The Financial Fiction Genre
Related Genres : Legal Thrillers, Suspense, Mystery, Spy Thrillers, Historical
Novels and Romantic Fiction
The Legal Fiction Genre
With its famous trial scene on which the plot hinges, Shakespeare's Merchant of
Venice could be regarded as a forerunner, of both the legal fiction and the
financial fiction genres, though exhibiting rather greater eloquence than most works
in these categories! (However nobody can live on a diet of caviar and champagne. More
modest fare can be even more satisfying in its own way). Dante's Divine Comedy
devotes significant attention to usury and counterfeiting. Dante was himself the son
of a banker or money-changer, the brother-in-law of a moneylender. A loan, secured on
the basis of a signature of dubious legality, is central to the plot of the Doll's
House by Ibsen, a play that was immensely controversial when it was first
performed.
John Grisham
Although The Firm falls squarely in the tradition of John Grisham's legal
thrillers, money laundering is central to the business of the firm in question, as
the newly-recruited lawyer who is the main character of the novel eventually
discovers but not before he is up to his neck in danger. Therefore The Firm
can definitely be regarded as a financial thriller, but it is interesting to compare
it with works written by novelists whose background is in banking. Fortune
magazine, in a review of the first novel by Linda Davies wrote "if John
Grisham ... were female and British and attuned to the high-tech tintinnabulation of
currencies changing hands around the world, he might write a twisty thriller such as
Nest of Vipers."
Naturally, as a trained lawyer himself, Grisham approaches money laundering from the
perspective of a lawyer trying to untangle a maze of companies set up to facilitate
the process rather than that of a banker trying to detect suspicious transactions.
Another work by Grisham relevant to this subject is The Runaway Jury in
which some stock transactions form a major element of the plot.
Brad Meltzer
Brad Meltzer is another American lawyer who
turned to writing legal thrillers, usually ones having a strong connection with
politics. The Tenth Justice, his first published book, came out in 1997. His fourth
novel, The Millionaires, is the story of two brothers who work for a private
bank. A secret, abandoned account containing three million dollars provides them with
the key to a new life - but then they discover the invisible strings that were
attached to the account.
The Mystery Genre
It is impossible to draw a strict dividing line between mainstream thrillers and
works in the mystery genre. Normally a certain degree of mystery is inevitable in any
plot having a great deal of suspense and that is true of many modern financial
thrillers. The main distinction is probably that in novels in the mystery category
the identity of the wrong-doers is usually concealed until near the end of the story.
However, many thrillers have twists in their plots which re-introduce an element of
mystery even though the identity of the villains is known to the reader.
Emma Lathen
Emma Lathen is the pseudonym used by two American authors, Mary J. Latsis and the
late Martha Henissart, for books featuring a Wall Street banker, John Putnam
Thatcher, as an amateur detective whose special knowledge of the financial world
gives him an advantage over professional police officers. Starting with Banking on
Death in 1961 and continuing up to the mid-1990s Latsis and Henissart produced a
series of over 20 novels in which Thatcher was the main character. Writing under the
name R.B. Dominic they also produced a separate series of novels featuring an Ohio
Congressman Ben Safford, but the Lathen series is better known. Latsis had worked as
an economist for the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation until 1969,
eight years after their first novel was published, and Henissart had worked in the
field of corporate finance and banking until 1973. Consequently the two women were
well-qualified to write mysteries set in the financial world. In 1967 they won the
Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger Award and in 1983 they received the Mystery
Writers of America Ellery Queen award.
Peter Høeg
A work which undoubtedly belongs to both the thriller and the mystery categories is
Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne, set in Copenhagen and Greenland, which
won international renown for the Danish author, Peter Høeg, after it appeared in
English as Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow. The main connection between
Høeg's novel and financial thrillers is the chapter set in the casino which is
used for money laundering by, among others the criminals involved in drug
trafficking, a minor but recurring theme in the book. Commerce also figures fairly
prominently in some early chapters in the book in connection with a Greenland mining
company with its headquarters in Denmark, and in a later chapter, a Danish shipping
firm.
Spy Thrillers
The activities of spies and secret agents play a key role in many of the
mainstream financial thrillers discussed earlier, particularly those of Stephen Frey,
David Ignatius, Linda Davies and Peter Tasker. The works of Frey, Ignatius and Tasker
tend to deal with the staple themes of the spy thriller, e.g. terrorism and potential
conflicts between nations, while Davies focuses more on the newer , sometimes
ambivalent roles of the security services in tackling international crimes such as
money laundering and drug trafficking, and the connections between the security
services and the financial world. In 1998 the disaffected former British secret agent
Richard Tomlinson, alleged that MI6 had a spy in the Bundesbank, a claim that could
almost have come from the pages of Nest of Vipers!
Financial institutions figure strongly in some works writers who are normally
thought of as writers of orthodox spy thrillers.
Ian Fleming
Many people are aware of the fact that Ian Fleming worked for British intelligence
during World War II and that his experiences provided the inspiration for his spy
thrillers. However not many know that he was the grandson of a wealthy Scottish
banker Robert Fleming, and that for four years prior to the war Ian Fleming himself worked as a banker
and stockbroker in London. Before that he had been a journalist in Moscow and after
the war he was the foreign manager of Kemsley Newspapers until 1959. Probably many
more people today are familiar with Goldfinger, one of his classic James Bond
adventures, from the film than from the original novel and will know how Bond saves
Fort Knox, the home of most of the US gold reserves, from the plot hatched by Auric
Goldfinger, the world's cleverest and richest criminal.
John le Carré
John le Carré, the
pseudonym of David Cornwell, is one of the world's best known authors of spy fiction.
After taking a first in modern languages at Cambridge and a he worked for for the
British intelligence services and then after a short spell teaching at Eton, started
working for the Foreign Office in a capacity which is widely believed to have
included more intelligence work. His first novel, Call for the Dead was
published in 1961 and following the success of his third, The Spy who Came in from
the Cold, in 1963 he decided to become a full-time writer and over the course of
three decades he produced a string of successful novels with the Cold War as a
background. With the collapse of Communism le Carré, like other spy fiction
authors, had to find a somewhat different theme. In Single and Single
published in 1999, financiers are one of the main destabilising forces threatening
poorer nations and MI5, the SAS, GCHQ and the customs service work together to combat
the menace. His father, Ronnie Cornwell, had been a con-man with convictions for
fraud and his character inspired one of le Carré's previous books, A Perfect Spy, so perhaps it
is not surprising that le Carré should write a spy thriller that is also a
financial thriller.
Tom Clancy
Tom Clancy, who has some
claims to have originated the literary genre now known as the techno-thriller has a
certain connection with the financial world since he worked as an insurance broker in
Maryland. His plots generally deal with the big issues of global politics but finance
also plays a major role in Debt of Honor, written at a time of increasing
anxiety in the US about Japanese-American economic competition, the weaknesses of
America's financial system, and the dangers of cutbacks in the American armed
services. The Japanese secretly unleash a computer virus on the New York stock
exchange with the aim of destroying American and European financial markets. This
turns out to be an act of war. The theme of a resurgent, nationalist Japan is also
one that occurs in Peter Tasker's first novel, Silent Thunder.
Economic warfare actually has a long history. Sir Francis
Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth I's secretary of state and spymaster, cornered large numbers of bills drawn on Genoan banks in
order to delay the build up of resources to equip the Spanish Armada which set sail
against England in 1588.
Historical Fiction
Rafael Sabatini
Rafael Sabatini was born in
Jesi, central Italy in 1875. When he was 17 he moved to England where he wrote many
works of historical fiction. His first was written in 1902 but it was not until 1921
with the publication of Scaramouche, a novel about the French Revolution, that he
attained great success. His last novel was the Gamester came out in 1949, the
year before his death. It is about John Law, the Scottish adventurer and economist
who fled to Amsterdam after killing a man in a duel. In Amsterdam he studied he
studied the principles of banking and 20 years later in 1715, after many further
travels, he got his great chance when the French regent, the Duke of Orleans turned
to him in desperation as French public finance was in a parlous state after the wars
and extravagance of Louis XIV. John Law created the first public bank in France which
was at first a great success. However Law's enemies managed to pin the blame for the
collapse of the Mississippi Bubble in 1720 on him and he was dismissed from his post,
eventually dying in poverty in Venice.
Ken Follett
Ken Follett's Dangerous Fortune, discussed in the section of this guide on novelists who were journalists is a work of financial fiction
set in the Victorian period. It is worth noting that although Dangerous
Fortune is a work of fiction, the plot involves a British bank which gets into
difficulties because of its investments in Latin America and, in actual fact, one
famous British bank, namely Barings, did come within 24 hours of bankruptcy only to
be saved by the Bank of England and other leading City of London banks so that it
survived for another century, before being brought down by Nick Leeson in a banking
scandal which reverberated around the world and coincided with the emergence of some
of the banker novelists described in this guide.
Susan Howatch
Susan Howatch, a British author,
known for her family sagas and her novels about the Church of England in the 20th
century, was originally a lawyer. A characteristic feature of her family sagas is
that they deal with well-known historical events transposed to an utterly different
setting. In the case of The Rich Are Different and Sins of the Fathers
the setting is Wall Street in the period 1922-68, but the main characters are Julius
Caesar, Cleopatra, and Augustus Caesar. Howatch's legal background is reflected in
her treatment of topics such as the Glass-Steagall Banking Act.
Lindsey Davis
Lindsey Davis is best known for her
series of mystery novels set in Ancient Rome. Ode to a Banker is the 12th
featuring the sleuth Marcus Didius Falco. Aurelius Chrysippus, a wealthy Athenian
banker and patron to a group of writers is found dead in a library - and one of the
suspects is Falco himself! Ode to a Banker is a reminder of the fact that the
history of banking
stretches back to ancient times.
Deborah Moggach
First published in 1999, Tulip Fever, is a story of desire and deception set
in the household of a tulip speculator in Amsterdam in the 1630s. Financial
wrong-doing in 17th century Holland was also the subject of Black Tulip by
Alexandre Dumas, which is discussed in the section covering the 17th Century to the
Victorian Era.
David Liss
David Liss was completing a doctoral
dissertation in the department of English at Columbia University,
on how the mid-eighteenth-century British novel reflects and shapes the
emergence of the modern idea of personal finance, when his first novel was published.
He has given numerous conference papers on his research and has published on Henry James.
A Conspiracy of Paper, his first novel published in both the U.S. and in Great Britain in 2000,
is a historical thriller set in London of 1719 and concerns the rivalries between the
South Sea Company and the Bank of England on the eve of the South Sea Bubble. His
second novel, The Coffee Trader, published in 2003, is also a
historical financial thriller. It is set in the Amsterdam of the 1690s, the city with
the world's largest stock exchange, and deals with the struggle to control the market
for a new commodity - coffee.
Patrick O'Brian
Captain Jack Aubrey the hero of Patrick
O'Brian's works of nautical fiction set in the Napoleonic Wars is modelled on Lord Cochrane whose fame as
a naval commander during that period was second only to that of Nelson. It was not
only Thomas Cochrane's battles that provided inspiration for O'Brian but also a more
controversial episode in the seaman's life when he was found guilty, probably
unjustly, of a stock exchange fraud. In The Reverse of the Medal O'Brian
suffers a similar fate. After the financial scandal Cochrane went to Latin America
where he took charge first of the Chilean navy and then the Brazilian navy during the
wars of liberation against Spain and Portugal.
Romantic Fiction
Sheila O'Flanagan
Sheila O'Flanagan started her career with the Central Bank of Ireland and later moved
to NCB Stockbrokers, also in Dublin, where since 1994 she has been a bonds trader.
She also writes a column on financial topics for the Irish Times. Her first novel,
Dreaming of a Stranger straddles the financial and non-financial worlds, and
she has followed that up with other works in the romantic fiction genre.
Roy Davies.
Last updated 11 October 2004.
