The Devil Wears Church's?


Good finance fiction is apparently very difficult to produce. Otherwise there’d be more of it. We’ve got a couple of books by Tom Wolfe, some of Scott Fitzgerald’s stuff and, well, that’s about it. So we were thrilled when we caught wind of Golden Handcuffs, a new novel due out in a couple of months from a twenty-something refugee from an investment bank in London.
But there was something odd about the story. To begin with, we’d never heard of Polly Courtney until earlier today when DealBook took notice of an item on HereIsTheCity, which was itself pointing to an article published in the English newspaper The Observer. Any trail that leads through two blogs and an English newspaper deserves at least a bit of skepticism.
What’s more, none of the folks involved mentioned a publisher. If you are an author for a major publishing house, one of the things you learn rather quickly is that it is a good idea to mention your publisher when discussing your book. You know, because it’s a good idea to tell booksellers where to order your book. And, well, the publishers like it and they’re the ones paying you to write.
So we did some digging. WallStFolly had discovered Miss Polly’s website—where, by the way, she castigates Helen Green’s £800,000 win against Deutsche Bank—and so we looked for information on the publisher there. It seems her book is being published by Troubador, which describes itself as “the leading Italian Studies publisher in the UK and publish an expanding academic research journals programme.” That’s odd. Why would they publish a roman a clef about working in finance?
The answer may be contained in the next sentence of Troubador self-description: “We also run a self-publishing programme for authors of any subject under our Matador imprint.” So is Miss Polly’s book being self-published? There’s nothing wrong with self-publishing but we find it extraordinary that a roman a clef about a young girl in finance couldn’t find a mainstream publisher. A young girl lost amidst the sharks of The City? We cannot imagine publishers wouldn't be climbing over each other for it.
But they aren't. This suggests three possibilities. One, Miss Polly’s book is very, very bad indeed. Two, there is some grand conspiracy in London with publishers suppressing possibly embarrassing books about their financial institutions. Or, three, Miss Polly is just an enthusiast for self-publishing and wanted to go it alone.