Larson crafts a gripping historical suspense story about the romance and tragedy of the Lusitania in Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the ‘Lusitania’.

What drew you to the Lusitania story?

I began reading about it on a whim and became transfixed. I realized that the time line of events most people assume isn’t correct. The sinking of the Lusitania wasn’t the proximal cause for the U.S. entering WWI. It was almost two years between the sinking and the war declaration, and President Wilson’s request for war never mentions the Lusitania. I decided I could tell the story in as compelling and suspenseful way as possible. My approach to history—my goal—is not necessarily to inform, but to get readers to sink into the past, linger there, and arrive back in the present with the feeling of having lived in another place and time, at least for a little while.

Your research took you to many places. Which location had the biggest impact?

The National Archives of the United Kingdom—the real meat was there. But there was also the Cunard Archives at the University of Liverpool, which contains the files of morgue photos taken after the sinking of the Lusitania. With my research, I really need absolute confirmation of what actually happened, direct physical connections to the past. I also hadn’t expected the Edith Bolling Galt/Woodrow Wilson correspondence to be so ardent. Edith was more restrained than Wilson. He knew very quickly he wanted to marry her, but she parried his thrusts in a kind of romantic sword fight.

To an extent, you present the Lusitania incident as a romance. Can you expand on that?

I really liked Wilson’s romantic saga. Here was this stiff, professorial type writing torrid love letters to his girlfriend about falling down the precipice of love. I would have loved to include some of his complete letters; they were such intense pleas for love. But overall it speaks to the romance of seas.

What do you think about some people’s insistence on blaming the Lusitania’s sinking on something or someone other than the German U-boat commander Walther Schwieger?

Neither captain was really prepared for the moment of contact. For Schwieger, it was a miracle that this massive thing was there for him to torpedo. He approached with cynicism because torpedoes had a 60% failure rate. A sweep of random things converged on that day, fascinating things that led to this tragedy.

What about those passengers who got on board a vessel belonging to a belligerent nation in wartime?

People thought differently about risk and threat then. It was a civilian ship, and the Lusitania could outrun any submarine. So this population of people was very confident that Cunard and the Royal Navy would be looking after them. Why weren’t they under convoy? That’s the real question. Winston Churchill [First Lord of the Admiralty] believed merchant traffic had to look out for itself in wartime. He was a ruthless guy—remember, he admitted, “I love this war.”