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Prince of Tricksters (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,245
Discovery Miles 12 450
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Prince of Tricksters (Hardcover)
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Total price: R1,265
Discovery Miles: 12 650
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Meet Netley Lucas, Prince of Tricksters--royal biographer,
best-selling crime writer, and gentleman crook. In the years after
the Great War, Lucas becomes infamous for climbing the British
social ladder by his expert trickery--his changing names and
telling of tales. An impudent young playboy and a confessed
confidence trickster, he finances his far-flung hedonism through
fraud and false pretenses. After repeated spells in prison, Lucas
transforms himself into a confessing "ex-crook," turning his inside
knowledge of the underworld into a lucrative career as freelance
journalist and crime expert. But then he's found out again--exposed
and disgraced for faking an exclusive about a murder case. So he
reinvents himself, taking a new name and embarking on a prolific,
if short-lived, career as a royal biographer and publisher. Chased
around the world by detectives and journalists after yet another
sensational scandal, the gentleman crook dies as spectacularly as
he lived--a washed-up alcoholic, asphyxiated in a fire of his own
making. The lives of Netley Lucas are as flamboyant as they are
unlikely. In Prince of Tricksters, Matt Houlbrook picks up the
threads of Lucas's colorful lies and lives. Interweaving crime
writing and court records, letters and life-writing, Houlbrook
tells Lucas's fascinating story and, in the process, provides a
panoramic view of the 1920s and '30s. In the restless times after
the Great War, the gentlemanly trickster was an exemplary figure,
whose tall tales and bogus biographies exposed the everyday
difficulties of knowing who and what to trust. Tracing how Lucas
both evoked and unsettled the world through which he moved,
Houlbrook shows how he prompted a pervasive crisis of confidence
that encompassed British society, culture, and politics. Taking
readers on a romp through Britain, North America, and eventually
into Africa, Houlbrook confronts readers with the limits of our
knowledge of the past and challenges us to think anew about what
history is and how it might be made differently.
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