The Titanic Murders (30 page)

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.