When the Dancing Stopped: The Real Story of the Morro Castle Disaster and Its Deadly Wake - Softcover

Hicks, Brian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743280091 ISBN 13: 9780743280099

Publisher: Free Press, 2008

Synopsis

During the dark days of the Great Depression, thousands of weary souls escaped their bleak lives for a week of paradise aboard the Ward Line's glamorous cruise ship, the Morro Castle. It was the most famous passenger liner of its day, lightning fast, elegantly appointed. It was also a ticking time bomb. It was the summer of 1934. Two sailors joined the Morro Castle crew, one a teenager on his first job away from home, the other a dangerous psychopath. Within two months, they would witness the end of the party in a single night of death, killer storms, and catastrophic fire. And that was only the beginning of a twenty-year-long story. In When the Dancing Stopped, we too walk up the gangplank to that art-deco liner and, at first, enjoy the glamour and the sultry Havana nights. With mounting suspense, we also witness the launch of a mystery that mesmerized the nation and then, in the midst of troubled times, faded away. Award-winning author Brian Hicks, using newly declassified FBI files, thousands of pages of investigation notes, testimony, and new interviews, takes the reader on a mid-century cruise through history, revealing a cold-case file that had been, until now, left unsolved for history. And, as he relates in this work of masterful storytelling, it all began with the last cruise of the Morro Castle.

About this title

About the Author:

Brian Hicks is the author of Ghost Ship and Raising the Hunley. A senior writer with The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, he has won more than a dozen journalism awards, including the South Carolina Press Association's award for Journalist of the Year. He lives in Charleston with his wife and two sons.

From Publishers Weekly:

The Morro Castle, a luxurious cruise ship, inexplicably caught fire on September 8, 1934, off the New Jersey coast on its way back from Havana. The blaze spread so quickly that many lifeboats were burned, and at least 134 passengers (out of 318) perished. Hicks (Raising the Hunley: The Remarkable History and Recovery of the Lost Confederate Submarine) re-creates this incident in a page-turning chronicle. The cause was never determined, but drawing on official records, first-person accounts and recently declassified FBI documents, Hicks makes a convincing case that the fire was set by a crew member. Shortly before the fire, the ship's captain died mysteriously of an apparent heart attack and was succeeded by William Warms. Hicks details how Warms's agitation and indecision made the disaster worse: he neglected, for one thing, to turn his ship away from an impending nor'easter, whose wind further whipped the flames. Hicks has done a lot of research, but it never weighs down the narrative, which draws the reader in from the get-go. 8 pages of b&w photos. (Oct. 24)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0743280091
• ISBN 13: 9780743280099
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368