The Titanic Murders

EPILOGUE


THAT NIGHT REMEMBERED





MY ANONYMOUS PHONE CALLER NEVER contacted me again, and my attempts to contact the various official expeditions to the Titanic’s wreckage on the ocean’s floor, two and a half miles under the Grand Banks, have been fruitless. My letters about murders on the ship, and the possible existence (and discovery) of two canvas-body-bagged corpses in the cold cargo hold, apparently have been viewed much as I originally did my midnight caller: the work of a crank. (My phone calls have resulted in hang-ups, bum’s rushes and being put on hold until a dial tone clicks back in.)

Of course, I have no way of contacting any unofficial expedition—doubtful as the existence of such an effort might be, considering the shortage of deep-diving submersibles like Robert Ballard’s Alvin and IFREMER’s Nautile—and confirming my caller’s story now seems unlikely or even hopeless.

Researching the story told me by May and Jack Futrelle’s daughter, Virginia, that April afternoon in Scituate, has been considerably more successful, as the narrative you’ve just concluded I hope indicates. Virtually everything Mrs. Raymond told me about the murders fit neatly into known history, and answered a number of questions that have baffled researchers (why Captain Smith canceled the Sunday lifeboat drill, for instance, and the seemingly needless rush to port).

Unfortunately, I had only that one long afternoon’s meeting with Mrs. Raymond, who passed away later that same year.

What we do know is: who survived, and who did not, and—despite the tumult of that terrible night—we have at least some idea of the circumstances surrounding those who lost their lives so tragically and, almost invariably, heroically.

For the record, at approximately 11:40 P.M., the Titanic—at a speed approaching twenty-three knots—side-swiped an iceberg, despite the ship’s captain and crew having received numerous warnings of ice in the area. With too few lifeboats aboard and a slowly dawning realization by crew and passengers of the extent of the damage to the ship, a disaster worsened into tragedy. By 2:20 A.M., the Titanic was gone, taking many of her passengers and crew with her, putting more than fifteen hundred people either in or under the icy waters.

Archie Butt and Frank Millet, with several other passengers, aided in the loading of women and children onto lifeboats; when all of the lifeboats had been dispatched, the gentlemen returned to their card game in the Smoking Room until the slant of the table no longer allowed. Stories of Major Butt on deck fighting off swarthy steerage “rabble” with a walking stick or even a firearm appear to be one of the many yellow-journalistic inventions that pervaded early coverage of the disaster.

Archie Butt was last seen standing solemnly to one side on the boat deck, stoically awaiting his fate like the good soldier he was. He was apparently in the company of his friend Francis Millet; both men died in the sinking, Millet’s body recovered by the crew of the MacKay Bennett, whose grim task it was to salvage as many Titanic corpses as possible from the icy Atlantic.

Captain Smith’s fate remains clouded, as do conflicting reports of his demeanor on deck. The press of the day made him out a hero, but considering the source, the reports that he fell into a dazed, near-catatonic state are more credible; still, witnesses recalled seeing him with a megaphone, directing lifeboats to return to pick up more passengers (an order ignored). One story has him committing suicide with a pistol, but more credible is the eyewitness account of a steward who saw his captain walk onto the bridge, shortly before the forward superstructure went under, presumably to be washed away—a suicide of sorts, at that.

Another crew member reported seeing Captain Smith in the freezing water, holding a baby in his arms, moments before his ship made her final slide into the sea. Legend has it that the captain swam to a lifeboat, handed the child over, and swam off to go down after, if not with, his ship. The last reliable reports of Smith have him, in the water, cheering the attempts of crew members to struggle onto the top of an overturned lifeboat, calling, “Good lads! Good lads!” An oar offered to Smith was out of the captain’s reach, as a swell carried him away.

Some of the most famous stories of that night—the ones sounding most like legend—are true.

Isidor Straus, offered a seat on lifeboat number eight in consideration of his age, refused to go when other, younger men were staying; and Ida Straus refused to leave her husband’s side.

“I will not be separated from my husband,” she said. “As we have lived, so will we die together.”

And they did; in one final indignity, however, the ocean took Mrs. Straus’s body, while her husband’s was recovered, to be buried in Beth-El Cemetery, Brooklyn. Forty thousand attended the memorial service for the couple, with a eulogy read by Andrew Carnegie.

Benjamin Guggenheim, at first protesting the discomfort of a life belt, later abandoned it for his finest evening wear. With his valet, he awaited death in style, announcing, “We’ve dressed up in our best and are prepared to go down like gentlemen.” Oddly, his final thoughts—or at least his final thoughts of how he might like to be remembered—had to do with his long-suffering wife, writing the following note: If anything should happen to me, tell my wife I’ve done my best in doing my duty.

This may have been small solace to Mrs. Guggenheim, after Madame Aubert—rescued with the others in lifeboats by the ship Carpathia—came ashore announced as “Mrs. Benjamin Guggenheim.” As a further indignity, Guggenheim’s business affairs were in disorder, his steampump company doing poorly at the time of his death, leaving his children to make do with trust funds of only half a million or so, each.

Thomas Andrews, one of the first to understand that his ship was doomed, circulated through the Titanic dispensing various stories to various passengers, depending on how well he felt they might bear up under the truth. He worked manfully to see to it that as many women and children as possible were gotten into the lifeboats; but despair, finally, overtook him.

Andrews was last seen in the Smoking Room, staring at a serene nautical painting, his life belt nearby, flung carelessly across a green-topped table. His arms were folded, his shoulders slumped. When a steward, moving quickly through the room, asked him, “Aren’t you even going to have a try for it, Mr. Andrews?”, the shipbuilder did not even acknowledge the question.

William T. Stead was also seen in the Smoking Room, seemingly absorbed in the book he was reading, unconcerned about the brouhaha (he had taken a break from his book and was one of the few on deck at the time of the collision with the iceberg). He continued this until near the end, when he was spotted standing calmly at the rail. He had never mentioned to his fellow passengers that he had premonitions of drowning, and that he had—like Morgan Robertson, the author of Futility—written a story about an ocean liner striking an iceberg, with lives lost because too few lifeboats had been aboard.

“This is exactly what might take place,” he had predicted in 1886, “and what will take place, if liners are sent to sea short of boats.”

His body was not recovered.

Third-Class passenger Alfred Davies lost his life in the disaster; so did his uncle and two brothers. Their father described them, at the memorial service, as “fine big lads” and “the best of sons.”

In lifeboat number six, Maggie Brown, by standing up to an obnoxious crew member who’d taken charge, found her place in history as the “Unsinkable Mrs. Brown.” Never reconciling with her husband, over whose money she and her children battled for years, Maggie reveled in her celebrity until her death by a stroke in 1932. A Broadway musical loosely based on her life spawned a 1964 MGM motion picture starring Debbie Reynolds, who looked not much like Maggie (who somehow, after her death, became “Molly”); but then neither had Maggie wielded a handgun on a White Star lifeboat.

First-Class passengers Emil Brandeis and John Baumann were lost in the sinking; the body of the former was recovered, the latter’s was not.

J. Bruce Ismay worked bravely and hard, seeing that women and children were shuttled onto lifeboats; but he carved himself a place in history as a coward by stepping into one of the last lifeboats, collapsible C, and choosing not to go down with his ship—not even watching the great ship slip under, turning his back to the sight, much as the world would turn its back to him. By June 1913, he had “retired” from White Star, and was vilified throughout the remainder of a life that has been described as reclusive; his wife said the Titanic “ruined” him. Ismay’s charitable acts—and there were a number of these—included establishing a fund to benefit the widows of lost seamen. He died in 1937.

Charles Lightoller performed professionally, even heroically, going down with the ship, but swimming to capsized collapsible B, and scrambling on top. He was a company man at the two official inquiries, protecting both the late Smith and the very much alive Ismay; but nonetheless fell prey to the White Star Line’s unofficial policy of sabotaging the careers of surviving Titanic officers. He did become a commander in the Royal Navy during World War I, and provided heroic volunteer duty at Dunkirk in World War II. He died in 1952, not living to see himself portrayed as the hero of the film of Walter Lord’s epic version of the Titanic’s story, A Night to Remember.

Lightoller was the one who allowed Michel Navatril, a.k.a. Louis Hoffman, to place his sons Lolo and Momon on collapsible D, the final lifeboat launched. Michel Jr. (Lolo was the boy’s nickname) recalled his father’s final words to him: “My child, when your mother comes for you, as she surely will, tell her that I loved her dearly and still do. Tell her I expected her to follow us, so that we might all live happily together in the peace and freedom of the New World.”

Navatril’s body was recovered; he had a revolver in his pocket.

The two boys—briefly celebrities as the unidentified “Titanic orphans”—were returned to their mother in France. Edmond Navatril (Momon had been his nickname as a child) fought with the French army in World War II, escaping from a prisoner-of-war camp; however, due to health problems suffered during his captivity, he died at age forty-three. Michel Jr., who became a professor of psychology, lives in France.

Bertha Lehmann, the Swiss girl who was the only person Navatril ever trusted to take charge of his sons out of his own sight, boarded the same lifeboat as the Navatril boys. She lived in Minnesota and Iowa and raised a number of children; she died in December 1967.

John Jacob Astor IV guided his wife Madeline into lifeboat number four, but Lightoller refused Astor’s request to accompany and protect his wife, who was after all in a “delicate condition.” Lightoller firmly refused and Astor accepted this judgment, but did ask the number of the boat, whether to locate his wife later, or to register a complaint against Lightoller, will never be known.

Astor then assumed a casual, confident manner, lighting up a cigarette, tossing his gloves to his wife and assuring her that the sea was calm; saying, “You’ll be all right. You’re in good hands,” adding that he would see her in the morning. He stepped away and receded onto the boat deck.

When older boys were being turned away by Lightoller from lifeboats as “men,” Astor impulsively grabbed a girl’s large hat off a nearby head and shoved it onto a boy’s, saying, “Well now he’s a girl,” gaining ten-year-old William Carter a seat and his life. One of his last acts, apparently, was to go to the kennels and let out all of the dogs there, including the Astors’ Airedale Kitty, whom Madeline Astor claimed to have seen, from her lifeboat, running about the boat deck as the ship was sinking.

Astor was seen at the railing with Archie Butt and others, but did not drown; his crushed, soot-covered remains, recovered, indicated he’d apparently been killed by the falling forward funnel. In the pockets of his blue serge suit were $2,400 in American money and smaller amounts in French and English currency.

Madeline Astor was granted the income of a five-million-dollar trust and various mansions, as long as she did not remarry; but she married again, anyway, having two more sons by elderly stockholder William Dick, and married yet again—after a divorce—in 1933, to an Italian prizefighter, divorcing him five years later, also. Presumably her son John Jacob V, who had his own five-million-dollar trust fund, saw to it his mother didn’t starve. She died in 1940, in Palm Beach, Florida—a suicide, according to some sources—rarely speaking of the tragedy, and younger than her husband had been when he died.

Henry B. Harris, ushering his wife René to where Lightoller was restricting seating on the collapsible D, was told his wife could come aboard, but that he could not. He said softly, “I know—I’ll stay,” bade her farewell, and stepped back into the crowd.

René sued White Star for a million dollars, receiving only $50,000 (the standard payoff for a First-Class death aboard the Titanic—steerage was a thousand dollars). Plucky as always, she bucked the standard sentiment that a woman could not be a theatrical producer, and had a long and prosperous run doing just that; for years she had hit plays running in her own theaters, living a life strewn with yachts, Central Park penthouses, various homes and various husbands (though always using only “Harris” as her surname). The stock-market crash of ’29 sank her finances, but not her spirits; when she died, penniless, in a one-room apartment in a welfare hotel, at age ninety-three in 1969, she was still (in the words of Walter Lord) “radiantly blissful.”

Wallace Hartley and his orchestra—the full eight members playing together for the first time on the deck of the sinking ship—performed until the ship went down. Some say the impromptu concert ended around half an hour before the final plunge; even if this is so, their cheery on-deck ragtime is an enduring legend, and fact, of the tragedy. Despite adamant opinions to the contrary, their last number probably was “Nearer My God to Thee.”

Actress Dorothy Gibson—one of the twenty-eight persons in boat number seven, capacity sixty-five—sailed the Titanic to fifteen minutes of fame. One month after the sinking, a moving picture starring and written by Miss Gibson—Saved from the Titanic, in which the silent-film star’s costume was the very dress she’d worn that memorable night—appeared in theaters to huge crowds. It was her last success. She married film distributor Jules Brulatour, divorcing two years later (with a hefty $10,000 a year in alimony), dying in obscurity in Paris in 1946.

Official records list John Bertram Crafton and Hugh Rood as having gone down with the ship; neither body was recovered by the MacKay Bennett.

One of the enduring mysteries of the night the Titanic sank is whether Alice Cleaver behaved as a heroine, or a villain. Hudson Allison had left the family’s C-deck suite to find out what exactly was wrong; soon his wife Bess was in mild hysterics, and Alice Cleaver seized up baby Trevor into her arms, wrapped the nightgowned child in a small fur blanket, and assured the boy’s mother that she would not let the child out of her arms much less her sight.

Alice then rushed out, apparently passing Hudson in the hallway; but the stunned parent seemed not to recognize either Alice or his boy. The nanny hurried onto deck, where, with the help of steward William Stephen Faulkner, she made her way to lifeboat eleven. As she climbed into the boat, Faulkner held the child for her; rather than accept the child from the young man, Alice pulled him into the boat after her. Because he was holding a baby in his arms, this was allowed.

The Allisons—Hudson and Hugh and golden-haired Lorraine—were lost in the sinking; Lorraine was, in fact, the only First-Class child to die. Even as newspapers were praising the blunt-nosed nanny for her courage and quick thinking, the families of Hudson and Bess Allison accused her of an act tantamount to murder.

Mrs. Allison’s mother asserted that the Allisons had obviously stayed aboard the ship, searching for their baby, and missed their chance at a lifeboat. Space was the birthright of their gender for Bess and Lorraine, and Hudson Allison—with the baby in his arms—could just as easily stepped into that lifeboat as the young steward.

After all, Hudson Allison’s only crime was hastily accepting a last-minute replacement for the position of nanny, without sufficient time to check references. (His body was recovered but not his wife’s, or his daughter’s.)

Lending credibility to the theory that Alice Cleaver was more coward than heroine were the lies she told reporters, giving her name as Jane Andrews. Obviously, the nanny did not wish to see the glowing reaction of the press tainted by knowledge that the woman who saved the Allison baby off a sinking ship was a mother who’d thrown her own baby off a train.

Alice Cleaver lived out her life in North America, fading into obscurity, dying in 1984. What became of her relationship with William Stephen Faulkner—the only person she would let near baby Trevor, on the rescue ship Carpathia—is unknown.

Baby Trevor was raised by his aunt and uncle, George and Lillian Allison, and grew to manhood, only to die in his teens of ptomaine poisoning. His parents’ fortune became the object of a struggle between his aunt and uncle and a woman who claimed to be (but never was able to prove she was) his now grown-up sister, Lorraine.

May Futrelle, rescued in lifeboat nine, never remarried. She spent the rest of her life in Scituate, mostly in the home she’d shared with her husband. While their children’s education was well provided for, May felt a responsibility to pay back $17,000 in cash advances that had gone down on the ship, along with Jack’s half a dozen new “Thinking Machine” stories.

She oversaw the publication of her husband’s final posthumous works, as well as aggressively sought reprinting of his earlier work. The straightforward, journalistic style of Futrelle’s “Thinking Machine” stories allowed his wife to keep many of them in print, for many years; and of course “The Problem of Cell 13” became an acknowledged classic of the mystery genre.

Active with the Authors’ League of America and first chairwoman of the American League of Pen Women, May published a number of her own novels, and was a pioneer in conducting writers’ workshop-style clinics for beginning writers, leading to a CBS radio show in the thirties, Do You Want to Be a Writer?

Well into the 1960s, she was pushing the republication of her husband’s fiction—witness the bestselling 1959 Scholastic Book Club collection of “Thinking Machine” stories—and shortly before her death in 1967, May signed exclusive rights for radio adaptations of twenty-eight Futrelle “Thinking Machine” stories, many of which were presented on CBS Radio Mystery Theater. She is buried in St. Mary’s Cemetery in Scituate.

Throughout her life, as her daughter Virginia reported, May would carry out the ritual of tossing a bouquet of fresh flowers into the sea on the anniversary of the tragedy. The memories of that last night remained vivid and with her always.

Futrelle had come rushing into their stateroom, saying, “Get dressed at once—throw anything on. The boat is going down.”

She recalled the screams of women and shrill orders of officers on deck, “drowned out intermittently by the tremendous vibration of the Titanic’s bass foghorn.”

Futrelle remained calm, telling May, “Hurry up, dear, you’re keeping the others waiting,” kissing her, then lifting her like a bride over the threshold and placing her into the lifeboat, one of the last to leave.

“There’s room,” May said frantically, looking about the boat as it began to lower. “Look! Come with me! There’s room!”

“I’ll be along later,” he said.

Her last memory of him, she carried with her—to that cliff, from which she tossed her flowers, and to her grave.

Their lifeboat had not been in the water for more than a few minutes when the Titanic made its final plunge. Over the years she came to question whether or not it was only her imagination…

… but she always swore that she’d seen Jack, standing, clinging to the rail with one hand.

And waving good-bye to her with the other.





A TIP OF THE CAPTAIN’S HAT





The basic idea for this novel, as my prologue indicates, extends back to my childhood enthusiasm for Jacques Futrelle’s “Thinking Machine” tales, and my fascination with the notion that he—and a number of his stories—went down with the Titanic.

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 illustrations 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.