In fact back in June 1968 Bagley had been asked by Robert Clark of the Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC) to write on the specific topic of heroin smuggling with the view to a film being produced. The author duly produced the requested novel, delivering The Spoilers to his publishers in November of that year. Following publication of the novel ABPC was taken over by EMI and the film project was shelved. This joined a growing list of titles that had seen a similar fate: The Golden Keel, High Citadel, Landslide, and more recently Running Blind. Later that year Warner Brothers Productions Ltd, who had by then acquired films rights to The Freedom Trap, made a request to change the name of this novel for the publication of the hardback edition in the United States. Bagley thought that The Freedom Trap was a good title, and didn’t want to change it without a good suggestion.

Bagley decided that he must break the jinx of 1971 and wrote to his publishers on 2 January 1972 indicating that he would be starting a new novel the next day. The drafts he started, of which there were three, centred around a former ex-long range desert group army colonel, named Fermor in two of the drafts and Col. Andrew Mathieson in the third. Other characters in the drafts bore the names of Major Andy Tozier, and John Follet, characters that had previously appeared in his novel The Spoilers written for ABPC.

These drafts were abandoned and on 26 March 1972, Bagley delivered a completed manuscript to his publishers with the working title Because Salton Died. He told his editor in an accompanying letter that in an attempt to break his writer’s block he changed writing style and started to write a ‘classic whodunnit’, which in the event he didn’t achieve because his familiar style kept breaking in. He noted:

My method of writing is singularly ill-adapted for the writing of a whodunnit. I begin with a situation and let it develop, and the plot follows where the development leads; whereas a whodunnit should be meticulously worked out in a synopsis before a key on the typewriter is touched. My method, however, leads to a certain spontaneity. I tossed in a variety of odd circumstances, characters and situations, and let them work themselves out.

What resulted was a classic Bagley tour de force involving murder and corruption on a Caribbean island and a protagonist in the form of a former army intelligence officer, now working in London as an insurance investigator.

Collins promptly scheduled the book and began selling rights: in less than two weeks the first translation deal (Swedish) was completed. However on 11 April 1972 a Collins internal memo stated that Bagley had withdrawn the novel and there would be no novel for 1972, indicating the author would write to the Swedish publishers to explain the reasons for the delay.