People: former CFO turns to mystery writing.

When most financial officers kick back at the end of a full-time career, they may dabble in consulting for nonprofits or local businesses. But writing fiction?

That's what Christopher Joyce, a former divisional CFO at AT & T Corp. and CFO at Cable & Wireless plc, chose to do after finishing a project in 2003. "I just had the opportunity after my last assignment to put my feet up for about a year. I'd long had it in the back of my mind to write a book--and with the time I had, I felt I no excuse not to."

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Joyce's book, Last Effects, was published last year through a company he set up himself, Centennial Books, in his hometown of Alexandria, Va. It's a mystery that takes a financial consultant back to the Vietnam days of his late brother, killed during the war there in the late 1960s. Turns out that there's something suspicious about the verdict that his brother had committed suicide ...

The novel moves briskly, has plenty of good dialogue and does a nice job of evoking the Marine Corps records office, which Joyce says he created partly by Internet research and partly by pure imagination. "A lot of that was artistic license," he concedes.

As for centering the novel around Vietnam, Joyce recalls that he spent almost two years there as a Marine, "and the scenes and the color are very much part" of his own experience. "I did want to write a mystery, and I felt that setting it there would allow me to tap into that prior experience. I also wanted to wrap in a business mystery; I wanted the protagonist to have more on his mind than just his brother's death."

Joyce, a retired FEI member, says he's a mystery fan, and had read a lot of authors like Rex Stout and Dick Francis over the years. But he realized after some research that the traditional means of producing a novel--finding an agent and then a publisher--is mighty daunting for someone who's never been published. He ended up forming Centennial, and hiring expertise as needed: a graphics artist to do the cover, a printer and an outside editor, who turned out to be a college professor from Oregon who moonlights as a shaper of fiction. Joyce also chose all the fonts and page layouts for the book and created a website for Centennial to promote it.

All of this is a far cry from his career as a financial executive. Much of that, he says, was spent overseas or in "the outer moons" of the AT & T galaxy, though he was the CFO or a top finance person at Bell Laboratories, AT & T Solutions, AT & T Universal Card and other units. Besides duty as CFO at Cable & Wireless in 1999-2002, he spent a year as the CFO of Georgetown University, restructuring its debt portfolio.

Joyce says he had earlier toyed around with writing fiction, but "really just for my own enjoyment--never with the idea of publishing in mind. When I thought about a book, fiction was a genre with a lot of attraction. You can really let your imagination run free. As a CFO, fiction gets you behind bars."