The Crash of ’79

The Crash of ’79 is a book so real that its plot reads like today’s headlines. The central figure is that world traveler, playboy, despot, and winter-sports enthusiast His Imperial Majesty the Shah of Iran, whose grandiose and megalomaniacal dreams, nurtured in secret and financed by oil money, engulf the lives of Erdman’s characters, each of whom, unknowingly, is contributing to the event that will bring about the Crash of ’79 and the demise of the industrial West.

Bill Hitchcock, the hero, is a successful banker, divorced skirt-chaser, confirmed cynic and financial genius. It is Hitchcock whom the Saudi Arabians pick to manage their vast hoard of accumulated oil profits and to fire a warning shot across the bows of the Western financial community. And no sooner has Hitchcock sat down at his desk in Riyadh than he learns just how precariously balanced the Western world’s financial system really is.

Before long Hitchcock is wheeling and dealing at the highest levels of government, while pursuing Ursula Hartmann, beautiful Swiss daughter of one of the world’s most distinguished nuclear scientists. Through her he becomes aware that the Saudi’s, for all their oil and money, have a problem of their own – the Shah or Iran’s ambition to control the entire Middle East and its precious oil…