the east. In many ways this location makes Puerto Rico the 'gatekeeper' of the Caribbean Sea, and the island's strategic position as a crossroads has fired her character. Not only can you see the fusion of native America, Africa and Europe in the faces of her people, but you can also hear the synthesis of Spanish and English (spiced with Taino and African words) in islanders' speech in this officially bilingual commonwealth. Diners taste the merger of the fields of Europe, the spices of Africa and the fish of the Caribbean in traditional cuisine such as asopao, a hearty stew. Drinkers here in the rum capital of the world find magic in the spirits distilled from sugarcane and mixed with pineapple and cream of coconut in the popular pina colada or blended with tart lime juice! in a daiquiri.
  
  In Puerto Rico, poets become politicians and spiritual wayfarers embrace elements of Catholicism and African Santeria. Songs with rhythms to make stones rise up and dance carry lyrics about heartbreak. Slums and mansions stand side by side, and simply guesthouses languish in the shade of resort hotels. Ford Mustangs adorned with blazing paint jobs and tinted glass travel the backroads with herds of wild horses. Street vendors selling tostones (fried plantains) share the block with Burger King, while the warships of the US Navy keep company with local sailboats.
  
  No doubt, travelers will find other dramatic signs of fusion in the Puerto Rican landscape itself. Contemporary Borinquen is a place where the green peaks of the Central Mountains (Cordillera Central) press the high-rises of modern San Juan to the edge of the sea. The ancient fortresses and walled Spanish city of Old San Juan stand nearly adjacent to the casinos, condominiums and resorts of the newer Condado district. Cane fields surround golf courses, soulless housing developments mask the way to pristine ocean coves, and the world's most luminescent phosphorescent bay lies next to a proving ground for military maneuvers. Broad beaches lie almost in the shadow of verdant mountain slopes of El Yunque, the national rain forest.
  
  And in spite of - or perhaps because of - these dramatic contrasts, the music never stops on this island whose anthem, "La Borinquena" praises Puerto Rico as a "flowering garden of exquisite magic...the daughter of the sea and the sun."

• Logs of the Dead Pirates Society: A Schooner Adventure Around Buzzards Bay (2000)
  A pocket of salt water tucked into southern Massachusetts, Buzzards Bay is a place where "swamp yankee" traditions still hold sway and the ghosts of Indians and 17th century explorers, pirates and revolutionaries rise from every quarter. Herman Melville and Henry James, Grover Cleveland and John F. Kennedy are among the many historical figures who have left their mark on the area. Among the boats cruising the idyllic and largely unspoiled bay, the research schooner SARAH ABBOT-crewed by high school students studying marine biology-sails each summer with Captain Randall Peffer at the helm. A tale of exploration and adventure, Logs of the Dead Pirates Society is the absorbing account of a routine cruise that became a rite of passage and a deeply personal quest for Peffer. Coming aboard with a persistent yet vague uneasiness, Peffer views the bay's islands and coves, towns and townspeople through an unusually keen and imaginative lens. Ruminating on historical wisdoms, he searches relentlessly for the path to his future by delving into the past. Thus this seemingly ordinary cruise (which concludes with a surprising, satisfying twist) stands-in the words of Joseph Conrad-as one of "those voyages that seem illustrations of life." Randall Peffer's nonfiction narrative Watermen won the Baltimore Sun's Critics Choice Award. He is the author of several travel guidebooks published by National Geographic and Lonely Planet, and has been a regular contributor to National Geographic, Smithsonian, SAIL, and WoodenBoat. Peffer is a licensed captain and a literature instructor at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.

• Lonely Planet Virgin Islands Edition (2001)
  Lonely Planet’s first edition "Virgin Islands" is a guide that will never lead you far from the rythym of reggae or calypso, the soft tones of Creole accents or the untouched natural beauty of these emerald isles. The independent traveler will have a multitude of decisions whether exploring the historic towns of Charlotte Amalie, Christiansted and Frederiksted, or the comfort of world-class resorts in Virgin Gorda, Caneel Bay, Peter Island and St. Croix’s Carambola Beach or lolling on the beaches of the staggeringly beautiful bays and cays. If you are craving conch fritters and callaloo or yearning to snorkel in crystalline coves, kick off your shoes and follow "Virgin Islands" to the Virgins’ best – from St. Thomas’ sizzling calypso bars to St John’s vast tropical park to tiny Norman Island, where the Treasure Caves hold secrets of pirates past.