Writing adventures

I didn't really mean to write adventure books, but it makes perfect sense to me now.
What I like to do is to acknowledge all the great things about the tradition of adventure books, and swashbuckling books in particular - and then have some fun with it.
I like to pay tribute to the great novelists of the past, and I've sneaked in something in honour of each of my favourites somewhere in the Swashbuckler trilogy.
We don't read Rudyard Kipling much any more, for example, and as a man of the Victorian empire some of his ideas and attitudes may seem very old-fashioned. His writing, in the language of another era, can be hard to read. But everyone's heard of The Jungle Book, and maybe Kim or Captains Courageous, or seen the movies, even if they haven't read the books. I love how he used to end tales with "But that's another story". It's like starting a fairytale with "Once upon a time". It fills you with expectation.
That's an adventure story tradition.
But then, being me, and not really good at traditions, I sometimes like to take the genre and shake it up a little.
You know how fiendish pirate captains often seem to be Spanish? In movies of the 1960s they were the sort of evil genius who might have been played by Anthony Quinn (he was actually Mexican, but he was often called upon to play Greeks or Arabs or ... anyone with an accent).
What, I wondered, would happen if things weren't quite as they seemed?
What if the pirate was a girl?
What if the Arab was really Irish?
What if the dashing nobleman fell over a lot?
What if ...
Ah, but that's another story.