Tony Thomson’s Second Career

By Lindsey Pizzica Rotolo

A glance at Tony Thomson on paper (he was educated at Deerfield and Yale, served in the army during Vietnam, obtained graduate degrees from Oxford and Stanford and had a 30-year career in various investment management firms in London) doesn’t tell the whole story.

While Thomson was quite successful in his working years, it’s hard not to wonder if an alternative path that delved into the human condition—psychology or sociology—would have been a better fit for the ever-curious, always-candid, self-published author.

He has written two memoirs and two novels since retiring and moving to Norfolk in 2002. His second novel, “Meltdown at North Fork,” just recently became available for purchase on Amazon.

Thomson finds life to be quite humorous, and seems captivated by the variety of people who inhabit it. For someone whose retirement goal was to “just have dogs and a garden, and not go through life a foreigner,” he certainly enjoys his departures, whether by way of airplane or by disappearing into his writing.

Writing was always a part of Thomson’s life. He did a lot of it in his investment career—requests for proposals, quarterly reports and marketing materials. His first job after business school was as a fund manager, but he was quickly drawn into the marketing side of the business. “It was amazing. We had all these Oxford and Cambridge grads at J. P. Morgan, but none of them could put a coherent paragraph together,” he says.

Thomson made time for creative writing in those years as well. He wrote a novel decades ago about the IRA. “It was rubbish, I tossed it. What do I know about the IRA?”

Thomson’s first writing project upon retirement covered a topic that he did know a lot about—how he fell in love with his wife, Alyson. “Love, Fate & Afghanistan” is a touching, intimate memoir about a road trip they took in 1971 from London to India and back. Then came “Eat Your Heart Out, Ho Chi Minh; or Things You Won’t Learn at Yale,” a dissection of Thomson’s experiences in the 1960s at Yale University and in Vietnam.

His first novel, “Trust Fund Kids,” was inspired by the controversy over the ill-fated Yale Farm Golf Course proposal. The book drew criticism from Norfolkians for its lack of editing and some character depictions that hit a little too close to home.

“I’m really not good at character development,” admits Thomson. “My characters are always one-dimensional, so it’s odd that some people in town think I’m depicting them. I don’t write about real people.” As for the lack of editing, Thomson adds, “I broke down and hired an editor this time, but my wife says it makes little difference.”

The idea for his most recent novel came from a conversation he had one night with a friend of his son’s. They discussed the tight connection between our state’s finances and Wall Street, and imagined what would happen if the Wall Street money dried up and everyone started leaving Fairfield County in droves. Thomson ran with it, and about a year later had a postapocalyptic novel ready to send off to Create Space, a subsidiary of Amazon.

“It’s funny, it’s supposed to be funny,” says Thomson of “Meltdown in Norfolk.” And it is. There are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, especially for those who know Norfolk well. “We need to laugh at politics right now, it’s all become so absurd. The politics of 2016 are so crazy that nothing in ‘Meltdown’ is implausible,” says Thomson. Well, except maybe the werewolf.

“I try to give people a few laughs,” says Thomson. “If I succeed in that, great. That said, I have found that most people don’t have a very good sense of humor.”

He is already at work on his next novel, which will be about fund management. “I’ve long thought it would be great to write about that subject . . . it attracts really quirky people.” This one will be set in London.

Photo by Alyson Thomson