David Poyer doesn’t shrink from a challenge.

Poyer grew up in Bradford, the son of a World War II veteran who
was hospitalized when Poyer was a boy, leaving the family in
financial straights. An appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy in
Annapolis, Md., provided his college education and set him on a
dual career path – sailor and novelist.

More challenges were to come, including retiring from the Navy
in 1976 and “teaching himself to write.” He began by writing
guidebooks and even ran a guidebook company, which he later sold.
Even then, he says, those books “had long passages that looked like
fiction.”

So he moved on to the challenge of fiction. He started with Navy
thrillers, then added historical fiction, including the locally
popular Hemlock County series about a mythical Pennsylvania county
in oil country that should sound familiar to Bradfordians. Now,
he’s combining the naval thriller with the historical novel in a
series about the Civil War at sea, something no other author has
tried for nearly 100 years.

His third book in the series, “That Anvil of Our Souls,” came
out in July. Poyer will be reading from it at 7 p.m. Thursday at
Tina’s Hallmark. The Civil War at Sea series also includes “Fire on
the Waters,” published in 2001, and “A Country of Our Own,”
published in 2003.

Before he wrote the series, Poyer said he “found only one novel
that had ever treated the Civil War at sea,” and it was published
around 1910.

“So there was the attraction of an unplowed field,” he told his
publisher in an interview provided to The Era. “If I had gone into
the Napoleonic or Revolutionary Wars, for example, the field would
have been pretty exhausted.

“The 1860s saw the transition from the age of sail to the age of
steam, the industrial age. As a sailor and a former naval engineer,
I could identify with motivations and feelings on both sides of
that divide.”

Poyer’s interest in the change from wind power to steam power
shows in “That Anvil of Our Souls,” which focuses on the first
ironclad battleships, the Union’s Monitor and the Confederacy’s
Merrimack. Not only does Poyer write about the battle between the
two, but also about their design and construction and the logistics
involved in creating something the world had never seen before
during a time of war rations.

One of the primary historical characters in the novel is Capt.
John Ericsson, designer of the revolutionary Monitor. Assisting the
cantankerous Swede is a fictional character, Theodore Hubbard, a
promising young engineer who is both in awe of and doubtful of
Ericsson’s design. The conversations between the two provide a
painless education in ship design.

Another historical character is Hubbard’s commanding officer
aboard the Monitor. Poyer said the character, like several in the
book, is built upon information he found in his research. Poyer
found documents describing Captain Worden as effeminate. He
expanded on this information and describes Worden as
lavender-scented and lisping with “long locks and long brown beard
(that) were carefully curled.”

“All these characters are quite firmly based in reality,” he
said.

Hubbard and other characters appear in the first two books in
the series. They include a well-bred southern woman coping with her
husband’s imprisonment for piracy, a Confederate surgeon, a runaway
slave turned gun captain on a Union ship and Lt. Lomax Minter, an
officer involved in the construction of the Merrimack who tries to
court his rival’s wife while he’s in prison.

The unlikable Minter is another of Poyer’s challenges. “It’s
more of a challenge to write an unsympathetic character,” Poyer
said in a phone interview with The Era last week. “You always look
for the challenge.”

As part of his research for the series, Poyer has read more than
324 books and examined primary sources such as maps, old charts,
tactical manuals, shipyard documents and period letters. He sailed
the waters where the novel’s action takes place on his sloop,
Frankly Scarlett, and sailed off the Grand Banks on “the only
square-rigger left in U.S. service, the Coast Guard barque
Eagle.”

With all the research that goes into his books to make them
accurate, Poyer says he still prefers fiction to nonfiction. His
response is predictable. “I think fiction is harder to do.”