Pierre/Finlay, however, despite his Australian twang, prefers to call himself a Mexican. The one group who will not be toasting his victory are the bookies, who, having played a part in Finlay's earlier downfall, were badly burned.
Graham Sharpe, of William Hill, the doyen of literary sweep stakes, was sour about the shortlist.
"It was difficult to motivate myself to read the books. It is certainly the least impressive year I can remember," he said.
But if the shortlist was unimpressive, the longlist and the pool of 100 more novels from which it was drawn, was equally short on shock and awe.
Martin Amis, the perennial nearly man of British letters, failed yet again to live up to papa, Kingsley, who won the Booker with The Old Devils. The manner of his failure this time, however, was utterly humiliating.
He only made the longlist for The Yellow Dog -- a comic novel which several critics agreed was a dog indeed -- because the judges apparently felt sorry for him after the novelist Tibor Fischer, a former fan, had savaged him.
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