“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a note to the reader, and again in our interview, he insists that “anything between quotes in my books is from a real historical document”.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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