Prince of Tricksters: The Incredible True Story of Netley Lucas, Gentleman Crook by Matt Houlbrook (review)

Netley Lucas is a difficult man to pin down. Born Netley Evelyn, he marries under the name Leslie Graham, talks his way into colonial outfitters as the Honourable Basil Vaughan, goes into business in Toronto as George Armstrong Mackenzie, writes books in London under the name Charlotte Cavendish, makes headlines as "Evelyn Graham (or Netley Lucas)." There are, between 1903 and 1940, "at least" 38 different aliases. A master of the elaborate confidence trick and a lover of stolen fast cars, beautiful women and (sometimes, probably) men, he becomes a jailbird-turned-debonair man-about-town who, when faced with moral and financial ruin, reinvents himself spectacularly as a popular criminologist, society darling, and successful biographer with "intimate" access to the lives of the great and the good. Lucas is also a drunk, a narcissist, and a compulsive liar. He writes his own autobiography, twice. His second memoir, My Selves, is archly published with a foreword written by a prominent neurologist and authority on alcoholism who offers a diagnosis of its authors' personality disorder; translated into French, it is discovered by Surrealist poets and re-issued, delightfully, as Moi et Moi.

Matt Houlbrook deftly weaves the disparate threads of Lucas's "incredible true story" into a rich and persuasive whole, using his subjects' short but multiple lives to examine issues surrounding criminality, deviance, and citizenship; class and mass culture; gender and sexualities; popular psychology; and the changing nature of celebrity, privacy, and professional expertise. In part a microhistory, in part a bravura reassessment of early-twentieth-century British society from the perspective of one of its most unreliable narrators, Prince of Tricksters joins some of the most inventive and satisfying recent cultural biographies, such as Kali Israel's Names and Stories or Lisa Cohen's All We Know, in combining life-writing with writing about life-writing.¹ The conflict between fin-de-siécle tradition and modern forms of selfhood, and the uncertain identification of authenticity in a society in flux after the First World War, are well-trodden paths, but Houlbrook uses the figure of the "trickster" and his exploits to shine new light on the categories through which historians have conventionally understood the politics and culture of the 1920s and 30s, arguing that Britain in this period "confronted a crisis of confidence" (5). As a writer, Netley Lucas thumbed his nose at the seriousness and progressive projects of contemporary social observers; instead, Houlbrook shows, by unravelling the complex web of commercial connections between social élites, publishers, ghostwriters, and cultural power brokers, how his critique of authority and deference was delivered by pushing the logic of the market for life stories to its extreme. The trickster prince and his partners in crime, like the adventuress Josephine O'Dare, were able to pursue "social advancement through storytelling" (45).

The book is an elegant rejoinder to any misgivings about the potential of exceptional individuals to serve as subjects of ambitious historical enquiry. Houlbrook prefers to paint Lucas/Graham as a chimera—"a flicker of light"— and himself as merely an amateur "trickster" composing an "open-ended and provisional" history about "fractured and changeable" identities (309-14). This seems disingenuous. The most eye-catching scenes masquerade as fictive: a film script, a trial cross-examination, even imagined conversations between the biographer and his subject(s); but these too are carefully footnoted. Houlbrook writes throughout with a cinematic eye for detail and sense of place, so that the reader swaggers with Netley in his finely tailored suits around the clubs and restaurants of the West End, joins him in prison cells and the cabins of transatlantic cruise ships, and, during a dip in his fortunes, accompanies him forlornly home along suburban streets half-lined with mock-Tudor semis. We cheer when, after another successful reinvention, the trickster or one of his associates is back, ready to cut a publishing deal with none other than...