Unmasked: the murky past of the Booker Winner

Fiachra Gibbons

The novelist DBC Pierre, winner of the Man Booker Prize, confessed to betraying and fleecing his friends in a manner that even Byron would have blanched at. The reformed drug addict and gambler admitted to selling his best friend's home and pocketing the proceeds as well as working up debts of hundreds of thousands of dollars in a scheme to find Montezuma's gold in Mexico.
Pierre is the nom de plume of an enigmatic Mexican-Australian called Peter Finlay, 42, whose chequered past began to catch up with him last month when he was shortlisted for the prize, arguably the world's most prestigious book award.

Before then, despite the rollicking reviews for his first novel, Vernon God Little - a darkly comic morality tale set in Texas about a boy who lies his way into very deep trouble - so little was known of Finlay that his name was mis-spelt on the Man Booker longlist as DCB Pierre. But all that is about to change.

The clue to his dishonesty, which included persuading a friend to sign away his property, was there in the acknowledgements at the back of his book. "To all whose shores remain littered with my sins - this could be the handle of a mop... " he wrote.

And he told the Guardian: "I let some very fine people who believed in me down. I thought that if the book worked, I could start to quietly pay some of them back." Finlay denied that he was a crook, or that he had "deliberately ruined other peoples lives".

But he did confess to the Guardian that he used to have a major drug and gambling problem. "For nine years I was in a drug haze, on a rampage of cocaine, heroin, any shit I could get. I am not proud of what I have done and I now want to put it right." Finlay said he has begun to pay back the 75-year-old American painter whose home he admits to "taking". "One day I will pay it all back," he vowed.

The author has spent the last few years in a rented hideout among the hills of north Leitrim in Ireland, a place so isolated it is jokingly referred to as "one step beyond the back of beyond". But he said he knew that one day he would be found and exposed.

"I've been preparing for this, playing it out in my head for
years. I knew it would come," he said. "I am a very changed character in myself. I no longer have expensive tastes, a cup of tea and a book is like a week in Monte Carlo for me."

The death of his wealthy father when he was 19, and the overnight nationalisation of Mexico's banks in 1982 which slashed his inheritance from "hundreds of thousands of dollars to tens of thousands at a stroke", was the catalyst for his woes, he insists. "I suppose I have this Mexican machismo thing. I had to provide for my mother. I remember doing a mad deal with a woman in a tower block who had a safe full of US dollars to get what was left of our money out of the country. That night I left Mexico City with the cash sown into my suit."

In a further intriguing twist to the tale, the odds on the reformed gambler picking up the £50,000 cheque on Tuesday night shortened yesterday after one of the judges, the critic DJ Taylor, hinted they have a "favourite in mind".

Meanwhile, Finlay/Pierre - whose initials DBC stand for Dirty But Clean -- a nod to his murky past -- said he was saving his most explosive revelations for his memoirs. "I'm keeping quite a lot back - there are some things you would never believe. At one stage, I won the lottery in Mexico. To be honest, I've got a shit load more stuff to work through. It's going to be a long road back."

The rights to Finlay's novel have already been optioned by a French producer working in Hollywood. There is likely to be no shortage of takers for those to his life either.

This article was first published in the Guardian.