Insolvency novels for the beach

ummer reading lists are full of legal and courtroom thrillers, most about crime, some about corporate misdoing of one kind or another; but insolvency? Not so much.

Most of the novels in which insolvency features are about bankruptcy, and most of the ones we are familiar with were written in the nineteenth century when the law was undergoing an unprecedented period of reform (described in V Markham Lester’s Victorian Insolvency, an excellent read, but probably not for the summer holiday). As everyone knows, bankruptcy features in several of Dickens’s works, notably The Pickwick Papers (1836), David Copperfield (1849), and Little Dorrit (1857), famous for its account of conditions in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison. American writers have made a contribution, among the earliest of which is Arthur Mervyn by Charles Brockden Brown (1799) which begins with the bankruptcy of its main character; it’s a rambling book and probably not worth the bother of reading now.

When it comes to corporate shenanigans it’s still hard to beat Anthony Trollope’s The Way we Live Now. The monstrous central character and swindler, Melmotte, has plenty of modern parallels, and the railway speculation fraud he perpetrates has an evergreen quality – of the worst kind.

Unlikely as it might seem, I know of a novel which features an IVA. I was put onto it years ago by someone in the trade who said he had advised the author. It’s Maggie’s Boy by a novelist called Beryl Kingston. My memory is that it was a decent enough story but not a literary masterpiece. Towards the end there’s a description of a hearing in Brighton County Court about a failed IVA and the resulting bankruptcy order.

Looking further afield, the French novelist Balzac wrote about debt and its consequences, notably in César Birotteau. And years ago a German lawyer gave me a book called The Sufferings of Ballmann by Herbert Rosendorfer all about a disillusioned German insolvency judge. I don’t think anyone has thought it worthwhile to translate it.

There is, believe it or not, an insolvency practitioner who has written novels, Andrew Seagal. I have yet to read anything by him. Perhaps this summer!

Stephen Baister (Consultant)