LA Meyer Books in Order

L.A. Meyer, born Louis A. Meyer, was born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in 1942. Because his father was an Army officer, he grew up moving between military bases in Germany and along the American East Coast. That early life gave him a taste for travel long before he began sending characters across oceans.

He studied English literature at the University of Florida, graduating in 1964. After college, he hitchhiked through Mexico and the American Southwest, then joined the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam era. He served with the Mediterranean Fleet and visited ports in Italy, France, Spain, and Malta.

The sea stayed with him.

Meyer did not follow one straight path into writing. He worked as a floor sweeper, social worker, and high school art teacher, and he also trained seriously as an artist. He took graduate art classes at Columbia University before earning an MFA in painting from Boston University in 1973.

He had already begun writing for children by then, with two picture books published before he finished his MFA. Painting remained a central part of his life, though. In 1984, Meyer and his wife, Annetje Lawrence Meyer, opened an art and print business in Bar Harbor, Maine, later known as Clair de Loon.

His stories eventually found their biggest canvas at sea.

The idea for Jacky Faber, the headstrong heroine of the Bloody Jack books, came while Meyer was listening to British and Celtic folk songs about young women who dressed as boys and went to sea. He took that spark and built Bloody Jack, the first novel about a London orphan who passes as a ship's boy during the Napoleonic Wars. Jacky's voice, quick thinking, musical talent, and habit of landing in dangerous situations carry the series from London to Boston, the Mississippi River, France, the Caribbean, Australia, and beyond.

Readers who enjoy the books often come for the fast-moving scrapes, ships, disguises, and historical settings. They also get Jacky's stubborn loyalty to her friends, her complicated relationship with Jaimy Fletcher, and her refusal to accept the narrow roles other people set for her. Later books such as Curse of the Blue Tattoo, Under the Jolly Roger, Rapture of the Deep, and Wild Rover No More keep widening her world while returning to the people and choices that shape her life.

Meyer's background as an artist and sailor gave him plenty to draw on. His fiction is full of practical shipboard work, old songs, odd jobs, faraway ports, and the messiness of making a life when the rules are stacked against you.

He lived in Corea and Bar Harbor, Maine, where he continued to paint and work with his family business. Meyer died in Ellsworth, Maine, on July 29, 2014, at age 72, from complications of Hodgkin's lymphoma. His final Jacky Faber novel, Wild Rover No More, was published later that year.