The Chief Executive of a Wall Street
bank – a man widely disliked by everyone for being sneaky, imperious and
selfish – lies dead on an expensive rug in a multi-million dollar home in the
Hamptons. Whodunnit?
The chief suspect is another bank chief
executive – moody, aggressive, and depressed after being forced out of his job
by the dead man. The police are called
to the scene, and it ends the quiet life for the British psychiatrist who
treated the accused man – and is in deep trouble himself. The story of A Fatal Debt, my mystery novel set in London, New York and the
Hamptons has a touch of wish fulfilment.
In all the anger and outrage at what characters such as this unleashed
on the world in the financial crisis on 2007-08, few have got their just
desserts. In this tale, there is both
crime and punishment, which I hope will satisfy the aggrieved reader.
I have been a financial journalist for
20 years and co-wrote All That Glitters,
a book about the collapse of Barings. Yet
it took the crisis to make me venture into fiction. I was based in New York and the best
non-fiction stories – the fall of Lehman Brothers, the profits that
short-selling hedge funds made from the crash – seemed to have been taken. Why not a novel, I thought? Actually, it had a longer history than that. I’d thought about writing a financial
thriller before, encouraged by my agent.
But I had struggled with the subject, as well as the switch from
journalism. The trouble with banking is
that, although it involves lots of money and some glamour, the day-to-day
reality is too boring and technical to interest most people.
The best novelists have found their own
ways around this. Robert Harris’s The Fear Index, for example, finds an
ingenious solution to the challenge of writing about algorithmic trading, which
I thought would defeat anyone. But some
other financial novels never quite surmount that difficulty. The crisis provided my answer. A friend of mine worked in a Wall Street
hedge fund, which failed in the crash, triggering its founder into a mental collapse,
which ended in a psychiatric hospital. The
incident started me thinking about the parallels between financial booms and
crashes, and the mental state of bankers.
Then there was the second obstacle – turning from journalism to novel
writing. An awful lot of my fellow hacks
seem to do it – some highly successfully and others mainly for diversion. Publishers appear to like journalists – they
are accustomed to writing at speed and meeting deadlines, I suppose.
But novel writing and journalism are
different – something I knew well enough in theory but only found in practice
when I tried. It felt like climbing a
mountain without equipment. Journalists
can do research, take notes and construct an article out of these facts. A novelist is on his or her own. I found that psychologically tricky in itself. After a day of trying to write from my
imagination rather than my notes, I felt exhausted, and had to go and take a
nap. Until well into the process, I didn’t
completely let go of my roots.
One day, I wanted to change the story
in a way that involved an underground car park at the apartment building where
Harry Shapiro, the Wall Street titan accused of murder, lives. I had a real-life model for the building,
right by Central Park, and for a moment, I felt frustrated that this block did
not have one. “Hold on, it’s a novel,” I thought.
“I can make it up,” At that
moment, I realised that, despite the work and uncertainty, fiction has its
rewards.
More
information about John Gapper can be found on his website and you can also follow him on
Twitter at @johngapper
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