The very title of Matt Houlbrook's new monograph, Prince of Tricksters: The Incredible True Story of Netley Lucas, playfully pushes at our boundaries of historical knowledge. What is the “true” story of Netley Lucas, interwar confidence trickster who possessed some forty different aliases to perpetrate deceptions ranging from faked royal biographies to petty hotel thefts? Is it important to know, or should we spend more time ruminating on the social, cultural, and political conditions that facilitated this man to lead his many lives, and to slip so seamlessly between various “selves”? Prince of Tricksters deploys astonishingly rich and tenaciously amassed archival research into “Lucas” and his associates in order to suggest the latter, forcing us to recognize the elasticity of identities within a given historical context in a manner pleasingly reminiscent of Laura Doan's challenging work Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women's Experience of Modern War (2013).

Indeed, taking his cue from the postmodernist approaches of scholars including Joan Scott and Natalie Zemon Davis, Houlbrook uses the story of an individual to test and reframe overarching accounts of life in interwar Britain, particularly unraveling the “conservatism” of its literary marketplace. Thus, although much recent historiography on interwar crime informs this work, Houlbrook's contribution moves beyond tracing the contours of a particular crime or criminal to produce a dazzling analysis of interwar mentalities. Beautifully written and compelling throughout, the book is interspersed with segments from a posthumous Australian radio play of Lucas's life which not only builds narrative pace but adds an appropriate sense of “theater,” echoing the exploits of its chief protagonist.

The book is an experiment in format. The challenge of charting Lucas's multiple aliases and the different confidence tricks “they” perpetrated while maintaining the reader's (and most probably his own) ability to recognize that alias and Lucas are one and the same, is unenviable. Yet Houlbrook deftly succeeds, largely through the clever device of opening each episode at or near the moment of exposure and then taking the reader on a journey to deconstruct the process from start to end. Such is the structure's effectiveness that it progressively schools the reader to be instantly skeptical of the true identity of each character introduced when a fresh chapter commences. In itself, this training in skepticism fulfills the intellectual and methodological ambitions of Prince of Tricksters by recasting the interwar decades, and our inherent understanding of history, as beset by a crisis of trust. As Houlbrook comments, the question “how do you know when to trust someone or something?” (4) applies equally to the conditions people faced following the aftermath of the Great War (when social and cultural upheaval forged new relationships and, for some, opportunities to assume new occupations and personas), to the everyday work of the historian assessing the “veracity” of particular historical sources, and to the reader who must decide upon the historian's trustworthiness.

Cultivating skeptics out of readers of history books and students of history in a way that is accessible and engaging is a profound and timely contribution to the discipline, with ramifications far beyond the book's subject matter or geographical and temporal scope. Houlbrook's insistence on exposing the limits of his own knowledge, as well as those of contemporaries, about his elusive con man makes for refreshing reading. It advances the premise of cultural history—of peeling back the hidden meanings of historic sources through layers of representation, power structures, and contemporary assumptions—by embracing the idea that no ultimate “truth” may be discovered. Within the looking, however, Houlbrook uncovers a universe of historical preoccupations, experiences, and relationships that offer a guide around the social machinery of Britain in this era, as well as the international reach of the disruption and perceived society of “strangers” left in the wake of war.

Two minor criticisms. To preface the first, I admire the sheer honesty of Houlbrook's love letter to his subject in the introductory “gambit” (20–21), and I can certainly appreciate the sense of vocation that underlies it. Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis (2005), the wonderful previous work from Houlbrook on homosexual lives and urban culture, memorably recounted a description of him as a “method-actor” among historians, and this inclination undoubtedly endures. Yet the love letter made me wriggle—and not out of intellectual confrontation. I will have to beg the author's forgiveness for having not yet discovered the “erotics of the archive” in this way (dust makes me sneeze, unfortunately, and looped signatures of long-dead heroes, though thrilling, have never succeeded in offering quite that level of enjoyment). I jest; but in earnest, I do not think this piece “added value.” This is unlike the other vignette, titled “We need to talk, Netley” (339). Here, Houlbrook outlines starkly his difficulty in reconciling the later discovery of Lucas's alcoholism and violence towards women with the impetus to heroize a subject pursued with such tenacity across archives and continents over many years, whose cunning even the reader finds herself admiring at times. There is an important subtext to this piece about the commercial imperatives of history writing and our responsibility to resist distilling subjects into the oversimplified categories of “heroes or villains,” however appealing—and marketable—that might be.

My second criticism is the weight of successive contextual references that on occasion (in chapters 1 and 4), overwhelm the analytical thread, and may well test the attention of readers encountering the interwar period for the first time. On the whole, however, Houlbrook's intimacy with the cultural landscape of his era is a real strength of the book. Allowing him to situate the content, genre, and dissemination of Lucas's faked stories within the canon of high-, middle-, and low-brow literature then circulating, Houlbrook knits these references carefully into the web of “authenticity effects” on which Lucas drew in order to secure publication of his own “fakes.” This is surely a definitive model for historians aiming to expose the broader resonance of their specific topic of research, vividly recalling Natalie Zemon Davis’ The Return of Martin Guerre (1984).

In sum, Prince of Tricksters is an evocative and fascinating book that is sure to become required reading for future generations of historians.