Purgatory Ridge: The Idea

Kent-on-North-Shore

I’m frequently asked where my ideas come from.  Sometimes that’s a difficult question to answer.  Often I simply can’t recall.  But Purgatory Ridge is different.  I remember well the day this story was delivered to me.

At the time, I was employed by the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development.  Iron Lake was already on bookshelves.  Boundary Waters was nearly complete.  I was trying to open myself to an idea for the next novel, but nothing was coming to me.

On my coffee break one afternoon, I sat down with a terrific woman named Kaye O’Geay, one of my cohorts at the Institute.  Our conversation turned to fathers, and she told me the story of the death of her own father.  He’d been a deckhand on an old ore carrier, a ship called the Daniel J. Morrell.  In November of 1966, while making the final passage of the season across Lake Huron, the Morrell encountered one of those horrific gales that occasionally sweep across the Great Lakes at that time of year.  In the course of battling the storm, the ore carrier broke in half and sank.  In terms of the loss of human life, it was, at the time, the worst disaster ever to occur on the Great Lakes.  (The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald was still nine years away.)  Along with Kaye’s father, 27 other men were lost.  But one man survived, a watchman named Dennis Hale.  For more than forty hours, he drifted on an open pontoon raft, dressed only in his pea coat and skivvies.  The winds raged across the lake at sixty miles an hour; the air temperature hovered around freezing; the water was a bitter forty degrees; the waves towered thirty feet high.  Hale should have died.  But he didn’t.  The Coast Guard found him—nearly frozen—and flew him to a hospital, where he made his recovery.

North-Shore-004It was a remarkable story, and as soon as I heard it, I knew that somehow this was going to be at the heart of the next book.  I had no idea what kind of narrative I would build around it, but I had a clear image of the way the book would open: with the sinking of a great ore carrier during a terrible storm, seen through the eyes of the sole survivor.

Dennis Hale has given his account of the incident in a fascinating book called, in fact, Sole Survivor.  If you’re interested, you can order it online at a number of sites.

How did I take the seed of that initial idea and create the very complex storyline that became Purgatory Ridge?  It happened in the way it usually happens—the result of gestation.

While I was finishing Boundary Waters, I let the possibilities of “story” roll around in my head, all centered on the sinking of an ore boat and what part that might play.  I had a few ideas already for other elements that could contribute to building a plot, and all these possibilities bumped around in my thinking.  Over the course of several weeks, a complex storyline developed.  By the time I finished writing Boundary Waters, I knew most of the plot of Purgatory Ridge: how it would begin, how it would probably end, who was going to do what to whom and why.  As I usually do, I sat down and outlined the book.  And then I began the writing.  I opened with a prologue—the ore boat sinking—which is a technique that creates lots of controversy among readers and writers alike.  And that’ll be the subject of my next blog.

See you down the road!

5 thoughts on “Purgatory Ridge: The Idea”

  1. I don’t understand this system, but I hope you get my comment. There is a book on literary criticism written by a Yale professor. I have it. It is a wonderful book. His theory in that book is that literature is elitist. Some people don’t like literature because they think it is pretentious. Some don’t like it because they think it is depressing. Probably a lot of people don’t like it because they are lazy or not smart enough to read it. Maybe that is why some people like or don’t like a prologue. I think I was an English major at a small college in Nebraska and we never spent one minute talking about prologue. I wish we would have. I, at this point in my life, don’t like elitist or pretentous but I do like prologue. Maybe introduction would be a better word for it. I was writing you an e-mail and I lost it so now I am going to try and find it.

  2. Wow I have just read 3 books by WKK and I laughed, cried, enjoyed , celebrated, yelled, relaxed, _ I travel and read a lot and thank you , this touches my soul

  3. I can’t wait for Vermilion to come out. My daughter gave me Iron Lake to read and I was hooked. I bought them all and am now in the middle of Heavens Keep. I’m a born Minnesotan and have spent much time up north and can travel the area with Cork so easily. I read many of the series while recovering from major surgery and they took me away from my own reality. I hope Vermilion is not the last of Cork. It would almost be like not receiving another letter from home.

  4. Kent,

    I realize it’s fiction, so I’m wondering if something in Purgatory Ridge is an intential mistake. In the prologue, you mention the Keweenaw Peninsula “that iron-rich finger of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The UP certainly does have a lot of iron, but it’s all down by Marquette. The mineral that lies beneath the Keweenaw is copper. As a matter of fact, most who live up there refer to that “finger” as “the Copper Country”. If you’ve never spent any time up there, or very little, I’d recommend a trip during peak fall color season. Brockway Mountain Drive in Copper Harbor is incredible. Copper Harbor also has a claim to fame as the northern terminus of US 41. There is a sign after you turn around informing you that it’s 1,190 miles to Miami.

  5. I recently discovered author William Kent Krueger. Purgatory Ridge is the third book I’ve devoured by this author! I was watching the college basketball playoffs and looked forward to commercials, so I could read another chapter of Purgatory Ridge! What a ride!! I live in Maine. I’ve never been to Minnesota. Author William Kent Krueger has peeked my interest in Minnesota, its history, its Anishinaabe tribe, its communities, and its lakes and forests! I finish reading one of WKK’s books, and I get on Google to check out places, people, events I read in the last book I read. Some day, I hope to travel to Minnesota and check out these places! Thanks, WKK, for the Cork O’Conner mysteries! Getting me through the pandemic and a Maine winter!!!! Donna Dachs

Comments are closed.