The Titanic Murders
Page 23
In response to the new interest in the tragedy, spurred of course by James Cameron’s successful film, I began to tinker with the notion of a mystery aboard the ship, with Futrelle as the detective, and offhandedly mentioned all this to Elizabeth Beier, the wonderful editor at Boulevard Books with whom I’ve worked on a number of movie tie-in novels. She at once saw the possibilities in my idea, and The Titanic Murders became my only novel to date sold on the basis of a single, casual phone call.
The writing of the book, however, has not been a casual affair. The idea evolved from a drawing-room mystery involving the real-life Futrelle and a typical Agatha Christie–style fictional cast into using only real passengers as my players (and suspects). This of course took the book into the more demanding arena of historical fiction (as opposed to simply a “period” mystery).
I have accordingly attempted to stay consistent with known facts about the Titanic and her maiden voyage, though the many books on this subject are often inconsistent, particularly on smaller points, and the various experts disagree on all sorts of matters, both trivial and profound. When research was contradictory, I made the choice most beneficial to the telling of this tale. Any blame for historical inaccuracies is my own, reflecting, I hope, the limitations of this conflicting source material.
The characters in this novel are real and appear with their true names; the blackmail threats made to the various players are grounded in reality. The epilogue’s litany of whatever-happened-to these real people is strictly factual. Nothing is known of either John Bertram Crafton and Hugh Rood, however, beyond their presence on the ship and their deaths in the disaster; they could just as likely have been clerics as crooks, saints as sinners, and were chosen from among the anonymous deceased because of the melodramatic felicity of their names. I would say that I intend no offense to their memories, but unfortunately no memories of them appear to endure.
My fact-based novels about fictional 1930s/1940s-era Chicago private detective Nathan Heller have required extensive research not unlike what was required of this project. I called upon my Heller research assistants, Lynn Myers and George Hagenauer, to help me in my attempt to re-create the maiden voyage of the great ill-fated ship. Throughout the writing of this novel, they were in touch with me on an almost daily basis, and without them this journey would not have been possible.
Lynn, a longtime Titanic buff (which I am not—or at least was not, until this project came along), focused on the ship itself, discussing various minute details and digging out the answers to innumerable nitpicking concerns of mine. He also shared his library of Titanic reference works, including numerous rare, period items, and provided videotapes of several documentaries and one of the Titanic films (S.O.S. Titanic). A police booking detective, Lynn also provided details about death by smothering.
George focused more on the people, and worked with me to gather background on the famous passengers (and, in the case of this story, suspects). In particular he was helpful in gathering, and interpreting, materials on John Jacob Astor, Isidor Straus, Benjamin Guggenheim and especially W. T. Stead.
Jacques Futrelle, while a major figure in the history of mystery fiction, is unfortunately little known (or read) today. I was blessed by the existence of a fascinating, well-done book on Futrelle’s life, the unique The Thinking Machine: Jacques Futrelle (1995) by Freddie Seymour and Bettina Kyper, a biography supplemented by five “Thinking Machine” stories—including “The Problem of Cell 13” and “The Grinning God,” a collaboration between Jack and May. In addition, coauthor Bettina Kyper—who knew both May and Virginia Futrelle intimately—generously shared further information with me over the phone. Other information on Futrelle was culled from E. R. Bleiler’s introduction to Best “Thinking Machine” Stories (1973) and the introduction to the Futrelle story collected in Detection by Gaslight (1997) edited by Douglas G. Greene. Further Futrelle information was drawn from Encylopedia of Mystery and Detection (1976) by Chris Steinbrunner and Otto Penzler and Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers—Second Edition (1985) edited by John M. Reilly.
A vital research tool to this book was Philip Hind’s extensive website, Encyclopedia Titanica, which (among many other things) features First-, Second- and Third-Class lists that include many biographies of passengers (and not just the famous ones); crew members, too. The wealth of information Mr. Hind has assembled is equaled by the clarity of his writing. My son Nathan helped me with Internet research and guided me through the use of the CD-ROM game from Cyberflix, Titanic—Adventure Out of Time (1996), which allowed me to tour the ship.
Also, since no major biography of Maggie Brown exists (at least that I know of), I was grateful and relieved to discover the Molly Brown House Museum website, which provided a lengthy, in-depth and well-written biographical essay, with many pictures, of the Unsinkable Mrs. Brown.
I would also like to acknowledge and praise musicologist Ian Whitcomb’s delightful CD, Titanic—Music As Heard on the Fateful Voyage, which includes renditions by “The White Star Orchestra” re-creating the authentic period music in the precise instrumentation of Wallace Hartley’s ensemble. In addition to providing an ineffable sense of mood, Whitcomb’s CD includes a voluminous, detailed, informative booklet.
Three first-rate book-length narratives about the sinking of the Titanic were key references in the writing of this novel.
Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember (1955) remains a riveting, beautifully written account (and his 1987 follow-up, The Night Lives On, answers many questions and explores various controversies that his earlier, you-are-there-style classic did not, including material on the Ballard expedition’s discovery of the wreckage).
Geoffrey Marcus’s The Maiden Voyage (1969) is a more detailed account and includes much material Lord ignored in favor of focusing on the night of the disaster; extensively researched, it stands beside A Night to Remember as a definitive work.
A similar, and similarly excellent, in-depth look at the tragedy is found in Daniel Allen Butler’s “Unsinkable”—The Full Story of RMS Titanic (1998), a clear-eyed, readable narrative including up-to-date material on the expeditions as well the public’s enduring fascination with this subject, and its impact on popular culture.
The Titanic obviously lends itself to oversized volumes that combine pictures and text; few pictures of the Titanic exist, however, and most of these books are filled chiefly with photos of her sister ship, the Olympic. The majority of the known photos of the real ship were taken by Jesuit Father E. E. O’Donnell, who took passage on the Titanic from Southampton to Queenstown, where he disembarked. In 1985, the same year that Robert Ballard discovered the ship’s wreckage, a cache of Father O’Donnell’s photos turned up, with their glimpses of life on and around the doomed ship. They have been well gathered, with a 1912 article by O’Donnell himself, in The Last Days of the Titanic (1997). O’Donnell spoke to Futrelle aboard the ship and took a photograph of the mystery writer standing on the boat deck.
Titanic—An Illustrated History (1992) by Don Lynch, featuring paintings by famed Titanic illustrator Ken Marschall, is an excellent coffee-table-style book, and both its text and elaborate illustrations (including a foldout cutaway painting of the ship that greatly aided me in gaining my bearings) were vital to the writing of this novel.
Similarly helpful was Titanic—Triumph and Tragedy (1994/1998), by John P. Easton and Charles A. Haas, a fastidiously detailed nuts-and-bolts account, voluminously illustrated with rare photos, a mammoth undertaking well done.
The Titanic—The Extraordinary Story of the “Unsinkable” Ship (1997) by Geoff Tibballs is a comparatively slender volume but extremely well assembled, with effective, well-researched text and nicely chosen pictures, which were of great help to me—this Reader’s Digest trade paperback is a handsome, user-friendly volume, particularly for the more casual Titanic buff.
A similar volume is Titanic (1997) by Leo Marriott, which features a gallery of paintings not seen elsewhere, and many large illu
strations that were useful for imagining the ship; unfortunately, the book has no index, which limits its effectiveness as a research tool. Even more maddening is Titanic Voices—Memories from the Fateful Voyage (1994), by Donald Hyslop, Alastair Forsyth and Sheila Jemima, which collects photos and letters and other rare documents and information about the disaster; prepared for the Southampton City Council, the book is oddly skewed and, even with three authors, no one bothered to assemble an index. Still, it was beneficial, sometimes uniquely so.
Two excellent “picture books” that combine the story of the disaster with haunting photos of the wreckage are The Discovery of the Titanic (1987) by Dr. Robert D. Ballard and Titanic—Legacy of the World’s Greatest Ocean Liner (1997) by Susan Wels. The latter—a Discovery Channel book—is stronger on history, the former focusing on Ballard’s expeditions.
A number of vintage books (or reprints thereof) were consulted: The Sinking of the Titanic (1912), Logan Marshall; Sinking of the Titanic—Thrilling Stories Told by Survivors (1912), George W. Bertron; The Truth About the Titanic (1913), Colonel Archibald Gracie; and Wrecking and Sinking of the Titanic—The Ocean’s Greatest Disaster (1912), no author given (“told by the Survivors”).
Particularly useful, in my attempt to re-create what it must have been like to be a First-Class passenger on the great ship, was Last Dinner on the Titanic (1997) by Rick Archbold with recipes by Dana McCauley, a lovely, eccentric combination of history lesson and cookbook.
Other relatively recent books, taking more specialized looks at the Titanic story, were also of help: Down with the Old Canoe—A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster (1996), Steven Biel; Her Name Titanic (1988), Charles Pellegrino; The Titanic Conspiracy (1995), Robin Gardiner and Dan Van Der Vat; Titanic—Destination Disaster (1987/1996), John P. Eaton and Charles A. Haas; The Titanic Disaster (1997), Dave Bryceson (the story as reported in the British press); The Titanic—End of a Dream (1986), Wyn Craig Wade; and Total Titanic (1998), Marc Shapiro.
A number of biographies and studies of society in the early 1900s were consulted, including: The Age of the Moguls (1953), Stephen H. Holbrook; And the Price Is Right (1958), Margaret Case Harriman (the story of the Strauses and Macy’s department store); The Astors (1941), Harvey O’Connor; The Astors (1979), Virginia Cowles; The Astor Family (1981), John D. Gates; The Case of Eliza Armstrong—A Child of 13 Bought for 5 Pounds (1974), Alison Plowden (the W. T. Stead “white slavery” case); Crusader in Babylon—W. T. Stead and the Pall Mall Gazette (1972), Raymond Schults; The Guggenheims—An American Epic (1978), John H. Davis; The Guggenheims—The Making of an American Dynasty (1976), Harvey O’Connor; The Guggenheims and the American Dream (1967), Edwin P. Hoyt, Jr.; Peggy—The Wayward Guggenheim (1986), Jacqueline Bograd Weld; The Inheritors (1962), John Tebbel; My Father (1913), Estelle W. Stead; and Who Killed Society (1960), Cleveland Amory. Also useful was a March 15, 1998, People Magazine article, “Sunken Dreams” by Jeffrey Wells, Joanna Blonska and Jason Lynch.
Further material on W. T. Stead was culled from The Wreck of the Titanic Foretold? (1998), edited by Martin Gardener, reprinting Morgan Robertson’s prophetic The Wreck of the Titan (originally published as Futility) as well as Stead’s own prophetic sea-disaster writings.
Midway through the writing of this novel, by which time I had become intimate with the material via research, I went for a third time to James Cameron’s Titanic, and was very impressed by the verisimilitude of the art direction and the quality of the screenwriter’s research. I also viewed several other Titanic films: Titanic (1953); A Night to Remember (1958); S.O.S. Titanic (1979); and the television miniseries Titanic (1996). Surprisingly, every one of these productions has its merits, most obviously the adaptation of the Lord book; all but the first of these (and even it’s not bad) take pains to be accurate, and the mini-series in particular is underrated and has art direction that rivals Cameron’s, despite a considerably smaller budget.
In addition, I screened numerous documentaries, the most useful of which was A&E’s Titanic (1994) written and directed by Melissa Peltier; others viewed included Secrets of the Titanic (1997) written and directed by Dennis B. Kaye, codirected by Dr. Robert D. Ballard; Titanic (1997) written by Linda Cooper and produced by Dick Arlett; Titanic: Secrets Revealed (1998) written by Lois DeCosia and directed by John Tindall; The Titanic Tragedy (1997) written by Tom Gredishar, Randy Jackson and Mariangela Malespin, directed by Geoff Chadwick; and Ray Johnson’s Titanic Remembered (1992) and Echoes of Titanic (1995).
My talented wife, mystery writer Barbara Collins—the May to my Jack—helped me through this difficult, demanding project, providing frequent impromptu library trips, poring over blueprints and photos in an attempt to help her directionally dyslexic husband find his way around the ship, and offering insightful criticism and needed praise, while keeping a constant lookout for looming bergs, growlers and field ice.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo credit: Bamford Studio
Max Allan Collins is the New York Times bestselling author of Road to Perdition and multiple award-winning novels, screenplays, comic books, comic strips, trading cards, short stories, movie novelizations, and historical fiction. He has scripted the Dick Tracy comic strip, Batman comic books, and written tie-in novels based on the CSI, Bones, and Dark Angel TV series; collaborated with legendary mystery author Mickey Spillane; and authored numerous mystery series including Quarry, Nolan, Mallory, and the bestselling Nathan Heller historical thrillers. His additional Disaster series mystery novels include The Lusitania Murders, The Hindenburg Murders, The Pearl Harbor Murders, The London Blitz Murders, and The War of the Worlds Murder.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE: A TRIP TO SCITUATE
DAY ONE: APRIL 10, 1912
ONE: A BIRTHDAY PRESENT
TWO: A CLOSE CALL
THREE: SUNSET OVER CHERBOURG
DAY TWO: APRIL 11, 1912
FOUR: CAPTAIN’S TABLE
DAY THREE: APRIL 12, 1912
FIVE: THE PROBLEM OF C13
SIX: INFORMAL INQUIRY
SEVEN: SECOND-CLASS CITIZEN
EIGHT: THE MUMMY’S CURSE
DAY FOUR: APRIL 13, 1912
NINE: STEERAGE
TEN: SHIPBOARD SÉANCE
DAY FIVE: APRIL 14, 1912
ELEVEN: SMOOTH SAILING
EPILOGUE: THAT NIGHT REMEMBERED
A TIP OF THE CAPTAIN’S HAT
ABOUT THE AUTHOR