But passengers were pragmatic about the dangers – so much so that Larson struggled to find those who had recorded the mundane details of the crossing before the fateful 18 minutes of the sinking. German U-boats and torpedoes were a different order of threat and a lot harder to outrun than an iceberg. But in the spring of 1915, any transatlantic crossing was overshadowed both by the war in Europe and by the still-fresh memory of the Titanic’s loss three years before. The ocean liner Lusitania leaving on her last voyage from New York, on Photograph: Bettmann/CORBISĪnd indeed the RMS Lusitania was the biggest and fastest ship in the prestigious Cunard Line fleet, able to make the New York to Liverpool crossing in under five days. “There is something absolutely magical about the era – or eras – in history when the ship was everything,” Larson says, still feeling romantic even after researching the gruesome aftermath of a torpedo attack. Larson is much more eager to talk about maritime history, a passion that links this book with his earlier Thunderstruck, set a few years earlier aboard a different transatlantic liner, and telling the story of the chase to catch a murderer.
Except that maybe hubris and overconfidence are always dangerous things.”
“I’ve been asked a lot lately what message is there in the Lusitania for the modern day,” says Larson. Larson still thinks of himself as “a writer who does history” rather than a historian. He doesn’t invent scenes or speeches, and refuses to create composite characters to streamline a story. In a note to the reader, and again in our interview, he insists that “anything between quotes in my books is from a real historical document”.
Larson was once a journalist, and he is a meticulous reporter. He admires Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler for “the cleanliness and austerity of their prose” and in a nod to Hemingway adds: “I’ve really tried to strip my writing of as many adjectives and adverbs as I possibly can.”
To propel his narratives, Larson freely raids the toolkit of fiction, particularly hardboiled detective novels, for “suspenseful elements – withholding, foreshadowing and so forth”.
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