The Swetky Agency - Clint Magnum, CA Submission Synopsis

Submission Synopsis

Clint Magnum,
Certified Accountant
by Laird Long

Length:
50,000 Words

Genre:
Humor
Parody
Mystery
Action

Zip File:
Download Complete Book Here

Author Laird Long

Sentence:
Move over, Arthur Anderson, there's a new pencil-pusher in town, and does he have an attitude!

Blurb/Logline:
“I’m a Chartered Accountant-in-training with a head full of numbers and fists full of dynamite. I make the numbers crunch, and, baby, if they don’t, I become the biggest liability on the balance sheet of your life.”

That’s Clint Magnum – CA wannabe, a hard-rock behemoth with a gung-ho attitude and a quick-draw calculator. His life’s mission is to bring order to the capital markets and garner an accounting designation in the process; and swing low sweet chariot for those who stand in his way. He sees accounting as neither an art nor a science, but rather a contact sport. This is his brutal story.

Synopsis:

Clint Magnum, CA – A Life in the Numbers Racket is the recounting of a year and a bit in the hardboiled life of young gun Clint Magnum, accountant-in-training. After graduating from university, he’s reluctantly recruited by Twinkle & Winkle Chartered Accountants of Winnipeg, Manitoba, and quickly handed his first front-line audit assignment: Roadhog Trucking – a transportation company whose corporate vision is a load of something other than clarity. After smashing that audit into file-sized pieces, he tackles the shady CEO of a non-profit organization with a serious profit problem.

From there, the assignments pile up like charred bodies on love’s battlefield: the audit of a senior citizen-run crafts emporium where the blue-haired merchants are importing more than just knickknacks; attendance at an arms-length list of inventory counts, where Clint battles the elements and the laws of physics to bring back the message the capital markets breathlessly await: “The numbers are right! The numbers are right!”; other work as assigned in the Great White North; and the clandestine tax reclassification of the oxymoronic Democracy Foundation.

Along the way, Clint and his buddies, Spud Morgan and Vanya Holden, experience the kind of Firm-sponsored professional and personal development that leaves them as emotionally-stunted as clear-cut forest. They’re forced to attend a training session in the secluded hinterland of Eastern Manitoba, under the unbalanced guidance of a host of crackpot consultants and technical shamans, and then a boardroom meeting where the partners ask the tough question: “How do we get more clients?” and Clint provides the tough answer: “I thought that was your job?”

Clint works hard and plays hard, whether he’s grappling with Vanya on a non-professional basis, being volunteered for mandatory charity work, providing entertainment at the Firm’s annual, pay-as-you-go Christmas party, or rocking the house at a CA curling tournament that quickly degenerates into a full-fledged, Big Eight fistic fun-fest.

And as the months crawl by like wounded snails, the mother of all accountancy tests looms ever larger – the Uniform Final Examination, a four day, four hours per day torture test the passing of which will determine the Few, the Proud, the CA. In preparation for this sadistic pleasure, Clint and the gang head off to Summer School, where tempers flare and the battle lines are quickly, if vaguely, drawn over the white-hot, panic-button issue of equipment depreciation. Clint’s street-level accounting smarts triumph over formal education, but he’s forced to unleash the savage program Scared Smart! in a last-ditch effort to win Spud’s war on Advanced Auditing – to no avail. So, it’s left to Clint and Vanya to advance to a Newfy UFE Prep School where the curriculum stridently advocates understanding, but Clint bluntly demands remembrance, and then, finally, they and other grunts from T & W and other Firms write the Uniform Final Examination.

Following the UFE, in the three month, tension-torqued interval between exam writing and exam results, the public accounting adventures continue. Clint has a violent reaction to his annual performance evaluation and the dearth of zeros in his annual raise, and a late-night office hockey game raises more than a little hell. Then the klaxon call of “Auditor Down!” sends Clint charging out to an abusive client who likes to push pencil-pushers around until they push back; and a charity telethon devolves into city-licensed larceny.

The day of determination at last arrives; the UFE doomsday clock ticks down to zero hour and the results are known – except for Clint. He has to confront the accounting emperor of Manitoba in a Clash of the Titans-like showdown to figure out if he has passed or failed; and, from there, the convocation ceremony degenerates into emotional sparks and electrical blackout.

Bio:
Big guy, sense of humor. Writing credits include: Blue Murder Magazine, Handheldcrime, Orchard Press Mysteries, Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine, Plots With Guns, Hardboiled, Thriller UK, Man's Story 2, Shred of Evidence, Bullet, Eternal Night, Another Realm, The Dark Krypt, Albedo One, Here & Now, Monthly Short Stories, and stories in the anthologies Amazing Heroes, Darkways of the Wizard, F/SF, City Crimes/Country Crimes, and Crossings. His story, 'Sioux City Express', was listed as one of the top 50 mystery stories of 2002 in the anthology The Best American Mystery Stories - 2003.

Additional:
The author's publishing credits include over two hundred short stories in the hardboiled, hardcore, and humor genres, three of which have won awards. His knowledge of the in's and out's of accounting are legendary. He worked for Price Waterhouse, Chartered Accountants, for eight years.