The Bezzle

I recently read Cory Doctorow’s new novel, The Bezzle. (FYI his publisher sent me a copy.) It’s the follow-up (and in the story’s own timeline, a prequel) to Cory’s excellent tech-themed thriller, Red Team Blues. The hero of Red Team Blues is Marty Hench, a forensic accountant who loves barbecuing, whiskey, and exposing elaborate financial scams, especially cryptocurrency ones. He’s in his early sixties and gets called in by a vastly wealthy friend to retrieve the crypto-key an international crime family is after. It’s a thrilling ride that got me back into reading the first time covid fried my brain. Red Team Blues is also fascinating on crypto and cyber-security, and its attention to cultural and sociological detail is lovingly rendered, line by snappy line. The Bezzle takes Marty back to the dot com boom. Same guy, very different novel. Utterly worth your time.

First, the title. ‘Bezzle’ was coined by JK Galbraith to describe the blissful and often long moment when an embezzlement has occurred but before it’s been discovered. The embezzler has his money. The victim still thinks he has his. It’s the gravity-defying interval when Wile E. Coyote is running on air and hasn’t begun to fall.

The Bezzle is about three bezzles of wildly increasing severity. The first is when guys like Marty’s younger buddy, Scott Warms, sell their tech firms to Yahoo and still think the product they built will survive. Scott has recently sold his company and become a Yahoo employee, realising too late that Yahoo only acquired his product to kill the competition. Now, Scott’s job is to evaluate other acquisitions for Yahoo. He tries to warn people against selling to Yahoo, but most prefer the money and some wishful thinking. The bezzle is a happy place to be. No one wants to be told they’re in it.

Scott’s still quite rich, so he and Marty fly to Catalina Island near Los Angeles to blow off some steam. In Catalina’s capital, Avalon, as we’re (just a little repetitively) told, there is no crime. It’s a policing grey area and the full force of the law is only applied to worker bees, not visiting millionaires. Marty and Scott discover and disrupt a Ponzi scheme that’s sucked in many locals, and make a powerful enemy. The victims initially can’t believe their money’s gone. There must be a way out, they plead, but Marty says it’s a negative-sum game. They lost the money the moment they paid in. Once you’re in the bezzle, all you can do is pull down the pyramid, and fast. The longer it goes, the more lives it wrecks. The person running the scheme sets the rules and breaks them, just like in bigger, officially sanctioned, white collar frauds.

In this well-made novel, there’s a third, devastating pyramid scheme which the first two have set us up to read. This time, the criminals at the top are the private equity firms that have rolled up California’s and other US states’ prisons into ownership by a single firm. They’ve loaded it with hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, taken a massive pay-off equivalent to that debt, and begun to squeeze states, employees, prisoners and prisoners’ families dry, just to pay the interest on the debt. The Bezzle tells how the PE-backed privatisers monetise and drain everything that makes a prisoner’s life bearable; sufficient calories, reading material, time outside the cell, phone calls, and family visits. Late in the book Marty says the cruelty isn’t the point; it’s the money. It was always the money.

The state has lost its money as soon as it signs the deal, as PE firms hoover up and run down public assets and services. The taxpayers have lost theirs, though they’re happy with life in the bezzle, assuming that prison is just something that happens to people who deserve it, so the more of it, the better. The prisoners and their families are miserable, but they were never the marks, just the means. Can Marty watch out for his friend and unravel this fraud? Maybe. It’s a novel, not a just-so story.

Recently, a friend told me what he thinks is the Jack Reacher novels’ secret sauce. Yes, they have short sentences, short chapters and lots of cliff-hangers. (And a thoroughly delightful author who’s an interesting reader, supports writing in general and IMHO deserves every bit of his success.) But what keeps people (mostly men who don’t read many other novels) coming back for more is that Reacher is full of information about how things work. Things like locks, rifles, security systems; practical, manly stuff. I was stunned, to be honest. It had never occurred to me that people use novels to get information you can find in a Youtube tutorial. But it makes sense!

I enjoy the how-things-work of Cory’s novels as much as I do the stories and characters. The truth is, they all work together. There’s reason and urgency to his descriptions of financial records cross-referencing, or searching out owners on the supposedly anonymous blockchain, and the characters doing the explaining have a strong point of view. Their specialist knowledge cuts new paths to move through the world. Anyway, anyone who loves historical fiction, crime procedurals, and of course science fiction and fantasy, knows that half the fun is the world-building, which is just another way to say world-explaining.

Quite possibly this is all so obvious it doesn’t need to be said! But I was surprised and quite delighted to remember Jack Reacher this morning when I sat down to try and convey the rich reading pleasure in a novel of the grimmest of topics, the American carceral state. This book is a furious, clear-eyed, accounting of the obfuscated numbers that make the United States the country that’s imprisoned more people than any other regime, ever. And so many of them brown and Black. It’s a novel of issues, presented as they should be, detail by devastating detail. The issues and ideas are this novel’s warp, the specificity and sometimes surprising emotional truths its weft. (Like Marty’s first adventure, this one is grounded in male friendship and thoughtful care. Also book chat! The all-male prison reading-group’s take on The Hobbit is one for the ages.)

While company names are changed, the novel draws deeply on real life horrors like the ‘deputy gangs’ of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. These gangs of neo-Nazi police were (are?) made up of men who batter and kill people of colour, openly and with near impunity. The novel’s reach extends to the capture and exploitation of inmates’ reading, with libraries shut, physical books forbidden, and prisoners forced to pay premium rates to temporarily license on their shitty Android devices, books that are long out of copyright. There’s also a surprising but believable overlap of interest between the extraction capitalists and the Nazi cops. One side whittles down and extorts the sustenance prisoners need to survive with some humanity intact, the other ensures a steady supply of mostly brown and Black bodies to imprison.

I compared the first Marty Hench novel, Red Team Blues – about blockchain and the white-collar butler class to global crime – to Dickens’ Bleak House. In both, a single case is the centrifuge. Its effects spin out to show how the privileged classes are so eagerly corrupted. This time round, The Bezzle does for privatised Californian prisons what Little Dorrit did for the Marshalsea. There are people who know what’s up and should do better don’t, or can’t; the California Attorney General’s office is almost as pathologically helpless as Dickens’ “Circumlocution Office”, especially when Trump’s presidency ushers in the US’s ‘golden age of grift’. Similarly to Little Dorrit, The Bezzle puts the most blameless character possible into the maw of for-profit incarceration. Just as sweet young Amy Dorrit was her era’s most attractive innocent, our version is Scott Warms, an agreeable if initially callow young tech bro.

Scott is white, educated, rich and connected; the sort of person least likely to be convicted of any crimes he might commit, and a type whose incarceration is often portrayed at sentencing hearings and in newspaper reporting as unnatural and especially tragic. His was a life considered to be worth something before he ‘threw it all away’. Scott has the book thrown at him because, although he’s rich and white, he’s crossed someone richer and better connected. He also has the misfortune to be sentenced during the US’s baseball-inspired jurisprudence of ‘three strikes, you’re out’, kicked off by California and made into federal law by Bill Clinton. I won’t spoil the ending, but where Scott lands after years in prison is both extraordinary and satisfying. Marty ends the novel somewhat chastened, and on his way to being the more thoughtful person we meet in Red Team Blues.

The Bezzle has surprises, pleasant and otherwise. The textures and observations of the dot com boom are spot on and brought me right back. There’s a ridiculous dot com in the opening pages, and someone has to dial long-distance to their home ISP to download their email. Monied men wear Japanese denim and grumpy old (or middle-aged) farts refer to GW Bush as “Shrub”. I love Cory’s attention to male fashion and how it expresses and maintains status.

This focus is pointed at the physical and mental conditions of prisoners, too, and at their families. One short waiting room scene gives a vignette of the pain of incarceration without rehabilitation, respect or the most basic of care, as it impacts on families and loved ones. Each little group gets half a dozen or a dozen words, and each contains a world of sorrow. At one especially low point in Scott’s incarceration, Marty describes him as a “shattered zombie”. At another, as “a lousy JPEG of himself”. The details matter, to novelists and forensic accountants. They add up.

The Bezzle also made me think about something else almost too obvious to mention, how money and power are concentrated to make some people’s lives frictionless and insolently unaccountable, and to strip other people’s lives of the tiniest of pleasures, the most essential of connections and experiences. By coincidence, I’ve just finished Emily St John Mandel’s novel, The Glass Hotel, about a Bernie Madoff-like fraud. There’s a line, late in the book, that basically says luxury is weakness. Which, of course. The cashmere jumpers so soft on the skin, the memory foam and anticipation of needs, the private chefs and masseuses. It bears saying again, since luxury functions as the spoils in a war-like conflict of ‘survival of the fittest’ that really, is mostly just fraud; the rich aren’t the strongest. They’re just the best protected. What they’re best protected from and fear most of all are consequences. As this novel shows, in any real jeopardy they quickly fold.

It’s inevitable that we compare books we’re reading to other recent reads. Scott reminds me of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, who’s stripped bone-clean by hardship and becomes another, nobler version of himself. (I’m always reading, or tbh listening to the audiobook of Piranesi. It’s been three years now and I think about him all the time.) Just occasionally, people who are meant to be broken, aren’t. I’m not sure we deserve their stories, but we do seem to need them.

It cannot be said too many times that white-collar criminals largely go free and unmolested, while the people they prey on are so often crushed. Mandel’s Madoff-like character ends his days in humane prison conditions that should be universal but are reserved for rich white men, double-agents and child abusers. He muses about how money is a game with two levels, and he’s always been able to play at the higher one. But while Mandel holds the grit of material suffering at a remove – insulated always by gossamer suggestions that this is just one of infinite possible worlds, anyway – Cory’s Bezzle doesn’t look away. Justice is in short supply, but with Marty Hench involved, there’s always the chance of balancing the books.

The Bezzle is an exciting financial thriller, a deeply grounded, campaigning novel, a bravura display of how SFF world-building can strip America’s real-life self-mythology bare, and above all a heartfelt tale of loyalty and friendship in near-impossible conditions. I strongly recommend it.