‘The Bermuda Bond’: a few background notes
Last Friday, I finished the draft of my new novel, The Bermuda Bond. Now, it’s ready for an edit and the inevitable – and no doubt necessary – final revisions. Handling these elements will take up the next month or so.
Over the past several months, writing the book has been a real escape and it gave me the chance to retreat into my home office, surround myself with research materials accumulated over many years, and revisit Bermuda in my mind.
I travelled to the very attractive Atlantic island every year – mainly for work purposes – for more than fifteen years in the 1980s and 1990s, and also managed to tie in a few holidays out there too. My wife came with me on many of the trips and we were very lucky to get to explore the place thoroughly and have some fun times.
Actually, we were married on Bermuda (in 1993). You should ask my wife about that because she hasn’t quite forgiven me for roping her in to help with the work I was involved in during the two weeks we were there during our ‘honeymoon’. (Bad form, I know, I know!)
On our final visit twenty odd years ago – we haven’t been back for quite a while – we were on a family holiday and travelling with a soon-to-be-born baby girl. So, I do have a strong emotional bond with Bermuda.
It is a fascinating island, especially if, like me, you like naval history (it has a wonderful Royal Dockyard), beautiful beaches, pretty architecture and warm azure seas.
On a more prosaic note, its other claim to fame is, of course, its status as an offshore financial centre. I have always taken a rather cynical view of tax havens like Bermuda and, because of that, I’ve long thought of setting a financial thriller on the island. With that end in view, I kept all my guidebooks and local literature from the 1990s in a box file and dug it all out last year to start the research. I also read up on various financial matters to gather what I needed to tackle that dimension of my book.
As well as the more recent exposures in the Panama Papers, the Paradise Papers and the Jeffrey Epstein case, I was drawn back to all the earlier fraudulent offshore practices of outfits like IOS, BCCI and the like. All of them provided some of the context for the events that lie at the heart of my novel.
I like writing fiction where the setting is practically one of the characters and Bermuda has proved a great location in that respect for the action I had in mind.
This new work of mine is in the same vein as my earlier Spy Without a Cause and I’m hoping it will be as well received when it is published in the summer of 2021.