I stumbled across a small corner of World War II history whose story originates in a quiet corner of Tidewater Virginia. At the end of a peninsula between the Rappahannock and York Rivers lies Mathews County, Va. This small, remote community was home to an extraordinary concentration of merchant seamen. For generations, fathers, sons, brothers, cousins and nephews, in numbers far out of proportion to the County’s population, served as ship captains, mates, and deckhands on merchant ships plying the world’s oceans. With the outbreak of World War II, those occupations put them on a collision course with packs of Nazi U-boats determined to choke off the flow of goods between the U.S. and England. For many months, the U-boats were winning the war of attrition by a lopsided margin.

Having visited that area a few times by boat on our cruises around the Chesapeake, I was intrigued by a story that I imagined may have been overshadowed amid the more familiar icons of World War II heroism. The ideal setup for, yes, writing a book, which I’ve done—a forthcoming novel entitled Lifeline. It’s historical fiction, which to date has been outside my lane. But beyond the story of Mathews, Va., and how families on all sides of a world war become engulfed in in its violence, there was another source of inspiration. I read a novel so majestic in its story structure and lyricism that it made me realize (not for the first time) what truly great writing is. Rather than try to equal it—an unrealistic goal, I thought—why not at least try to imitate it? More on that later.