The financial thriller, once a literary oxymoron, is now a recognisable niche battling for a slice of the market dominated by the lawyer/courtroom output of John Grisham et al. Thanks to the 1980s and the idea of bond dealer as Nietzschean superhero, being a financial thriller writer is no longer a lonely furrow to be ploughed by the dedicated few.
Hollywood gave us Wall Street; BBC's Blood on the Carpet gave us a warts-and-all look at boardroom machinations, and Liars Poker and Barbarians at the Gate told us how it really was from the inside. The Nick Leeson fiasco, made accessible by Ewan McGregor in Rogue Trader, brought such events out of the business pages and into the popular imagination.
Since the greed-is-good heyday, the bond dealer has fallen to earth but the market, financially and in print, lives on. Paul Kilduff's Square Mile is set firmly in the thriller side of the ledger and deals with a well-respected City of London institution brought low by shady dealings emanating from the Far East (shades of Barings, anyone?).
Our hero, Anthony Carlton, works for Steen Odenberg & Co and is immensely proud of the status this brings. He heads up the Control Group, a team designed to sniff out any wrongdoing at the bank and he is equally proud that he has never really come across any.
He enjoys all the perks of the job, including the after-office attentions of his beautiful secretary and is very pleased with himself and his situation.
However, the death of a director in suspicious circumstances starts off a chain of events that leads to the downfall of the bank and Carlton undergoes a Damascan journey in the process.
Kilduff, in getting from A to B, takes all the requisite steps. He lovingly details the lifestyle of the traders and support staff alike.
The old cliche of the Oxbridge type rubbing shoulders with the East End barrow boy and all of them engaged in the pursuit of riches is liberally used. Indeed, judging by its ubiquitous appearance in books, articles and on television, it is amazing that there are any barrow boys left in London - obviously Eastenders is even more divorced from reality as told here than thought.
We get regular expositions on the rituals and dress codes of this self-styled elite (the champagne, white shirts being a no-no, the Saville Row suits, the ironic cufflinks, the conspicuous consumption) and an insider's account of the pleasure and pain associated with playing with vast amounts of other people's money.
Kilduff, a former City worker, writes with authority on the above but it is in old-style thriller writing that the pace flags. Moving in chronological sequence is a good method of getting from start to finish for an accountant but is a little predictable for the reader.
Having everybody up to their necks in the underhand goings on may satisfy a Socialist Worker Party member but is a little hard to take; only the X-Files can get away with that tack. And a regular reader of such things can spot the baddies a little to early.
Another problem is that tracking down financial dealings involves a lot of paperwork and mathematics, two subjects which send most people to sleep. To leaven this, Kilduff is forced to stray into the less-familiar underworld of cops and robbers.
Here the old reliables of dodgy Triad members, rumpled PC plods and magnolia coloured police stations hove into view. He handles the world of high finance and soft-top BMWs with much more aplomb.
It is billed on the front cover as the definitive financial thriller of the decade. It is not. But the bare bones and incipient ability are there. Maybe book number 3 will be the definitive one.
