Wednesday 12 January 2011

Accountancy 101 Part I

In the non blog world I'm a Chartered Accountant (that's CPA to my many American fans). As a CA I've always been proud of our motto: "Two and two equals four but when you need a five call us."

There is no intersection between the subject of this blog and the world of accountants. I don't know of a single vintage Canadian paperback with an accountant as either the hero or villain. There is one classic American reprint with an accountant hero - David Dodge's It Ain't Hay, first published by Simon & Schuster as the last of a four book series. The 1946 Dell edition is famous for the cover and subject.

The hero is James Whitney (Whit), hard-boiled San Francisco Certified Public Accountant who becomes a reluctant detective when his partner George MacLeod is murdered in Death and Taxes (1941). Whit goes to Los Angeles to investigate a wool-broker’s son who is embezzling money from the family business and turns up a high stakes poker game run by a gang of professional card sharps in Shear the Black Sheep (1943). In Bullets for the Bridegroom (1944) Whit and Kitty MacLeod (George’s widow) go to Reno to get married and get caught between German spies and the undercover FBI agents who are trailing them. It gets personal for Whit in It Ain’t Hay (1946) when he receives a severe beating ordered by a drug smuggler, Barney Steele, who thinks Whit has double-crossed him. Whit risks everything—his friends, his marriage, his business, his life—in order to even the score with Steele.

Dell 270

Dell 270 back

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