Celebrating 25 Years with Charlotte Doyle

The oth­er day I was star­tled to real­ize that my book, The True Con­fes­sions of Char­lotte Doyle was pub­lished twen­ty-five years ago.

Here’s the sto­ry behind the book.

I had been work­ing on anoth­er nov­el; The Man Who was Poe, when I first had the idea for the book. The Man Who was Poe, (which is about Edgar Allan Poe) takes place in Prov­i­dence, Rhode Island, where I was liv­ing at the time. Poe is often cred­it­ed with the inven­tion of the mys­tery sto­ry, in par­tic­u­lar with his Mur­der on the Rue Morgue. So it was quite nat­ur­al that I was think­ing of mys­ter­ies, and in par­tic­u­lar of the idea of the so-called “locked room mys­tery,” in which some­thing inex­plic­a­ble hap­pens in a locked room.

What, I came to think, could be more like a locked room, than a ship at sea?

In Chap­ter Four­teen, on page 129 (124 in the paper­back edi­tion) of The Man Who was Poe, a char­ac­ter, Cap­tain Elias, is talk­ing to Edmund, the boy pro­tag­o­nist of the book. He says, “Now, Mas­ter Edmund, if you’ve got time to hear a good yarn, I’ve one for you. You see, The Lady Lib­er­ty had a sis­ter ship. Sea­hawk, her name was—“

The Sea­hawk is the name of the ship on which Char­lotte trav­els. Indeed, The Sea­hawk was the work­ing title of the book. But as I wrote that line, it was the moment I start­ed think­ing about The Tue Con­fes­sions of Char­lotte Doyle. It was to be a mur­der mys­tery set on a ship in the mid-Atlantic. I sold the idea to my edi­tor, Richard Jackson.

How­ev­er, though I began to write the book, I went to Italy (Venice) for a nine month peri­od. As won­der­ful as my trip was, I found it very dif­fi­cult to write there. Sur­round­ed as I was by the Ital­ian lan­guage, my own Eng­lish writ­ing became rather inhib­it­ed and clum­sy. Besides, though I had a portable com­put­er I did not have a print­er. To print what I was writing—an impor­tant part of my writ­ing process—I was required to go to the Uni­ver­si­ty but once a week and leave a com­put­er disk (remem­ber those?) and return five days lat­er to pick up the print­ed pages. Find­ing it impos­si­ble to write, I stopped. The book was put on hold.
Only when I returned to Prov­i­dence did I com­mence writ­ing again. By then the book—in my mind—had evolved. As I wrote the form of the book—a mystery—was part­ly retained, but my inter­est (and writ­ing) was about the evo­lu­tion of Char­lotte as a character.
I recall think­ing of the title, but was sure it had been used in some form many times. I checked, and was sur­prised that it had not.

I com­plet­ed the book. It went through the nor­mal edi­to­r­i­al and pub­li­ca­tion process. By the time book was released from my thoughts, I had found anoth­er sto­ry that held my atten­tion: A very dif­fer­ent book titled, Noth­ing but the Truth.

Char­lotte went on to win the Horn Book-Boston Globe Award and a New­bery Hon­or plus many oth­er awards.

The True Con­fes­sions of Char­lotte Doyle will nev­er have a sequel. But the Sea­hawk, which is first men­tioned in The Man Who was Poe, does reap­pear in the first part of Beyond the West­ern Sea (since re-titled Escape from Home)

The book has gone through many edi­tions, and has been trans­lat­ed into many lan­guages. Curi­ous­ly, over the years, it has come to be read by younger read­ers than was orig­i­nal­ly the case. A num­ber of peo­ple have told me it changed their lives. It has had many, many readers.

I should read it again.