[Fulltext] When a guy tells you he worked hard for a B.Comm. in the 80s you know he can spin a good yarn. Meet Paul Kilduff, the beancounter turned best selling author whose day job is Vice President of the US investment bank Merrill Lynch in the IFSC in Dublin. Paul's first book, Square Mile, has been the top selling paperback in the City of London over the past few weeks. His second, The Dealer, is due for publication in April 2000, and he's already at work on a third.
Born in Dublin, Paul currently lives in an apartment in Ballsbridge, with an easy commute to work. "Dublin's a relief after 15 hour days and the hassles of the London tube." Tell that to drivers on the Naas Road or the N11.
He attended St Michael's in Ballsbridge "educators of the cream of the country", he says before adding "in other words, the rich and thick". He went from there to UCD where he earned his B. Comm. in 1985 and followed that with a DPA (now the Masters in Accounting) in 1986.
Since the book came out he's had email (paulkilduff@tinet.ie) from all kinds of people. "One guy, a newspaper seller outside a tube station, asked someone else to email me for him. He wanted to know if he was the newspaper seller in the book. In fact he wasn't. The guy I based that character on has since died."
Paul's new found fame suits him. He's been interviewed for radio in the UK. He's been profiled in the press. He appeared on Sky TV's book program. "I was glad it was on late at night. I thought that meant no one I knew would see it but they did. It seems like everyone was getting home late from the pub and just happened to turn on the television."
"I suppose I decided to be a CA because it's a good qualification," Paul says. "I always wanted to work in the City of London so qualifying as a CA seemed like a good move". He trained with Touche Ross, now Deloitte & Touche, recalling how one partner sat with his feet out the window of his upper floor office on warm summer days, summoning staff at reception to retrieve his shoes from the pavement below if and when necessary. "I enjoyed the audit work. We had some interesting accounts, Dunnes Stores, the Ansbacher accounts, and NIB. You have to see the CA training as an investment. It's not great when earning say £5,000 a year while your friends are getting £15,000 but it's worth it in the end."
Having completed his training contract in 1989, Paul headed for London where he joined the American securities house, Prudential Bache, to work in the investigation area "reviewing their business operations around the world".
"Investigation is exciting. There were days when I flew to New York and back just for a meeting. You get to meet with the legal and compliance people, and I guess you could say that some of the ideas for my writing were inspired by that experience."
Since then, Paul has worked for various financial institutions in the City of London.
The direct inspiration for Square Mile had an immediate and somewhat bizarre source. Arriving at work for London stockbrokers James Capel one Monday morning some years ago, Paul was shocked to discover that the Director of Investment Trusts who occupied the office next to him had been murdered over the weekend. The victim a quiet, 51 year old corporate financier, lived in a modest one-bedroom flat in Spitalfields and went to visit his widowed mother every weekend. The murder weapon was a serrated knife.
Despite being a high profile case, the murder was never solved. The police investigation uncovered evidence of a secret lifestyle: letters, videos, nights spent trawling the bars of Old Compton Street, and mysterious payments to an address in Morocco.
That Monday, says Paul, was the day he realised there was a great novel to be written about the City of London and that he was the one to write it.
Although he claims not to be a great reader, Paul is very much up to speed with the "who's who" of financial thrillers. His favourite author is Tom Wolfe (Bonfire of the Vanities) but others left him less impressed and gave him the confidence to have a go himself.
He set about the task with a discipline any Chartered Accountant would admire. "The average novel is 120,000 words - that's about 30 chapters with 40,000 words in each." He writes mostly at the weekends being too busy with work to be able to think or write fiction during the day. He doesn't go out on Friday nights so that he's fresh on Saturday mornings, and he aims to write 3,000 - 4,000 words over a weekend. That said, if it's a sunny Saturday or Sunday, he's equally likely to be out playing tennis but he does set himself targets and he meets them.
The manuscript finished, he sent some sample chapters to about 20 literary agents in the UK. "A couple of them came back almost immediately asking for more. I met a few of them before settling on Judith Chilcote. She introduced me to Hodder & Stoughton who were very positive about the book from the start. They were in the market for a financial thriller writer and I filled a gap on their lists. If they had already had someone writing that kind of book for them, they wouldn't have taken me on. Publishers don't buy competing authors in the same genre as authors already on their lists. They're investing in a writer for the long haul so they like to meet you and reassure themselves that you are someone they are happy to invest in. It's an advantage to be young. They are more interested in investing in someone in their 30s than in someone in their late 50s.â??
The market Paul is aiming at is fascinated by Nick Leeson's breaking of Barings or more recently, the Martin Frankel story. Frankel is the American high school drop-out, banned by the SEC from securities trading, who recently pulled off one of the biggest frauds ever, siphoning more than $300m from a group of insurance companies before disappearing, leaving behind a bizarre trail of astrological forecasts and a to-do list with reminders to "Launder money".
"After Barings, the company I was working for sent me out to Singapore to check our operations out there, just to make sure that the same thing couldnâ??t happen to us. When I got back, I wrote up a report of about 10,000 words. I guess that kind of writing was good preparation for writing the book."
"It's probably true that the financial markets lend themselves to fraud, particularly where a head office is in one country with smaller operations overseas, often in different time zones with communication done mostly by email or fax. Also, people like Leeson tend to know a lot more about the market they operate in than their bosses, so they're more likely to be given a free rein. That's what happened in Barings".
Back in Dublin since 1995, Paul only recently revealed his closet fiction writing to family and friends. "When I told people at work that my book was reviewed on amazon.co.uk they thought there was some other guy with the same name. Eventually I convinced them it was me", he says.
Paul says he has no plans to give up the day job at the moment. "Writing is just a hobby". But with two more books on the way, we've got to wonder for how long. "Square Mile is mostly plot driven. The Dealer will be a better book because itâ??s character driven. Itâ??s important for your second book to be better than your first", he says.
It's not often Accountancy Ireland gets the chance to read thrillers in the line of duty. Square Mile is a gripping read. Great pace, exciting, well researched, it has a couple of murders, embezzlement, a hero you can empathise with, and it's in stock in a bookshop near you. If you liked John Grisham's The Firm, then you only need to know one thing. This is better and I, for one, am looking forward to the next one!
Accountancy Ireland Vol 31 No 4 August 1999