From Balance Sheets to Plot Twists
I’m often asked how I came to create the Hamilton St. James mystery series, what drove me to do it. The honest answer requires taking a step back, to a time long before I ever signed a financial statement or outlined a plot.
Before Hamilton existed, before my career as a business strategist and accountant, a Canadian kid was sitting in a grade-school classroom, pencil in hand, facing an English exam. The assignment was simple: write a complete story in a short amount of time. No topic. No restrictions. Just imagination and a blank page.
I don’t remember what I wrote that day, but I remember how it felt. Something about the challenge, the chance to build a world, invent characters, and see where they might go felt instinctively right. Natural. Enjoyable. The story probably wasn’t any good, but the experience was transformative. That small spark of creativity stayed with me, quietly smouldering beneath the surface of everything that came after.
Life, of course, took a more practical turn. I built a career in accounting, became a Fellow Chartered Professional Accountant, a Certified Fraud Examiner, and eventually a Managing Partner at EY (then Ernst & Young). I spent decades helping organizations untangle problems, trace irregularities, and navigate complexity; the kind of work that demands precision, skepticism, and the ability to see patterns others might miss.
It turns out, those are also the tools of a mystery writer.
When I retired, that long-dormant spark had room to breathe. For the first time in decades, there were no deadlines, no client files, no quarterly reports, just the open field of imagination. And into that space stepped Hamilton St. James: an investigator who sees what others overlook, who lives at the intersection of business, power, and human frailty.
Hamilton’s world was a natural extension of the one I knew: the quiet tension of boardrooms, the moral gray zones of corporate life, the fragile line between ambition and ethics. Writing him felt like merging two lives: the analytical one I’d built over thirty years, and the creative one I’d put on pause since childhood.
Some people reinvent themselves after retirement. I simply reintroduced myself to a part of me that had been waiting since grade school. From that freedom and that rediscovered joy of storytelling, the Hamilton St. James Mystery series was born.
- Peter Cleveland
Peter Cleveland spent more than three decades in accounting and corporate investigations before turning to fiction. His third novel, Shadows of Deceit, takes Hamilton St. James from the boardroom to the jungles of Costa Rica, where the numbers don’t lie, but everyone else might.
