The cabbies lose but are drawn into the web of a massive takeover bid as they try to fund

The cabbies lose but are drawn into the web of a massive takeover bid as they try to fund medical treatment for a sick child.
“The thread is revenge,” says Mr McLaren, “but that’s slightly missing the point It’s simply a feeling for the underdog. The only way to resolve the problem is for the cabbies to get their own back, but I wanted them to have a decent motivation.” Realistic characterisation is harder than it looks. What’s stopping me?”
Mr McLaren’s Black Cabs tells the story of three cab drivers who want to make a quick buck on information they overhear from traders. “I’ll be sitting in a meeting at work and I’ll be thinking I would rather like to get on with my scenes, any of the confrontational ones, where people are sparking off each other.” Writing such scenes, says Ms O’Flanagan, liberates her, and not just in imaginative terms “I will think I could have done something like this. Her new book, Suddenly Single, features an aggressive, go-getting businesswoman – something akin to her younger self. At NCB she was a foreign exchange dealer, and now deals in corporate bonds.

She too had an early desire to write and no family of her own, but along with Mr McLaren, she agrees that a major motivating force was the potential to poke fun at City values and to reinvent herself. Her original ambition was to be a librarian, but she failed the interview and came top in banking exams instead. Her last book, Isobel’s Wedding, topped the Irish women’s fiction chart a year ago. They can do syntax, and they know where to put commas, but the idea that your tempo is fast or slow, hot, warm or cold, is a totally alien concept.”
Sheila O’Flanagan, 41, trades at NCB Stockbrokers in Dublin by day, and writes by night. Some, like me, don’t have a family, and my job had reached its sell-by date.
“People go into gardening, or marathon running; most of us can’t write symphonies but we can all sort of do words.” In the City, he found a scarcity of talent “They simply can’t do words. “I have always reckoned everybody has a roughly equal amount of creativity and if they love their job, they tend to put it into that, or into their family. “I developed a love for words in my first job, at the Foreign Office,” says Mr McLaren.

In 1980, he was recruited to set up Baring’s operation in Tokyo, and moved to Morgan Grenfell in 1987 as a mergers and acquisitions director. This year, he left his job, though he still runs his financial boutique, Barchester Advisory, and holds non-executive directorships of Groupe Chez Gerard and Macallan Distillers.
Three years ago, when he was 45, he decided it was time to write. Last month Simon & Schuster published his thriller, Black Cabs, with a campaign including posters on the London Underground and window displays in bookshops. But, despite longer working hours and less leisure to write, so have the ambitions of City scribblers.
John McLaren is one of a handful to have inched into the big league. But that was stupid.
“I’ve since become a magnet for people in the City who are trying to write on the side and make money at it.” The market for fictional intrigues based on financial trading – seen as an exciting lifestyle – has become keener.

Mr Ridpath, who formerly managed Saudi International Bank’s investment portfolio as its head of securities, says: “I was slightly nervous about the fact that I was writing a thriller – I thought it was a bit demeaning. In the 1980s, Wall Street trader Michael Lewis fictionalised events at Salomon Brothers in the now-classic Liar’s Poker, but for most people in the financial world, fiction looked like a third-rate career path. Mr Ridpath now writes full-time, spending three days a week at the office he rents in the City.

The fantasy of writing fiction has become surprisingly commonplace among City professionals. But when he sold the book in 1993, the advance allowed him to give up his work at the venture capital firm Apax Partners. Mr Ridpath now writes full-time, spending three days a week at the office he rents in the City. When Michael Ridpath wrote the bestseller Free To Trade in the early 1990s, he told none of his colleagues in the City. He had taught himself how to write by studying a handbook, and he reckoned they would be unimpressed by his hobby.

But when he sold the book in 1993, the advance allowed him to give up his work at the venture capital firm Apax Partners. He had taught himself how to write by studying a handbook, and he reckoned they would be unimpressed by his hobby. When Michael Ridpath wrote the bestseller Free To Trade in the early 1990s, he told none of his colleagues in the City. He has great plans to take Siemens to its new spiritual home on Wall Street, with a listing expected there in 2001.
Apart from the employees, and the Siemens family who hold 7 per cent of the stock, most of those people with a stake in the company are delighted by the move.. There are units that seem to fit in with the new direction, but make little cash, and some, notably Osram, which are cash cows out on a limb from the core activities.
The chief executive is once again making promises about troubled subsidiaries returning to profit next year. Once the restructuring is through, the question is – what’s going to happen next?”
Mr von Pierer appears to be backing away from plans to narrow Siemens range to just two or three core activities. He added: “The trouble is that they haven’t said anything about where they are headings.