London: The City That Shapes My Thrillers 

Some writers invent their worlds. I spent almost thirty years working in mine.

London has been my home for forty years this year, and for thirty of those I worked in the Square Mile as an investment banker. I knew the early mornings, the late nights, the glass towers, the trading floors and boardrooms. I watched money move across borders in numbers so large that they almost ceased to feel real.

Almost.

Because behind every transaction, every decision and every carefully worded announcement, there were people… Ambitious people. Frightened people. Brilliant people. Ruthless people.

For a thriller writer, London provides rather good material.

A City of Contradictions

What fascinates me about London is not simply its size or its history. It is the contradictions.

Walk through the City of London and you can pass a medieval church reflected in the glass façade of an international bank. Turn the corner of a quirky little lane and centuries of history collide with billions of pounds moving through markets in fractions of a second—Poultry (a street that owes its name to a market that sold, you’ve guested, poultry) meets the Bank of England. 

Power is everywhere, and it shifts all the time. That has always interested me.

As a banker, I travelled extensively—across Europe, North America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa. Yet London remained the point to which so many threads returned. Deals negotiated thousands of miles away could ultimately land on a desk in the City. Political decisions made in Westminster could move markets and scupper transactions. 

And sometimes decisions that mattered were made somewhere much quieter. Behind a closed door. Over lunch in a gentlemen’s club. During a telephone conversation that may not be on the record.

That is where the thriller writer in me begins to wonder: what if?

The City Behind Henry Crowne

London is particularly important to my Henry Crowne Paying the Price series.

Henry is a financier, but he is also a man living a double life. His world is one of investment banking, money, intelligence, art collections and… crime—and London allows all of those worlds to exist close to one another.

In Collapse, the financial system is under enormous pressure. Henry’s firm is threatened, his past is catching up with him and the boundaries between finance, politics, criminality and the intelligence services begin to disappear.

I did not have to invent the atmosphere of the City. I knew it. I knew what it felt when markets were shaking the world and nobody quite knew where the next downturn would come. I knew the strange mixture of confidence and fear that can exist in financial institutions during a crisis. And I knew something else. People behave differently when they are under pressure.

That is useful territory for a thriller writer.

The financial crisis demonstrated that decisions taken by small groups of people could have consequences for millions. Banks, governments, regulators and central banks became part of the same extraordinary drama.

The novelist in me was fascinated by the question behind the headlines:

What happens when personal ambition becomes entangled with enormous financial power?

Henry Crowne emerged from that world. Not because he represents any particular banker I knew—he certainly doesn’t—but because the City gave me an understanding of the environment in which someone like Henry could exist.

Money Is Never Just About Money

One of the misconceptions about financial thrillers is that they must be about numbers.

Mine aren’t. They are about people, always people first even before the plot line settles. Money is simply a very effective way of exposing the skills and faults of a main character.

Give a character enough money to lose—or enough to gain—and you discover very quickly what matters to them. Loyalty? Reputation? Power? Survival? Morality?

That is why the City of London works so well as a thriller setting. The sums involved can be enormous, but the motivations remain intensely human. Greed. Fear. Jealousy. Ambition. Loyalty. Revenge. And occasionally redemption.

Those are the currencies I am really interested in.

From the City to Westminster—and Beyond

Of course, London’s influence on my books extends beyond finance. The physical distance between the City and Westminster (centre of political power) is small. The relationship between money and politics is considerably more complicated. That tension runs through many of my plots. My characters move through a London in which financiers, politicians, lawyers, police officers and intelligence operatives inhabit overlapping worlds. Remember that the famous MI6 (think James Bond) is only a mile away from Westminster and three miles from the City. They may have very different objectives, but their paths cross.

Sometimes deliberately. Sometimes disastrously.

In Breaking Point, for example, the deaths of two high-profile City bankers pull Nancy Wu and Inspector Jonathan Pole into an investigation touching London’s financial establishment, government and the Bank of England. Henry Crowne, meanwhile, is called in to help with the investigation. 

Different Londons. Different kinds of power… One city.

Nancy Wu’s London

Nancy Wu inhabits another side of the vibrant London.

A former Queen’s Counsel, she understands institutions and the people who operate within them. But she also understands something more important: institutions have rules; people have motives. The two are not always compatible and rules are made to be broken. 

In Blood Dragon, a kidnapping in London becomes connected to the disappearance of Nancy’s father in Beijing thirty years earlier. What begins as a crime investigation gradually reaches towards international intelligence and secrets that have survived for decades.

That is another quality London gives to my writing. It is an international, multicultural city. A crime committed here need not begin here. A decision made in Beijing, Washington or Moscow can leave a trail that eventually leads to a London street, an office, an art gallery or an apparently ordinary house. London allows a thriller to become international without ever losing its sense of place.

For a novelist interested in secrecy, deception and the subterranean currents of power, it is difficult to imagine a better playground.

The London You Don’t See

But perhaps the London that inspires me most is the one beneath the obvious London.

Not literally—although London certainly has enough tunnels, bunkers and forgotten spaces to keep a thriller writer occupied for years.

I mean the networks beneath everyday life. Who knows who? Who owes someone a favour? Who went to university together? Who worked together twenty years ago? Who sits on which board? Who can make one telephone call and open a door that is firmly closed to everybody else?

During my career, I sought to understand how these networks of influence operated. They exist everywhere, of course. But London concentrates them. Finance sits beside politics. Politics beside intelligence. Law beside business. Old institutions coexist with new fortunes. International money meets centuries-old establishment.

London as a Character

I don’t think of London simply as scenery.

In my books, I want the city to exert pressure on the characters. The polished entrance to an investment bank should tell you something before anyone speaks. So should a prison door closing behind someone who may or may not deserve to be there.

A quiet Mayfair street creates one kind of expectation. The City at seven in the morning creates another. Westminster after dark creates another again.

London under brilliant sunshine can looks confident, wealthy and like a stage where anything can happen. London in the rain is another creature entirely. Reflections stretch across wet pavements. Headlights disappear around corners. Buildings become shadows. People hurry with their heads down. Secrets somehow seem more plausible in the rain, or when the weather challenges the landscape and the people in it.

The Outsider Looking In

There may also be another reason London continues to fascinate me. I wasn’t born here.

I grew up in France before eventually coming to London, and perhaps part of me has always retained the outsider’s habit of observing the city rather than simply accepting it. Even after decades here, I still notice its peculiarities – The traditions. The codes. The understatement. The extraordinary proximity of wealth and hardship.

The way London constantly reinvents itself while stubbornly refusing to surrender its past. Being an outsider can be useful for a writer. You learn to watch. Across a negotiating table, what someone doesn’t say can be considerably more important than what they do.

Writing thrillers isn’t so different.

Why I Keep Coming Back

My River Swift novels take me elsewhere—to America, Afghanistan and landscapes very different from London.

I enjoy that enormously. Different landscapes create different dangers and force me to explore different kinds of characters. But London remains somewhere I instinctively return to. Perhaps because I know its rhythm of life, indifferent communities. Perhaps because so much of my previous life happened here.

Or perhaps because London contains almost everything I want in a thriller: money, politics, history, crime, intelligence, ambition and secrets. Especially secrets.

After so many years in investment banking, I learned that the official version of events is rarely the whole story. As a thriller writer, that is an irresistible thought. Every imposing door makes me wonder what is happening behind it. Every immaculate boardroom suggests conversations we will never hear. Every news headline makes me ask what happened before the story reached the newspaper—and what might have been deliberately left out.

London taught me to look beneath the surface. And that is probably why, no matter where my characters travel next, part of my writing will always belong here.