Business Notes WINDFALLS

From H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man to Topper, unseen characters have terrorized towns and caused comic chaos. The tradition now moves into the business world with a much touted and timely new book: Memoirs of an Invisible Man, the first novel by Harry F. Saint, a New York City real estate investor. The central character of Memoirs, a securities analyst named Nick Halloway, becomes the ultimate inside trader when a botched demonstration of an exotic new technology makes him transparent. He slips into the offices of corporate raiders, overhears their takeover plans and makes a fortune by telephoning orders to his broker. Guiltily, Halloway offers a classic economist's rationale: "The invisible hand taking its own small cut."

Author Saint, 45, who got an advance of $5,000 and wrote the book long before the Ivan Boesky insider-trading scandal broke, is enjoying a sudden run-up in his literary stock: book-club, foreign-publication and film rights for Memoirs have brought him about $2.5 million, though the Atheneum edition will not appear until April. Says Saint, whose business ventures were never so profitable: "I had always mistakenly assumed that writing didn't pay."