The Titanic Murders - By Max Allan Collins Page 0,83

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