If you like a lighter tone and golden age riffs in your historical crime fiction this novel might be right up your alley. A murder mystery set on the fateful last voyage of the luxury liner RMS Lusitania in 1915. Shortly after the ship sets sail from New York a passenger is found dead from a single gunshot wound in his locked cabin, probably suicide.
Among the passengers is Patrick Gallagher, a British civil servant escorting an errant British diplomat back to England. The captain invites Gallagher to investigating the death – one crucial detail doesn’t fit, could this be murder? Gallagher believes so. One of the passengers is a killer who could strike again at any moment. And all the while, the ship sails on towards Europe, where German submarines lie in wait.
Paul Burke: Welcome to Crime Time, Morgen. RL Graham is the pen name of your writing partnership with your wife Marilyn, also an historian and writer. Tell us a little bit about the experience you both bring to Death on the Lusitania.
RLG: Thanks, Paul. We’ve written fiction before under other names, but this is RL Graham’s maiden voyage, so to speak. As you say, we’re both historians and we actually started out writing historical non-fiction, but fiction writing is where we feel at home. We really enjoy taking dramatic historical contexts and playing around with them, trying to see events the way people at the time might have seen them, and at the same time, making those events more accessible and interesting for modern readers.
Personal experience also played a role too. We emigrated from Canada to the UK in 1987 on board one of the last old-fashioned ocean liners, the Stefan Batory. That experience was really useful when writing this story. Lots of little incidents in the book, the sighting of the pod of whales, the lady painting eggs, were borrowed from real life.
PB: Morgen, please accept our p condolences on the sad passing away of Marilyn just before Death on the Lusitania was published. Though publishing this novel may be a bitter sweet experience it must mean a lot to you too.
RLG: Marilyn was passionate about this book. She edited much of the final draft sitting in a hospital ward with a chemotherapy drip plugged into one arm, balancing her laptop on the arm of her chair while she typed with the other hand. Her commitment to writing was there right to the end. So yes, very definitely bitter sweet. We were together for 45 years, and I am and always will be very conscious of the empty space she left behind. But at the same time, so much of her thinking and so many of her ideas have become embedded in my own consciousness that I often feel she is still with me; notice how I used the present tense in my answers to the last question! And I see her spirit in every line of this book.
PB: As historians with a wide field of interest, was it a given that you would write an historical novel and how easy was it easy to settle on a period that you both wanted to write about?
RLG: We’re historical magpies. We’re fascinated by pretty much all of history and there aren’t many periods or eras that don’t interest us. I’d like to say that our books begin with the story, not the period, but that is too facile; the story and the period create each other. So, smuggling on Romney Marsh is really only going to happen in the eighteenth century, heralds serving as ambassadors to kings are a feature of the Middle Ages, and the sinking of the Lusitania can only happen during the First World War. We look for dramatic incidents and build stories around them, and because we like pretty much all history, once we find a story that fascinates us, the rest is easy.
PB: What was it like writing fiction together? In some ways very different to some of the non-fiction books you’ve worked on separately and together I’d imagine.
RLG: Writing is a solitary act, and working with other people can feel quite odd. Actually we have both written with other people in the past, as co-authorship is quite common in academia, which is where we both used to hang out from time to time. So we had a bit of experience to draw upon. After that, though, pretty much anything could happen. Every book we have written together has been done in a different way, depending on what else was going on in our lives. I’d love to say we have a really clever system that maximises creativity, but actually it was usually more of a case of, ‘I’ve got some free time, I’ll work on the book for a bit.’
The one thing that did not vary was the final stages, the last edit and the read through. One of us always went through the final draft with a fine tooth comb to iron out any stylistic inconsistencies. We would then sit down in facing chairs and read the script, one person reading aloud and the other listening for anything that didn’t sound right.
I’m doing that right now with another book. I read it aloud and I listen for what she might be saying to me. And as I do so, I can feel she is close to me.
PB: So the story is set on the last voyage of the Lusitania, which adds to the drama of the plot, that’s no spoiler. Would you explain about the Lusitania’s fate and it’s role in WWI and what was the inspiration for a story that sits within this framework?
RLG: Lusitania was torpedoed and sunk in 1915, at a time when the armies on the Western Front were just beginning to settle in for their long, bloody and largely futile war in the trenches. In a bid to starve Britain into surrender, German U-boats were sinking British ships that entered the so-called war zone around the British Isles. The USA was still neutral at this point, although American arms merchants were supplying Britain and France with artillery shells and other munitions. It was only a matter of time before a ship carrying American passengers was sunk and American lives were lost, and when the Lusitania went down this duly happened.
Many believed at the time that the loss of American lives would be enough to drag America into the war. They were very nearly right; American public opinion was outraged, but President Wilson of the USA still believed he could negotiate a peace between Germany and the Allies, and American stepped back from the brink, for the moment. But for America the drift towards war had begun, and two years later Wilson finally gave in and brought America into the conflict (see our forthcoming second book, The Spies of Hartlake Hall).
PB: WWI saw a dramatic change in the world, obviously, but as the novel opens the 1st class passengers on this voyage still seem to be living in the belle epoque, was that contrast one of the things that fascinates you about this time and place? As the story progresses you look at class and the ending of a world view.
RLG: Oh, absolutely. The menus in the first-class dining room alone show how the elites, at least, were still living in the past. The belle epoque was a fascinating time, not least for its contrasts between wealth and poverty, and between old wealth and new wealth, with all the huge shifting social currents that go with that. The war was both the end of the belle epoque and also, paradoxically, a kind of magnification of it, showing both the brilliance of the Gilded Age and the hollowness of it, how soon it will end. A new world is coming, and the shift from one cultural era to another can be seen in the actions and careers of our characters. Some of them are rooted in the past, others are very much part of the future; and that future can sometimes look quite dystopian.
PB: The novel has some classic Golden Era traits – the closed circle and the locked room mystery. Is this an homage to that classic period of British crime writing, is that where your love of the genre comes from?
RLG: I don’t think we set out to write a homage, but I can see that there are elements of that, certainly. Marilyn devoured Golden Era crime stories – I was more into thrillers, anything from Buchan to Eric Ambler, and so there is probably a little of both in this book. I suspect there are elements here of Journey Into Fear as well as Murder on the Orient Express. It’s hard to put a finger on what appeals to us about the period. I suspect that again, it is as much a fascination with the period itself as its writers that drew us to this era.
PB: Tell us a little bit about Pat Gallagher, your sleuth investigating the mysterious death of a passenger.
RLG: Pat Gallagher is a man with a past, and not all of that past is revealed in the story; there is plenty more to come. His early life was pretty unhappy, packed off to boarding school when he was still very young. As he says himself, he tried repeatedly to escape and ‘each time he escaped he made a few more miles before he was caught, and each time he was brought back the headmaster added a few more strokes of the cane.’ He joined the Royal Marines and served in China, and there are some mysterious references to Special Branch in Ireland; he also worked for Cunard Lines for a time, and knows the Lusitania well.
Then there is Roxanne, the actress for whom he clearly had deep feelings. He also blames himself for Roxanne’s death, though we don’t yet know why. He reads Baudelaire; he loves the theatre; he used to paint; and yet for all is artistic sensibilities there is also a deep melancholy about him. There is still a lot to be revealed about Pat Gallagher, so stay tuned.
PB: There are entwining strands to the story – the disgraced diplomat Gallagher is escorting home without knowing the man’s crime, the murder of the passenger and with the war raging we have spies too. You clearly enjoyed layering the plot. I think this gives the novel a modern feel.
RLG: Yes, and some people have grumbled about the complexity of the plot. On the other hand, others have loved it, so, swings and roundabouts. And yes, we do like complex plots, both reading them and creating them!
The comment about a modern feel is interesting. Again, we didn’t set out specifically to create that feel, but at the same time we didn’t want to write a carbon copy of a Golden Era book. We aimed to hit a balance of plot and characters that were historically valid and realistic, and yet make the book as accessible as possible for a modern audience, so they can see and hear and feel themselves there on Lusitania with the other passengers. As with all writing, there is a balance to be struck.
PB: When you’re writing about real events as a backdrop to murder mystery, are there any rules/guides you adhere to in Death on the Lusitania? There are some fascinating insights/nuances around the reasons for the fate of the ship and the way it was portrayed at the time.
RLG: Rule number one is, this is a novel first and a work of history second. That means there is room to play around with the history. Inventing blatant impossibilities, like having the ship carry a cargo of unicorns, is not on the table, but in any historical account there are always spaces between the lines, things that aren’t known or cannot be proven.
Take for example the conspiracy theory that sprang up almost immediately after the Lusitania sank, that the British authorities deliberately put the ship in danger in hopes that the U-boats would sink her and America would be dragged into the war. In fact that theory has been discredited, but you can see why, in the febrile atmosphere of the time, people might think this. So no, the British didn’t sink the Lusitania or help the Germans to do so, but that doesn’t stop characters from asking questions.
PB: Real events allow you a spectacular denouement which is thrilling but also poignant. You must have felt, even at this distance, the weight of the tragedy of the Lusitania?
RLG: Very much so. Crime writers write about death, and we all face an ethical dilemma; is it right to create entertainment for others, and to profit from that entertainment, by depicting the taking of a human life? But the loss of the Lusitania, like that of the Titanic, is something different. Nearly twelve hundred people died when the ship sank. We owe it to those people to treat them with dignity, which we very much hope we have done. But yes, there is a big moral responsibility there. The penultimate chapter of the book may have been one of the hardest pieces of writing we have ever done.
PB: So I think we can guess from your answers there will be more Pat Gallagher in the future, is this the opener for a series?
RLG: Oh, yes. I mentioned the sequel, The Spies of Hartlake Hall. Apart from Gallagher it features a very different cast, but the Americans are back, and the troubles in Mexico are still hanging in the air too. Instead of a luxury liner we now have a dilapidated country house, and instead of U-boats we have zeppelins. This book will come out sometime in 2025. We have more plots in the pipeline, so if enough readers like Pat Gallagher, then as the saying goes, he’ll be back.
Death on the Lusitania is published by Macmillan in Hardback, eBook and Audio and is available now.
