Bear Claw Ate Lee Child's Lemon Pound Cake

Last weekend I had the pleasure of introducing Lee Child on stage and rubbing elbows with him (he’s a Yankees fan) as I chaperoned him for the day at our Milford Readers & Writers Festival in Milford, Pennsylvania.

Prior to the festival, when I was going over final arrangements with his associate, I noticed that Lee had requested his driver pick him up before our dinner for festival speakers and organizers, so I said I’d get him something to eat for dinner. She described Lee as the very definition of the word “chill” (he is)—content with a place to have a cigarette and a cup of black coffee—and suggested he'd be happy with a piece of lemon pound cake for the car ride home.

Manette got a chuckle out of that story and the day before the festival she saw slices of lemon pound cake as impulse purchase items on the checkout line at the grocery store. She bought one for Lee.

When I met Lee the morning of the festival at the Hotel Fauchère, we were going over the schedule for the day and I mentioned that I would arrange something for him to eat before the car picked him up. I told him the story of the lemon pound cake. He smiled and asked me to thank Manette.

After the first event I went home to walk Styles and when I looked for Lee's lemon pound cake it was gone. We call my stepson, Zac, Bear Claw, because he has a habit of wandering downstairs in the middle of the night and eating whatever is around, most times mauling it in the process and leaving a trail of crumbs and wrappers behind. In this case there was no evidence that Lee's lemon pound cake had ever existed.

I was sitting next to Lee during the next presentation at the festival and someone on stage mentioned food. I leaned over to Lee and explained to him who Bear Claw was and that he had eaten Lee’s lemon pound cake. He laughed.

I had told Manette about Bear Claw’s indiscretion before I returned to the festival, and when it came time for me to introduce Lee on stage, we were sitting in the front row, waiting to go on. Manette walked up and I introduced her. She handed Lee a paper bag and leaned over to speak to him. I heard Lee say something to her about Bear Claw and they both laughed.

After the festival, Manette told me she had given Lee a lemon meltaway cookie—the only substitute she could find at the Patisserie Fauchère. In the process she said she was a fan, too. She said Lee smiled appreciatively. Then Manette said, “Of lemon pound cake.”

Bull Street - My White Collar Crime Thriller #1

Bull Street is the first of my White Collar Crime Thrillers. It's the story of Richard Blum, a freshly-minted MBA who goes to Wall Street as a naive, novice investment banker and soon discovers he’s landed smack in the middle of an insider-trading ring. As Richard peels away the layers of the skulduggery he's uncovered, he finds out that all the insider trading surrounds the deals of his firm’s largest client, Harold Milner. Milner is the takeover maven of his generation who Richard has idolized for years. In fact, on Richard’s first big deal on the Street, Milner has taken him under his wing. So Richard can’t believe Milner is involved in the insider trading, but stops short when he thinks of telling Milner what he’s discovered.

What if Milner is part of the ring? What if he isn’t but if Richard’s disclosure to Milner leaks to the traders and triggers them to come after him because he knows too much? And then what about the Feds he finds out are sniffing around? Will the footprints he’s left with his own digging cause the Feds to think he’s a participant in the ring and put him in their crosshairs?

Not only does Bull Street have those thriller elements, it's a coming of age story about Wall Street told from an insider's perspective. That's because I wrote the first draft of it when I was a freshly-minted MBA who landed on Wall Street as a naive, novice investment banker. As such, the novel includes many of my jarring learning experiences as I cut my teeth in Wall Street's sharp-elbowed world. I started my career there in an era that saw major insider trading and securities fraud scandals: the likes of Ivan Boesky, Marty Siegel, Dennis Levine and Mike Milken paid huge fines and went to jail in those days.

And so among the usual outsized personalities, misfits and oddballs I encountered in my early days on Wall Street, I also met a number of crooks from that era, a few of them high-profile. Bull Street is fiction, but the grandiose egos, the bare-knuckles negotiating tactics and the questionable ethics of many of the men and women of Wall Street portrayed in the book are true to life.

I hope you’ll give Bull Street a try. It's the first of my White Collar Crime Thrillers, and like all of the books in the series, it offers a window into the world of Wall Street’s financial gamesmanship from the perspective of one who’s been there.

Read a sample

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