When I was fourteen, I started writing a novel about the Titanic. Indeed, on a night filled with the inexplicable, cloaked in myth and legend, the enigma of Captain Lord casts the most looming shadow. This disinterest, this indifference to a jarring lurch away from the normal, is one of the enduring mysteries of Titanic’s sinking. Neither Lord nor Stone did anything more, showing a distinctly curious lack of curiosity for rockets exploding at sea. He told the captain twice, and was told in turn to signal with the Morse lamp. He observed eight white rockets explode above a ship visible in the distance.

While the tired captain snoozed on his settee, young 2nd Officer Herbert Stone stood the middle watch. On the night of April 15, 1912, Captain Stanley Lord of the SS Californian slept in his chartroom while the RMS Titanic sank as few as eight miles away. The Midnight Watch is a powerful and dramatic debut novel-the result of many years of research in Liverpool, London, New York, and Boston, and informed by the author's own experiences as a ship's officer and a lawyer. Told not only from the perspective of the SS Californian crew, but also through the eyes of a family of third-class passengers who perished in the disaster, the narrative is drawn together by Steadman, a tenacious Boston journalist who does not rest until the truth is found. The Midnight Watch is a fictional telling of what may have occurred that night on the SS Californian, and the resulting desperation of Officer Stone and Captain Lord in the aftermath of their inaction.

When they learned of the extent of the tragedy, Lord and Stone did everything they could to hide their role in the disaster, but pursued by newspapermen, lawyers, and political leaders in America and England, their terrible secret was eventually revealed. The next morning, the Titanic was at the bottom of the sea and more than 1,500 people were dead. Eight rockets were fired during the dark hours of the midnight watch, and eight rockets were ignored. He alerted the captain, Stanley Lord, who was sleeping in the chartroom below, but Lord did not come to the bridge. Second Officer Herbert Stone, in charge of the midnight watch on the SS Californian sitting idly a few miles north, saw the distress rockets that the Titanic fired. As the Titanic and her passengers sank slowly into the Atlantic Ocean after striking an iceberg late in the evening of April 14, 1912, a nearby ship looked on.

The Midnight Watch by David Dyer