Erik Larson, Author of ‘Dead Wake,’ Seizes Historical Mysteries

On a clear afternoon about 100 years ago, a large British passenger ship started sinking off the coast of Ireland, listing violently as it was sucked down into the ocean.

“Desperate people ran helplessly up and down the decks,” one horrified eyewitness wrote, adding: “It was the most terrible sight I have ever seen. It was impossible for me to give any help.”

The distressed witness was Walther Schwieger, a German submarine captain who just minutes before had fired a torpedo into the ship, the Lusitania, killing 1,198 of its 1,959 passengers, in one of the most devastating maritime disasters in history.

Some 95 years later, Erik Larson, the author of best-selling historical narratives like “The Devil in the White City” and “In the Garden of Beasts,” came across Schwieger’s journal and other dramatic testimonials at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Schwieger’s complexity as a character fascinated Mr. Larson, and helped persuade him that he had found the subject of his next book.

Five years and eight drafts later, Mr. Larson’s new book, “Dead Wake,” to be released by Crown on Tuesday, is shaping up to be one of the biggest nonfiction titles of the year. Mr. Larson turns the already heavily chronicled destruction of the Lusitania into a sort of geopolitical thriller, one that reads like a brainy mash-up of James Cameron’s “Titanic” and Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws,” with the invisible menace of the submarine spreading panic among seafarers like a rogue great white shark. ...