Erdman Cashes Out

International business writer and former Swiss banker Paul E. Erdman, who picked up an Edgar Award for his first novel of financial intrigue, The Billion Dollar Sure Thing (1973), died this last Monday, April 23, at his ranch in Healdsburg, California, reportedly from cancer. He was 74 years old.

“Not too many mystery writers can claim to have created a whole new sub-genre, but ... that’s what Paul Erdman did,” writes Steve Lewis at Mystery*File. Adds The New York Times: “An economist and former Lutheran seminarian, Mr. Erdman was widely regarded as having popularized financial fiction, a genre he affectionately called fi-fi. ... Mr. Erdman was in all likelihood one of the few novelists whose books were routinely reviewed--often glowingly--in Business Week and The American Banker as well as in mainstream publications. His novels featured exotic locales, shadowy cartels and lots and lots of money.” Among the author’s other best-known works are The Crash of ’79 (1976), The Panic of ’89 (1986), and The Set-Up (1997). His 1974 novel, The Silver Bears, was made into a 1978 movie starring Michael Caine, Martin Balsam, and Cybill Shepherd.

The Times’ Margelit Fox recalls that Erdman got his start as a writer while he was imprisoned for a time in Switzerland, following the collapse of his Swiss bank, which had lost “tens of millions of dollars” through “unauthorized speculation in cocoa and silver futures.”

It was by all accounts a very nice dungeon. Room service, complete with fine wines, was provided (at Mr. Erdman’s expense) by the best local restaurants. The wine would come in handy later, as he discovered.

Mr. Erdman also had a portable Olivetti, and to pass the time, he decided to write a nonfiction book about economics. But the one thing the dungeon lacked was a research library, so he turned the book into a novel.

Writing was a struggle at first. But help arrived in the form of a new inmate, a Frenchman reputed to be the finest safecracker in Europe.

“I sent him over a couple of bottles of wine, and in exchange he told me a way for an amateur to crack a safe rather easily with ordinary equipment,” Mr. Erdman told The New York Times in 1981. “That became the first scene in the first chapter in my first novel.”

The novel was, of course, The Billion Dollar Sure Thing.

(Hat tip to The Gumshoe Site.)