Shark Trouble

Master storyteller Peter Benchley combines high adventure with practical information in Shark Trouble, a book that is at once a thriller and a valuable guide to being safe in, on, under, and around the sea. The bestselling author of Jaws, The Deep, and other works draws on more than three decades of experience to share information about sharks and other marine animals.

“Shark attacks on human beings generate a tremendous amount of media coverage,” Benchley writes, “partly because they occur so rarely, but mostly, I think, because people are, and always have been, simultaneously intrigued and terrified by sharks. Sharks come from a wing of the dark castle where our nightmares live—deep water beyond our sight and understanding—and so they stimulate our fears and fantasies and imaginations.”

Benchley describes the many types of sharks (including the ones that pose a genuine threat to man), what is and isn’t known about shark behavior, the odds against an attack and how to reduce them even further—all reinforced with the lessons he has learned, the mistakes he has made, and the personal perils he has encountered while producing television documentaries, bestselling novels, and articles about the sea and its inhabitants. He tells how to swim safely in the ocean, how to read the tides and currents, what behavior to avoid, and how to survive when danger suddenly strikes. He discusses how to tell children about sharks and the sea and how to develop, in young and old alike, a healthy respect for the ocean.

As Benchley says, “The ocean is the only alien and potentially hostile environment on the planet into which we tend to venture without thinking about the animals that live there, how they behave, how they support themselves, and how they perceive us. I know of no one who would set off into the jungles of Malaysia armed only with a bathing suit, a tube of suntan cream, and a book, and yet that’s precisely how we approach the oceans.”

No longer. Not after you’ve read Shark Trouble.

After graduating from Harvard, Peter Benchley worked as a reporter for The Washington Post, then as an editor at Newsweek and a speechwriter in the White House. His novel Jaws was published in 1974, followed by The Deep, The Island, The Girl of the Sea of Cortez, Q Clearance, Rummies, and Beast, among others. He has written screenplays for three of his novels, and his articles and essays have appeared in such publications as National Geographic and The New York Times. He has written, narrated, and appeared in dozens of television documentaries. He is a member of the national council of Environmental Defense and is a spokesman for its Oceans Program.

Biography

But there's little the reading public likes better than a good scare (remember Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby? Or how about Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs?), and with Jaws, his first novel, Benchley got all the elements just right: There was a predator; there was plenty of suspense; and, oh yes, plenty of gore, too. The book, a perfect summer beach read, was wildly successful and spent 40 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. Benchley admitted that the book had little basis in scientific fact (at the time, almost nobody had any firsthand experience with great whites), but as a former newspaper reporter, he had impeccable instincts for a good yarn. He followed Jaws with two more terrifying deep-sea adventure novels, The Deep and The Island.

In 1982, Benchley published The Girl of the Sea of Cortez, a lovely, idyllic, and notably scare-free novel that received mixed reviews. "This reader yearned for more conflict," wrote a critic for the Los Angeles Times Book Review, "more 'and then what happened?' After a few more forays into traditional fiction, the author returned to his forté in bestselling thrillers like Beast, White Shark, and Creature.

Aware in his later years of the fragility of the species, Benchley became a staunch defender of the great white shark, penning several works of nonfiction about these endangered predators and actively advocating for ocean conservation. He died on Feburary 11, 2006, from pulmonary fibrosis, but his legacy continues with the Peter Benchley Shark Conservation Award, given annually for outstanding contributions to shark conservation.

Good To Know

In 1999, Benchley turned his attention to writing and developing a short-lived syndicated series about plane crash survivors in the jungle, Amazon, starring Carol Alt and C. Thomas Howell.

Benchley's novels have inspired several movies and teleplays, and the author had a hand in some of them -- sometimes as an actor. He was a TV interviewer in Jaws, played bit parts in other films, and appeared onscreen as an interviewee in E!'s True Hollywood Story about the making of Jaws.

Benchley was the grandson of Robert Benchley, the famous humorist and member of the Algonquin Round Table.