Paul Erdman was an economist and banker best known as the creator of bestselling financial thriller novels. His new genre, rooted in historical fact, well-researched monetary trends and detailed matters of international finance, was perhaps best exemplified by The Crash of ’79(1976), which foretold certain underlying trends that led to the actual crash of stock markets a few years later.

Erdman had, in the 1960s, established the first Swiss bank to be led by an American, which later became a branch of the United California Bank. In 1970 it collapsed – its chairman said that the reason was “unauthorised” trading in cocoa – and it was while Erdman, its president, was held in a jail in Basle awaiting charges that he wrote his first novel, The Billion Dollar Sure Thing (1973). For it he received the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.

After eight months in jail Erdman paid bail and returned to the US. He was sentenced by a Swiss court to nine years in jail, but did not go back. He continued to write financial fiction – or fi-fi, as he came to call it. The Silver Bears (1974) was turned into a film of the same name, starring Michael Caine, Cybill Shepherd and Jay Leno, and The Crash of ‘79 became a bestseller in the US and abroad.

His novels were reviewed not only in the mainstream media but also in business publications; and his lucid style enabled readers unfamiliar with complex financial concepts to learn about interest rates and global currency movements.

The Swiss Account (1992) is credited with helping to put the World Jewish Congress on the track of the gold, art and other assets taken from Jews during the Holocaust and later culminating in the historic settlements by Swiss banks with families of Jewish Holocaust victims.

Paul Erdman was born in Ontario, Canada, in 1932, to American parents. He graduated from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and received his PhD summa cum laude from the University of Basle in Switzerland. Early in his career he was a consultant for the European Coal and Steel Community (a precursor to the European Union) and Stanford Research Institute at Palo Alto, California.

He was an early supporter of web journalism, having been a founding financial columnist for MarketWatch.com, which was later acquired by Dow Jones & Company; and a leading expert in the field of international economics: he published several nonfiction works, among them Tug of War (1996) and Paul Erdman’s Money Book (1984), which set out his views on exchange rates and the international financial system.

Erdman lived for a while in England and after 1973 he was based in Sonoma County, California. His last novel – his tenth – is expected to be published this year.

Paul Erdman, banker and writer, was born on May 19, 1932. He died of cancer on April 23, 2007, aged 74