Accountants and Crime

Why don’t accountants feature more often in crime fiction? For every accountant who turns up in a mystery, there must be a hundred lawyers, and yet you would think that accountants are very well placed to indulge in criminal activity. Perhaps they are just better at getting away with it?

My question was prompted by the fact that one of the two narrators in Barbara Vine’s The Birthday Present, which I reviewed the other day, is an accountant. It has to be said that Vine, aka Ruth Rendell showed no interest in her character’s work, and portrayed him as a pretty dull dog. But it doesn’t have to be so. Some of my very best friends are accountants, and in person they are as varied a bunch as any other group One of the accountants I used to work with played drums in band that later became The Beatles.

Emma Lathen (actually, the pen-name concealed the identities of two female writers) wrote about a banker-sleuth called Thatcher, and one of her novels (a pretty good one) was called Accounting for Murder, but accountant-authors who write crime have always been thin on the ground. Perhaps one of the reasons why lawyers crop up so much more often in the genre is that so many crime novels are written by people who are either lawyers or have had legal training (it’s a long list that even includes such luminaries of long ago as Wilkie Collins.)

Richard Henry Sampson, who wrote as Richard Hull, is probably my favourite accountant-author; he emerged during the Golden Age, but his books were by no means conventional puzzles. His ironic mysteries weren’t uniformly successful, but almost all contain an interesting idea or two, and they deserve to be better known.

The recent film Deception, which I talked about a few weeks ago, is a contemporary examination of the criminal potential of accountancy, and a pretty good one. But I’m sure there’s scope for plenty of other interesting accountancy-linked mystery fiction. In the meantime, are there any really enjoyable examples I’ve missed?

Deception

Accountants don’t often find themselves taking heroic roles in thriller films, for some unfathomable reason, but Jonathan McQuarry manages it in Deception, a film which came out about a year ago. The fact that the nerdy McQuarry is played by charismatic Ewan McGregor certainly helps. We first meet him when he is feeling lonely during an audit visit to a corporate client. He is befriended by slick lawyer Wyatt Bose (Hugh Jackman) and soon he is discovering that there is more to life than balance sheets.

An accidental (or is it?) exchange of mobile phones plunges our hero into involvement with a mysterious sex club. Strange – but invariably glamorous - women start ringing him up to ask if he is free this evening. They meet at hotels, and after a quick bedroom romp, but no conversation, they disappear out of his life again. One of the ladies thus briefly encountered, amazingly, is the legendary Charlotte Rampliing. Suffice to say, she is still stunningly attractive after all these years. I kept expecting her to reappear later in the film, only to be disappointed. Then McQuarry meets through the game a very pretty blonde girl (Michelle Williams) he has already taken a shine to, and the plot begins to thicken.

Jackman, McGregor and Williams are all excellent in this movie, but although there are plenty of plot twists, some of them are rather predictable, while there is at least one gaping hole in the plot. As is often the case with films of this kind, the first part of the movie, when characters and events are being set up was rather more convincing than the later stages, when disbelief has to be suspended time and again.

All the same, I enjoyed Deception. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s well made, and the actors do a good job with the material. Worth watching.