Exclusive interview with author Chris Morgan Jones and a review of his novel about a Russian Oligarch’s financial front man
Rating: 3 Stars
Reviewed by Gabrielle Pantera
“Much of my work was in Russia or related to it, and I found the endless collision of politics, business and crime there constantly intriguing,” says The Silent Oligarch author Chris Morgan Jones. “I used to be a corporate investigator and in my old job I would often come across a particular type of character who I hadn’t come across in fiction and who began to fascinate me. The financial frontman, the lawyer or accountant who hides the proceeds of crime or corruption in offshore bank accounts in discreet little islands around the world.”
“Every interesting case I worked on would uncover these people, and I wondered who they were, and how they had become what they had become, and how they lived with the complicated lies that they told for a living,” says Jones.
The Silent Oligarch is a thriller set mostly in present-day Russia. The story moves from Russia to London to Kazakstan and the Cayman Islands. The characters and plot are complex. Jones has a flair for making your heart pound as you read. His writing is in the vein of John le Carré and Martin Cruz Smith.
Benjamin Webster was an idealistic young journalist and while in Russia he saw a colleague murdered. Ten years later, Webster is a corporate investigator who spies on the rich and powerful. Hired to ruin a prominent business named Malin he discovers his target may have been responsible for his friend’s death. Webster focuses on British lawyer Richard Lock, who married into Malin’s family and is the weak link in Malin’s empire. The police get involved. The press can smell a hot story brewing. Lock goes on the run. But who’s after him? Webster, Malin, or a secret government agency?
“I was hugely lucky in having done most of the research before I even realized I wanted to write it,” says Jones. “In the course of my time as an investigator, hundreds of stories crossed my desk and as many characters and locations. It’s all based on experience.” Jones did research the back story of one of the main characters, a Russian who’s worked in the country’s energy industry all his life, to get those details right.
The key to Jones’ story was that the financial front man had a Russian oligarch as a client. “It struck me that the relationship between them and their clients was unusual. Both needed the other, but each was a liability to the other as well. The secrets that they shared could quite easily, it seemed to me, come to poison an already delicate balance between the two.”
Despite professional qualifications and a veneer of respectability, the financial front men are criminals too, with the same prospects of being investigated and imprisoned as their clients.
Because the book is based on Jones’ professional experience, some of his friends imagine the story as being about them. “I have a good Turkish friend who happened to go to Eton…I stole that detail for a Turkish character in the book, who everyone now thinks is my friend reproduced on the page…despite the fact that everything else about him is completely different.”
Jones says he’s surprised his book was ever published. “When I began writing I of course had hopes that it would be, but no realistic expectation. I’d never written before and had no idea whether people would like what I was doing.
Jones says he’s writing the third draft of his second novel, which features one of the main characters, Ben Webster, in a very different story.
Jones is based in London , England. He was born in Bromsgrove, England, a little town in the West Midlands.
The Silent Oligarch by Chris Morgan Jones. Hardcover, 336 pages, Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The (January 19, 2012). Language: English, ISBN-13: 978-1594203190 $25.95
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