Triangle of Blood is the second in a trilogy of historical thrillers by Bob Richards, Bermuda’s former finance minister turned novelist.

Like Triangle of Treason, the first in the series, it’s “a spy story wrapped around facts”, using the island as a backdrop during the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s.

At the heart of the book is Sofar Station, a secretive organisation that operated near St David’s Lighthouse for more than 30 years.

“We had heard about Sofar — one of my good mates’ father worked for Sofar — but we really never knew what it was,” Mr Richards said.

In reality, Sofar Station was managed by Columbia University, which used the Sir Horace Lamb — a vessel similar to Jacques Cousteau's Calypso — for marine research.

“It was also connected to an outfit at Tudor Hill in Southampton. There were a lot of Bermudians working at Sofar as well as foreign scientists, but Tudor Hill was top secret. Most people, including me, didn't really know that they were connected.”

Together the agencies were investigating how sound travels through the open ocean to help detect enemy submarines in the Atlantic.

“The whole effort to detect Soviet missile boats pretty much started here in Bermuda, and the science was developed in Bermuda, and the devices and infrastructure to listen for them was developed in Bermuda,” Mr Richards said.

“It was the Tudor Hill facility, in conjunction with a bunch of other listening stations that were Stateside, that were able to pinpoint these boats, and then they sent their [team] out to track them.”

It was all part of the nuclear stand-off between the superpowers of the time, the United States and the Soviet Union.

“It was pretty dangerous work. Bermuda was one of the epicentres of it, and nobody here knew. We were all blithely going about our daily lives.”

To that fascinating history the author added fictional characters and put his imagination to work.

“The storyline is that the Russians are trying to find out what the Americans are up to in Bermuda, and they send spies here to find out, and then the spies get into trouble, and then they send assassins here to take the spies who’ve either failed or gone to the other side, to take them out,” Mr Richards said.

“So the storyline is based on this whole Tudor Hill/Sofar thing and the Bermudians involved. I also take time to reflect on a number of the things that were happening in Bermuda at the time.”

A big disaster in 1955 was a fire on board the Wilhelmina, a government ferry that regularly crossed the Sound to Dockyard. The pilot of the vessel, Reginald Dill, managed to beach her in an inlet near where Woody’s sits today. All but one of the 59 passengers and crew made it to safety.

“That story is covered in detail in Triangle of Blood and it’s 100 per cent accurate as to what happened, except I put my hero character as the skipper of that boat,” Mr Richards said.

“That was one of the big deals that happened in Bermuda in the Fifties. In the late Fifties, we had the Theatre Boycott and stuff like that, and those stories are told inside the book, too, so we have some Bermuda history which is pretty accurately told within the context of the Cold War story. The general story is accurate, the specifics of the spies and counterspies and all of that are fictional.”

A section in the back of the book distinguishes fact from fiction, offering insight into what is historically accurate and what is part of the narrative.

Mr Richards’s interest in maritime happenings and fascination with ferries sparked it all. What began as a 20-year “hobby” of research eventually transformed into a fictional historical trilogy.

“As a retired person you can sit down, put these thoughts into your computer. You keep rereading and every time you read it you get another idea.”

Some people swear by writing a set number of words each day, while others emphasise the importance of sitting at the computer at the same time daily — Mr Richards doesn’t buy into either of those disciplines.

“Very often I get ideas first thing in the morning. I’ll rush down to my computer, put it on and put them in there before I forget. [Sometimes] things happen, and then things might not happen for months. Some of these authors, they spend X hours a day tapping computer keys; that’s not me,” he said.

Like Triangle of Treason, Triangle of Blood was well received when a limited number of books were released last July.

“I didn’t have very many books because the publisher’s in India and getting books from India to here is a really big problem. Bringing them by air is very expensive, bringing them by ocean freight is very cheap,” said Mr Richards.

The books were put on a ship that was scheduled to go through the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean Sea and across the Atlantic.

“The problem is the Houthi shooting at ships in the Suez Canal and the Gulf of Aden. So instead of going that way, the ship went east from India, across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal, all over South America before it got to Miami, and then they had to tranship it from Miami to Jacksonville and then from Jacksonville here,” he explained.

“I've been able to secure some books by air — those are the books that are in the bookshops now.”

The copies are now sitting on the docks, having arrived in Bermuda roughly eight months after departing from the publishers.

“I’m glad I’m not really doing this for a living. One would like to be one of these famous and rich authors, but probably less than 1 per cent of all authors become rich. The rest of us do it because we like to do it.”

Although there have been talks of a movie, a screenplay that was delivered did not meet Mr Richards’s expectations.

“So it has to be done again,” he said. “I think there’s still a pretty good possibility — if I can get a good screenplay written — that it’ll make a great movie. I’m an action movie fan, and there’s plenty of action in my books.”

• Triangle of Blood is available onAmazonand other online bookstores. Locally, the book can be found at Brown & Co and Bermuda Book Store and will soon be available at LF Wade International Airport