ANOTHER NOVEL FROM LARRY CRUMBLEY TO HELP TEACH ACCOUNTING AND AUDITING ISSUES

Larry Crumbley, a visiting professor at Lousianna State University has done it again. This time he enlisted as co-author Stanley Kratchman, an accounting professor at Texas A&M, to write a novel to be used as an instructional supplementary text. In their recently released novel Deadly Art Puzzle: Accounting for Murder, Crumbley and Kratchman follow a retired CPA and part-time professor as they track down a murderer, using the skills of forensic accounting. The text is designed to be used near the end of an advanced accounting course or at the beginning of a financial accounting theory course. Crumbley also believes the text would be ideal for an MBA program or a finance course that has light coverage of accounting, or could be used in CPA firms' in-house training programs.

"Forensic accountants are the private eyes of the business world," said Crumbley, who has written six other accounting novels under the pen name Iris Weil Collett. "A normal accountant acts like a watchdog, but a forensic accountant is trained to act like a bloodhound."

Forensic accountants as seen by Crumbley are often called into cases involving fraud to dissect financial statements and locate hidden assets. Accountants for the IRS use their forensic skills to track down and prosecute delinquent taxpayers.

To succeed in the field, people must learn to look beyond the obvious, Crumbley said, and that's not always the easiest thing to teach in a classroom setting. He often uses riddles to get his students thinking.

Crumbley said that to be a good accountant, a person has to be a good detective. It's difficult to stretch people's minds and imaginations, he said, which is what he's trying to do with the novels.

According to Crumbley more than 100 universities around the nation have used the novels to teach accounting in the classroom. *