2. The Chasm by Victor Canning

This book was published in 1947 and was one of Victor Canning's first books. I expected it to be more of a detective story but it turned out that it is more like a traditional piece of dramatic fiction. The book is set in Italy immediately after the end of WWII and is focused around an English soldier living in Italy called Burgess who is having a rough time dealing with the aftermath of the war. During the war he lost his three best friends and his fiance left him and married another man. Both of these events caused him some trauma to the point that he often halucinates and the thinks he hears his friends voices only to turn around and find that it is someone that he doesn't know. Finally his shrink tells him to leave the base in Bologna and go for a holiday in order to cure himself by doing some soul searching and trying to identify what is really bothering him. So, he heads off to Florence where he wanders around the city visiting all the sites that him and his friends had visited and doing all of the things that they had done together. This exercise is doing nothing for him other than exacerbating his condition.

While at a bar he meets up with an army acquaintance called Marsh who advises him to get out into the country and find some place where he can take in the mountain air and go for long walks to clear his head. Burgess listens and heads off into the countryside and stops at a town called Cappo and checks into the local hotel. On one of his walks he spots a young woman and a boy and decides to follow them. He catches up with them and starts talking to them and he is immediately captivated by the young woman's beauty. He goes to their village and being friendly Italians they invite him to stay with them.

While at this village he discovers that the lord of the village is in fact a Nazi soldier who is hiding out from the authorities. At this point the story diverges into three major themes: his love affair with Gemma who is engaged to a hot headed Italian, his attempts to out the Nazi soldier, and his continued efforts to deal with his hallucinations.

This is not as good a book as the other Canning novels that I have read. His writing is far too colorful and melodramatic for my liking and he makes a number of convenient logical leaps that are just not believable. For example, at one point he looks into the eyes of one of the villagers and realizes that the villager is allied with the Nazi soldier. It is an entertaining read but I wouldn't rush to put it on your bookshelves.

As an aside, the back cover says that the book will be one of Columbia Pictures' "biggest British productions." I don't think that it was ever made into a movie though.

1. The Predators' Ball by Connie Bruck

I had read this book when I was in college but I decided to pick it up because it explains a lot about today's economic situation. In the 1970s Michael Milken joined a fledgling second tier investment bank called Drexel Burnham where he began as a low level associate but quickly rose through the organization because he was very smart and because he created the concept of the levereged buyout or LBO which brought in a lot fees for the firm. His idea was that you could buy a company by borrowing a lot of money and using that borrowed money plus a little bit of your own cash to do the deal. He would do this by issuing junk bonds which are unrated bonds that carry a very high interest rate to compensate the lenders for the risk they are taking.

He began doing these deals at a modest pace to finance friendly take overs but then he hit on the idea of doing these kinds of bond issuances to finance hostile take overs and that's when his business really started moving. By the early 1980s he ran a huge junk bond business which had catapulted Drexel Burnham from relative obscurity to one of the stars of Wall Street. He had built such a franchise that in most years he did at least 75% of the junk bond issuances that were completed. To a large degree he was responsible for putting buyout funds like KKR, Blackstone and others into business.

The book paints him as an egocentric self dealing control freak. I find it difficult to trust these editorial type books on these kinds of matters but from what I remember I agree that he was at least a control freak. But then his and the Drexel Burnham empire both came crashing down when he was charged with insider trading, found guilty, had to pay a huge fine and go to jail for a few years. The book is a good story about excess financed by too much debt which is analogous to the causes of today's problems.