Net­ley Lucas was a debonair and charm­ing con man, described by the press as the “prince of trick­sters”. Matt Houl­brook has writ­ten a remark­able study of this extra­or­di­nary char­ac­ter who died in 1940, aged just 36. He was a noto­ri­ous con­fi­dence trick­ster, con­vict­ed thief, con­coc­ter of fake crime news sto­ries, and the writer and pub­lish­er of bogus roy­al biogra­phies.

Lucas changed iden­ti­ties as eas­i­ly as oth­ers change their cloth­ing. Houl­brook admit­s being fas­ci­nat­ed by the moti­va­tion of this gen­tle­man crook: “I’m obsessed with mak­ing sense of you.”

He began his crim­i­nal career aged just 14. A friend lat­er recalled how con­vinc­ing Lucas could be: “I had no idea that he was oth­er than he pre­tend­ed to be…he had a fas­ci­nat­ing way with oth­er men and women. He would look you straight in the face and assure you that he was lord some­body or a hero of the war – and you believed him.”

Lucas mon­e­tised his gen­teel man­ners and appear­ance, sweet-talk­ing hotel man­agers and shop­keep­ers, turn­ing charm and class into cred­it. By 17, he was dri­ving around in a chauf­feur-dri­ven Daim­ler from Har­rods and social­is­ing with duchess­es and cho­rus girls. Lat­er he went on to rein­vent him­self first as a crime jour­nal­ist and then as the author and pub­lish­er of roy­al biogra­phies. After he pub­lished a biog­ra­phy of Queen Mary in 1930, she went through a copy of the book high­light­ing the errors: “I have anno­tat­ed this book to show what a num­ber of inven­tions are writ­ten about one.”

For Houl­brook, Lucas’s life-sto­ry reveals deep­er truths about the peri­od after the Great War in which the bound­aries between class and gen­der were shift­ing. New forms of mass cul­ture and democ­ra­cy were chang­ing how peo­ple viewed the state’s insti­tu­tions and offered greater pos­si­bil­i­ties of social rein­ven­tion: “Lucas’s crimes were unusu­al, but his aspi­ra­tions echoed those of count­less ordi­nary men and women in a peri­od when adver­tis­ing encour­aged dream­like fan­tasies of social mobil­i­ty.”

Lucas’s suc­cess as a con­fi­dence trick­ster sug­gest­ed that in an “age of dis­guise” all you need­ed was mon­ey and a veneer of class to pass your­self off as a gen­tle­man. In a soci­ety of strangers, his crimes were deeply sub­ver­sive.

You can read my Guardian review of Houl­brook’s book here.