Erik Larson revisits the Lusitania tragedy

NEW YORK — Erik Larson, who's made a career out of turning history into best sellers that read as urgently as thrillers, is sitting comfortably in his bright, quiet, luxurious apartment overlooking snow-covered Central Park.

He jokes, a tad chillingly, that he's "Hannibal Lecter — a literary Hannibal Lecter."

But there's no need to check the pantry to see what (or who) might be in the freezer. A former journalist with a wry sense of humor, Larson simply isn't sentimental about his subjects.

"There's the good me and the bad me. The good me is, 'Oh my God, this is horrible.' The bad me is, "This is great, this is such a fabulous detail,' " he says.

Larson is considered a meticulous master of non-fiction suspense, so it's not a surprise to learn he's a fan of The Silence of the Lambs, Hitchcock movies and dark Scandinavian detective fiction.

Larson's popular histories have sold more than 5.5 million copies, making him a rock star in the field. Two of Hollywood's biggest names have bought film rights to his books, drawn by their cinematic style: Tom Hanks (In the Garden of Beasts, set in Nazi Germany in the 1930s) and Leonardo DiCaprio (The Devil in the White City, about a serial killer on the loose during the Chicago World's Fair of 1893). The movies are in development.

Now Larson is swept up in a new, life-and-death historical drama: the sinking of the Lusitania, the subject of his latest book, Dead Wake (Crown, on sale March 10), timed to the 100th anniversary of the disaster.

Remember the Lusitania?

What was once a World War I rallying cry has faded from memory, overshadowed by a more glamorous maritime disaster: the Titanic.

The Lusitania, Larson says, is "sort of a political artifact. But what I'm trying to do is bring to life the actual, real, horrific human story of that episode, and maybe strip away some of that hoary political dust."

The Liverpool-bound British passenger ship set sail from New York during World War I, warned by Germany that it did so at its own risk. On May 7, 1915, off the coast of Ireland, the Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat; 1,198 men, women and children died, among them 123 Americans.

Larson, 61, who with his wife has three daughters, spent two years researching Dead Wake, unearthing archives in London, Liverpool and Cambridge, studying U-boat logs, even viewing morgue photos of the dead.

He takes us onboard the doomed luxury ship, introducing us to memorable passengers such as Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat and Connecticut architect Theodate Pope. We follow the cat-and-mouse game between Lusitania captain William Thomas Turner and U-20 commander Walther Schwieger, who launches the fatal torpedo. Historical figures Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the British Admiralty, and President Woodrow Wilson, worried about the U.S. being drawn into war, loom large.

Larson's editor at Crown, Amanda Cook, says he is "the master of making us forget the history we already know. In In the Garden of Beasts, you read that book and you're hoping desperately that someone will bring Hitler down. And in Dead Wake we find ourselves hoping irrationally that maybe this time the Lusitania won't sink."

Publishers Weekly calls Dead Wake, the most prominent of several new books about the wartime tragedy, "a riveting account."

USA TODAY's Jocelyn McClurg asked Larson, who once worked for The Wall Street Journal and Time magazine, about his writing craft, reliving the Lusitania horror, and the planned movie versions of his books:

Q: What drew you to the Lusitania?

A: It's such a compelling, powerful story. It's a natural narrative: a ship sets out, meets its doom. What happens in the interim? There was all this rich, archival stuff that I felt had not yet been exploited properly.

Q: What surprised you?

A:Everything surprised me. I think one of the first things that really startled me was the fact that the ship had listed so much that the lifeboats on one side were unusable and on the other side were so far away from the ship that it was just chilling. If you have a ship that's been hit by a torpedo and it's sinking and half the boats are unusable and the other half are 8 feet away from the hull, and the sea is down there 60 feet below and you're on that thing — you, your wife and your five kids — that's a horrible situation.

Q: Why is the turn-of-the century so compelling?

A: My favorite zone is from 1890-1915, that zone that spans the overlap of the so-called Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. People had such a boundless sense of optimism, they felt they could do anything they wanted to do and they went out and tried to do it. The Lusitania is a monument to this optimism, to the hubris of the era. I love that, because where there is hubris, there is tragedy.

Q: How do you create a sense of immediacy?

A: I think what it comes down to primarily is detail. It's going the distance, finding the rich detail and picking from all the stuff you collect those few details that will really light up the scene in people's minds. I provide the raw material. The reader provides the action; the reader provides the imagination that really makes this thing go.

Q: One unforgettable scene in Dead Wake concerns a young boy whose pregnant mother disappears. Later, he hears of a woman who gave birth in the sea, and is forever haunted by the idea this might have been her.

A: My editor said she cried each time she came to that scene, but to me, I'm like, "Oh, this is great!" I shouldn't confess that, but I'm a journalist.

Q: What are the keys to creating tension?

A: When you build suspense, you kind of have to pull back. You ease back and you build it again, ease back. Because people don't really like sustained suspense, they have to have breaks or they die. I love that stuff.

Q: What are your secrets for immersing readers in the past?

A: I really try to establish the reader firmly and irrevocably in the point of view of the period. For example, in Garden of Beasts I never refer to World War II because it hasn't happened. The same with the Great War. I don't call it World War I because nobody called it that, because there hadn't been a second.

Q: You use quotations to get inside real-life characters' heads.

A:I never recreate dialogue. I have often been asked by people, "You must have made this up because this is dialogue, right?" Anything in my books that is in quotes comes from some kind of living historical document: a letter, a memoir, a court transcript, a newspaper interview.

Q: Why is a chronology a vital tool?

A: A chronology is the single most important weapon in this kind of historical writing. Before I start to write I build a master chronology, something I learned actually at my very first newspaper job when I was doing a piece about a murder. The homicide detective showed me his "murder book," which is a binder full of every interview, references to every bit of evidence accumulated during the investigation, building a timeline as to what happened. In my case my chronology ends up being about 100 single-spaced pages long, and everything I find in the course of my research that looks like it's going to be a useful fact goes into the chronology at the point in which it occurred.

Q: Your thoughts on Tom Hanks as William Dodd, U.S. Ambassador to Germany in the 1930s, and Leonardo DiCaprio as 1890s serial killer H.H. Holmes?

A: I think Tom Hanks will be a perfect Ambassador Dodd (from In the Garden of Beasts). I think he'll be fabulous. And Leo DiCaprio as Holmes (from The Devil in the White City), which is the role he wants to play, is beyond fabulous. I think he'd be great. I don't think he's played a serial killer type. He's got that necessary charm. He's a lot better looking than Holmes ever was.

Q: Have you sold movie rights to Dead Wake?

A:I don't expect them to sell, frankly. I've heard from the movie marketplace that James Cameron did such a killer job with Titanic that it's almost impossible to do anything better. But I think it would be a good miniseries, like Bosch. I think Amazon should do it.