St. Martin's Literary Fiction asked David Dyer:

Why do you think the legend of the Titanic sticks in people’s minds even today, over 100 years later?

David Dyer The Titanic is the perfect drama; it’s as if fate conspired to put together in one time and place all the elements of great play. Or, as I sometimes think of it, the Titanic was a movie that wrote itself.

The ship was the largest in the world, and the most splendid and luxurious. She was on her maiden voyage and had been described as ‘unsinkable’. Her passengers were the rich and famous of her time: John Jacob Astor, one of the richest men in America; Mr Isidor Straus, co-founder of Macy’s; Major Archibald Butt, close friend of the President of the United States; Benjamin Guggenheim, millionaire and good friend of JP Morgan; Mr WT Stead, famous essayist and mystic; and many more.

But for me, I think the most important reason why the Titanic remains in people’s minds after all these years is the way the ship sank. The Atlantic that night was as calm as anyone had ever seen it – there was no wind, no swell, no waves, no moon – and the ship took almost three hours to sink, remaining upright for most of that time. This gave plenty of time and scope for all the individual dramas and moral dilemmas to take place which would later characterize all the movies, books and plays: the band playing to the very end; the elderly Mrs Straus refusing to leave her husband; John Jacob Astor helping his wife into a boat and then stepping back; the orchestra playing until the very end; and Mr J Bruce Ismay, the British chairman of the line, slinking into a lifeboat and becoming the world’s most famous coward.

There are, of course, many more stories from the sloping decks of that doomed liner, all of them dramatic, all of them worth telling.

And now we know too that there were men a nearby ship nearby watching it all through their binoculars. You couldn’t ask for more.

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