The origin of “The Baltic Dry Index,” like so much of writing was the unexpected but happy confluence of two different ideas.
In August 2021, I was reading the fascinating book Sinews of War and Trade, by Laleh Kalili. The book covers the history of British, US American and Arab interests as they develop shipping and trading infrastructure in the Arab Peninsula, as well as, the popular resistance to these policies. As shipping routes became oceanic highways on which ships sailed following regular schedules, the Baltic Exchange, based in London, UK, devised an index, the Baltic Dry Index (BDI) calculated from the current freight charges for dry goods for various ocean routes and ship sizes.
The nature of capitalism is to find ever more ways to financialize whatever transactions humans undertake. Once there is a number that denotes a particular price at a particular time, it doesn’t take long before those in charge devises a scheme that allows the trade of futures based on that number. In lay terms, it means an investor can bet on what the BDI might do in the future. Shippers might make such a bet to hedge against future increases of declines of shipping cost. Speculators do it to, well, cash in. Most futures markets allow players to leverage large sums with a minimal investment and, if the contract is cleared on time, to never have to actually ship anything.
Having a little bit of knowledge of how futures and options work (enough to not mess with that), I wondered how I could write a crime story that incorporated such schemes.
The second idea came after the wonderful website Crimereads.com published an article with the opening paragraphs of ten Graham Greene novels. I like Graham Greene and the opening paragraph of The Quiet American struck me as masterful.
These stewed in my head for a while. I imagined my protagonist sitting in a dingy hotel room like the protagonist in The Quiet American. It had to be located in a place that wasn’t well known.
The more I thought about threats to international shipping I focused on the situation in the Gulf of Aden around 2008 when Somalis, frustrated with Chinese and other fleets stealing fish from Somali territorial waters began to confront the thieves.
It didn’t take long before this defensive action expanded to basically kidnapping a lot of ships and holding them for ransom. In 2008 there were 111 attacks and 42 successful kidnappings. The numbers increased until 2011 when increased presence of warships from a large coalition of countries put an end to most attacks.
The choice of Djibouti as a locale for the story was simply logical. Djibouti has a large presence of foreign military forces, it has become a new center for espionage for that very reason. And it’s a small calm country in the middle of a lot of turmoil. Of course, Elmore Leonard’s novel Djibouti helped solidify my choice.
And the rest was simply writing, revising, writing, revising. Writers know that drill.
