Man Booker thriller: who's been boosting McCarthy?

It is rare for an old-fashioned thriller to make it to the Man Booker Prize final, but something fishy has been going on at the bookmakers ahead of next week's prize-giving ceremony. So much so that Ladbrokes have suspended betting on Tom McCarthy's novel C after an "unprecedented" flurry of last-minute wagers.

More than £15,000 was placed on McCarthy to win - comprising almost 1,000 bets at an average of just under £20 - within a 24-hour period.

Labrokes say they became suspicious because so many of the bets were coming from within the London literary world.  "We have ten years experience of taking bets on the Booker Prize," said David Williams, a Ladbrokes spokesman, "and this is something we have never seen."

Two other bookmakers, William Hill and Paddy Power, have also reported "unusual" strings of bets placed on McCarthy's novel. As a result, William Hill reduced the odds on C from 2/1 to 10/11 favourite.

All of which suggests that insiders know who has won. However, that should be impossible because the judges only meet to make their final decision next Tuesday afternoon, ahead of the Guildhall dinner presentation.

Could one of the judges have spilled the beans, confident that C is a clear favourite within the judging panel? It seems unlikely. As Ion Trewin, literary director of the Man Booker, said: "It's one of the most open years in terms of who could win so I really don't understand it."

It is not unknown for publishers to place wagers on their own books succeeding in the Booker, in order to generate good PR. Could that be the case here?

A spokeswoman for McCarthy's publisher, Jonathan Cape, denied any such ruse.
"Jonathan Cape are delighted by the faith the betting public have been showing in Tom McCarthy's brilliant novel C," she added.
 
Whoever's responsible, of course, the bookies could once again be proved very wrong - just as they were this morning when the Nobel Prize for Literature was announced.

According to the bookies, the Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o was a dead cert and if it wasn't him , then it was going to be Cormac McCarthy or Haruki Marukami. All wrong. The prize went to the Peruvian Maria Vargas Llosa. ·