From my earliest impulse to develop a suspense story from my father’s experiences, I was guided by my love for two novels about the Navy in World War II: Thomas Heggen’s Mister Roberts (1946) and Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny (1951). I noticed, very early on, that they were essentially the same story with parallel casts, the former a dark comedy, the latter a wonderful melodrama.
Tragically, Iowa-born Heggen wrote only that one novel (and co-authored the famous play adaptation) before his apparent suicide at thirty-one. Wouk adapted his novel for the stage, as well (The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial), and has, of course, continued on as one of our most intelligent and strangely underrated authors of serious popular fiction. While I have no illusion that this work is in any way on their level, I acknowledge these novels and their authors as an inspiration.
Vital to this book were two volumes: Better Than Good: A Black Sailor’s War 1943–1945, Adolph W. Newton with Winston Eldridge (1999); and The Port Chicago Mutiny, Robert L. Allen (1993). Also consulted were The Divine Wind, Captain Rikihei Inoguchi and Commander Tadashi Nakajima with Roger Pineau (1958); Chicago’s Two Gun Pete (1988), Jerry Jones; The Naval Officer’s Guide (1943), Arthur A. Ageton, Commander, USN; Proudly We Served: The Men of the USS Mason (1995), Mary Pat Kelly; The Negro Handbook (1947), edited by Florence Murray; and Black Metropolis (1945), St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton. Also helpful were the WPA Guides for California and Illinois.
In addition, I screened both Caine Mutiny movies (the classic 1954 Edward Dmytryk-directed theatrical feature and the lesser-known but interesting 1988 Robert Altman– directed TV movie) as well as Mutiny, the 1999 NBC Port Chicago docudrama and a concurrent History Channel documentary, The Port Chicago Mutiny. John Ford, Joshua Logan, and Mervyn LeRoy’s film of Mister Roberts (1955) was also screened.
Thanks to my longtime research associate, George Hagenauer, for taking a look at the manuscript; editor Sarah Durand, for her usual support; my friend and agent Dominick Abel, for his encouragement; and my wife (and in-house editor) Barbara Collins, whose numerous good suggestions for this novel included spotting a major omission—a captain never had a finer first mate.
About the Author
PATRICK CULHANE is the pseudonym of acclaimed author Max Allan Collins, who has been dubbed “Mystery’s Renaissance Man.” His New York Times bestsellers include his graphic novel Road to Perdition, basis of the Academy Award–winning film, and the movie novels Saving Private Ryan and American Gangster.
www.maxallancollins.com
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ALSO BY PATRICK CULHANE
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BY THE AUTHOR AS MAX ALLAN COLLINS
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Designed by Gretchen Achilles Jacket design by mjcdesign.com Jacket collage by Marc Cohan, ocean © by Henrik Trygg/Corbis
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
RED SKY IN MORNING. Copyright © 2008 by Max Allan Collins. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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