Meltdown! The Book

The exclamation mark is ours - but surely merited. Deal Journal reports that the race is on to get out the first narrative of Bear Stearns demise even as the final chapter of the saga remains in flux.
Publisher Doubleday has apparently already signed up William Cohan, whose look at Lazards, “The Last Tycoons”, won the FT/Goldman Sachs business book of the year in 2007, to pen the next financial epic.
Editor-in-chief Bill Thomas was on the phone last Friday apparently, entreating Cohan to put the saga into prose, before JPMorgan added the next twist to Bear’s demise.
Mr. Cohan subsequently wrote a proposal over the weekend for a financial narrative that will place Bear Stearns at its hub. After speaking to Mr. Cohan’s agent, Joy Harris, Mr. Thomas struck a deal on Tuesday. The book, tentatively titled “Meltdown,” is expected to be published in spring 2009. “He will tell the story of the financial crisis in all its manifest glory through a narrative whose center is Bear Stearns,” said Mr. Thomas.
Other would-be chroniclers of the credit crisis and Bear blow-up should get typing pronto.
But Mr Cohan probably needs a fresher title. Martin Baker, the other half of fund manager Nicola Horlick, already has a “fast-moving suspense novel…set in the world of high finance” with the same name.
Apparently, this is the first of a trilogy featuring academic-cum-sleuth, Samuel Spendlove:
Meltdown is a story of quest, love and moral retrospection. Sent by a powerful media baron to unearth the truth about the suspected market manipulation of the shares in a publishing company, Samuel Spendlove stumbles upon a far bigger, infinitely more dangerous plot to bring down the world’s financial markets.