Some Stories Refuse To Stay In The Past

I was in seventh grade when I first wrote a short story about a dog named Emelia Barkhart. I don't remember every detail of that original story anymore, but apparently I remembered enough. For years, Emelia existed somewhere in the back of my mind—a character from a much younger version of myself, attached to a story I had written long before I ever seriously considered becoming a novelist.

Then I visited the Titanic Museum in Belfast. There was something about standing there, surrounded by the history of the ship and the place where Titanic was built, that unlocked something I hadn't realized I still carried with me. I started remembering the research I'd done for that seventh-grade story. Details came back. Ideas came back. And, eventually, Emelia came back.

Only this time, she came back as the beginning of something much bigger. I've been building a full master outline for The Unsinkable Emelia Barkhart, and I honestly don't know where it will ultimately lead me. That uncertainty is part of what makes it fun.

The premise is wonderfully strange: a murder takes place during a dog show aboard the Titanic, and Emelia—a self-appointed armchair bloodhound—sets out to solve it. She imagines herself as a disciplined, legendary tracker, but her actual investigative technique is considerably less dignified. She follows her curiosity. She follows interesting smells. She gets distracted by food. She notices things because she is a terrier and cannot help herself.

And somehow, she keeps finding the right clues.

One of my favorite details is that the most important evidence isn't something a human detective would necessarily notice. Emelia catches an unfamiliar floral scent beneath disturbed carpet and along a stairway railing. What looks insignificant to everyone else becomes important because a dog's world is not entirely the same as ours.

That difference extends to the other animals. The dogs are expressive, emotional, and wonderfully obvious in their reactions, while Old Tom and Minette, the cats, are much more withholding. They observe. They remember. They reveal almost nothing. I like the idea that the animals aren't simply humans with fur or feathers or whiskers. They experience the mystery differently because they experience the world differently.

There are also clues that are deliberately honest red herrings. Silas Crane really is connected to Finch's gambling debts. Their behavior really is suspicious. They simply aren't murderers. I love that distinction because a mystery shouldn't have to cheat to surprise the reader.

Even Jo has a secret. When it appears that she has withdrawn from the investigation under social pressure, she's actually pursuing the human evidence—passenger records, ship personnel, and other information the animals can't access. There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about that structure, and I can see the influence of stories such as The Hound of the Baskervilles in it.

But underneath the mystery is something much older. Mrs. Carrow's motive isn't greed or ambition. She is carrying a grievance that has lasted for decades. She is secretly the daughter of a breeder whose family was ruined by Pemberton-Wick's rigged judgment years earlier. The murder is the consequence of an injustice that never went away.

Even Minette is connected to that past. The French cat stows away at Cherbourg because she recognizes Mrs. Carrow's scent from the breeder's household. She doesn't understand the human story in the way Jo does, and she certainly doesn't explain it to anyone, but her fragmented impressions become another piece of the puzzle.

I find myself enjoying the historical details almost as much as the mystery itself. The dog show has to feel like something that could really have happened in 1912—breed categories, judging practices, entry fees, insurance values, rosettes, an engraved silver cup. Those little details are what make the fictional world feel real.

And then, of course, there is the Titanic. The murder is solved just before the iceberg strikes. I like the audacity of that. The characters spend the story concentrating on one relatively small human tragedy while something unimaginably larger is already approaching. The mystery is solved, but there is no satisfying courtroom scene, no triumphant arrest, no neat resolution. The truth is discovered just in time for history to make almost everything else irrelevant.

There is something strangely fitting about that. The animals' fates also remain uncertain in ways that echo the real historical record. Some survive. Some don't. Some simply disappear from the story of the ship. Even Minette's fate is left unresolved. We know surprisingly little with certainty about many of the animals aboard Titanic, and I think that uncertainty belongs in the novel rather than being artificially cleaned up.

Perhaps the most personal part of the story, though, is Emelia herself. Her legendary tracking ability eventually turns out to be less legendary than she believed. The great bloodhound story she's been carrying around with her is an exaggerated kennel tale. The myth falls apart. And yet Emelia doesn't. That's important to me.

She doesn't need the legend to prove that she's a good detective. She solves a real murder because she is curious, persistent, observant, and unwilling to let an interesting smell go unexplored. She succeeds not because she is the magnificent bloodhound she imagined herself to be, but because she is Emelia.

In some ways, that may be the part of the story that came back to me most strongly.

When I wrote the original story in seventh grade, I wasn't the writer I am now. I didn't know how to build a master outline. I didn't understand structure in the way I do today. I certainly didn't know enough about historical mysteries, character arcs, fair-play clues, or the craft of turning an idea into a novel.

But that younger version of me had an idea. He wrote it down. And decades later, after a visit to Belfast, that idea was still there. Waiting. I don't know whether The Unsinkable Emelia Barkhart will become a finished novel. I don't know how many of the ideas in the master outline will survive the actual writing. I don't even know exactly where the story will take me. But I'm enjoying discovering it.

Maybe that's one of the unexpected pleasures of being a writer for a long time. You don't always have to invent something entirely new. Sometimes you can open an old door and discover that the story you left behind has been waiting patiently on the other side.

Apparently, Emelia Barkhart was patient. She just needed me to grow up enough to come looking for her.