Pilots of the Purple Twilight

Here is a comedy of manners set in the first class smoking lounge of the Titanic on the night she took fifteen hundred people into the depths. It highlights the nobility of those who chose, for varying reasons, to remain on board. Ida Straus could not let her beloved husband of thirty-nine years die alone. To John Jacob Astor, the richest man in the world, the self-sacrifice was a matter of etiquette. Discrimination played a part for those like Thomas Kilgannon, an agricultural laborer from County Galway who was locked below in steerage with other immigrants until all of the lifeboats were full of first and second class passengers. Though some liberties are taken in bringing nine diverse personalities together on the night that most of them would perish, their individual stories are accurate and have long since become legends, if only to their own families.