St. Martin's Literary Fiction asked David Dyer:

Stanley Lord, the captain of the SS Californian, is such a complex character. How did you get inside his head? What were the challenges and rewards of trying to portray a real person whose internal life was baffling to so many?

David Dyer Stanley Lord was a fascinating character in history, but he did not yield his secrets easily. 'Try to get beneath his skin', says John Steadman's daughter in The Midnight Watch, 'get deep down into his psyche - find out what sort of man he is...' Well, that's what John Steadman tried to do, and what I tried to do too. But it was easier said than done. I trawled through Lord’s letters, notebooks, photographs, and other documents, and read carefully the many pages of inquiry transcript. More importantly, I visited the streets where he lived in Liverpool, walked along the Mersey where he would have walked, and even visited the Wallasey Golf Club, which was exactly the same building Lord had often visited, ‘for the game, not the social side.’ I saw the library where Lord, if ever he picked up a book about the Titanic, he would put it straight back down again. I visited all of these places, and more. I tried my very best to achieve what the Australian author Kristell Thornell calls ‘narrative telepathy’ with my ‘subject’. But still Lord seemed to remain distant from me and aloof, or, as he is described on the steps of the Senate Building in Washington, ‘as unbendable as granite’. When Steadman says that the captain ‘was like a pond covered with thick ice that I could not get beneath,’ he is expressing my own frustration.
So that was the challenge. But my reward, strangely, was that in the end my portrait of Lord in The Midnight Watch was just as I wanted it to be. He is aloof in the text because he was aloof in real life. In real life he would introduce himself by saying ‘I’m Lord, Lord of the Californian’, and no one quite knew what that meant. He was inscrutable. So his distance on the page is a central part of his character, and goes a long way toward explaining why things went so terribly wrong that night.
And oddly, having said all that, by the end the novel Stanley Lord is the character I feel closest too and most sorry for.

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