In 1917, Netley Lucas was 14 and working as a pantryman on the passenger liner Kenilworth Castle, travelling between London and Cape Town. He was an orphan. His mother had died just after his birth, and he had been abandoned by his alcoholic father. Wealthy grandparents had sent him to public school, but when they died, Lucas was alone in the world.

On the Kenilworth Castle, Lucas read a newspaper report about someone who had posed as an officer. Intrigued by this idea, he got to know a South African midshipman named Gerald Chilfont, who was home after being wounded in the first world war, and then, back in London, Lucas did something that would change the course of his life: he bought a midshipman’s uniform and became Gerald Chilfont. With his new uniform and false identity, he went to King George and Queen Mary’s Club in Westminster, a philanthropic institution providing accommodation for soldiers. There he met an aristocratic woman doing her bit for the war effort and she introduced him to “a glittering social round”. As he said, gaining people’s trust was easy with “sufficient nerve to bluff things out and a tongue sufficiently glib to tell a convincing story”.

Lucas was a born confidence trickster. The dashing, smooth-talking young man looked older than his actual age and was overwhelmed with “invitations from perfect strangers to dinners, theatres, lunches and weekend parties”. People were keen to lend him money after he told them that he had lost his kit at the Battle of Jutland, and his uniform was a ticket to credit accounts at restaurants, tailors and car hire companies.

By 17, Lucas had a chauffeur-driven Daimler from Harrods and was socialising with duchesses and chorus girls

But his glamorous life as Gerald Chilfont didn’t last long. He was soon arrested for obtaining money by false pretences and, as a juvenile, sent to a reformatory. Almost immediately he escaped and again began posing as a gentleman. With what he called “the drawling accent of the spoilt son of an aristocrat”, he exploited the gullibility of a society that trusted upper-class manners and expensive clothing. Later, a friend would recall how convincing Lucas was: “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. He sweet-talked hotel managers and shopkeepers, turning charm and the comportment of a gentleman into credit. By 17, he had a chauffeur-driven Daimler from Harrods and was socialising with duchesses and chorus girls.

Between 1917 and 1924, Lucas was taken to court five times. In a society of strangers, his crimes were subversive, suggesting all you needed was money and the veneer of class to pass yourself off as a gentleman. For historian Matt Houlbrook, Lucas’s life story reveals deeper truths about the period after the first world war. He cites the criminologist Henry Rhodes: “Show me your crimes and I will show you the nature of your society.” New forms of mass culture and democracy promised greater possibilities of personal 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 had an astonishing run as a confidence trickster. After 1924, the self-fashioned “aristocrat of crooks” claimed to be a reformed character and turned to writing. He boasted: “Journalism is the only honest profession for which a criminal life is a good training.” Having made a name for himself writing for newspapers, he wrote six books in three years, beginning with The Autobiography of a Crook (1924), which became a bestseller.

But in summer 1927 his new career was cut short when it was discovered that he had fabricated stories: “The confessing ex-crook was a facade, a cynical pose to deceive publishers and readers, a crime of confidence.” Later it emerged that even his autobiography was a “curious literary hoax”, ghosted by a writer who had been paid to write a novel based on some events in Lucas’s life. But Lucas’s chameleon-like powers of reinvention were far from exhausted. He was determined to, as he put it, “take the literary world of London by storm”. And that’s precisely what he did next.

Evelyn Graham’s “bogus biography factory” was described by the press at the time as “the most impudent literary scandal of the century”. In three years, Graham had published more than a dozen biographies of British and European royalty, beginning in 1929 with Princess Mary. The New York Times described him as “biographer-in‑chief to the courts of Europe”.

He was determined, as he put it, to 'take the literary world of London by storm'. And that’s precisely what he did

Graham worked with the newly established publisher and literary agent Albert E Marriott, who boasted that he wanted to “break all the accepted rules of the game”. But Marriott and Graham fell foul of royal officials for pretending that their biographies were authorised. When Marriott published The Biography of HM Queen Mary in 1930, supposedly by Charlotte Cavendish, the widow of a colonel in the Indian Army, royal officials were outraged. Queen Mary herself went through a copy marking up errors: “I have annotated this book to show what a number of inventions are written about one.” Journalists tried and failed to track down the author. They then turned their attentions to Graham, who by 1930 was a rich man, earning £500 a month.

In a series of articles on “the mystery of Evelyn Graham” it was revealed that the author was none other than Netley Lucas. The deception didn’t end there. Marriott, too, was another of his personas. In total, journalists uncovered eight authors’ names associated with Lucas. Described as “a literary shark of the most unscrupulous kind”, he was arrested in 1931 after trying to sell another bogus manuscript.

After 15 months in Wormwood Scrubs, Lucas emerged “gaunt and haggard”. But he could still turn a trick – and write a book, this time another autobiography, appropriately titled My Selves (1933). He claimed that for the first time in his life he was being “perfectly honest with myself and the world”. But no one believed the man who had assumed some 40 identities in the course of his life.

Lucas drank himself into an early grave in 1940. Few mourned the passing of the man known as the “prince of tricksters”. Even Houlbrook acknowledges that Lucas was a “lying bastard”. But he can’t help but be beguiled by this extraordinary character: “I’m obsessed with making sense of you.” Lucas is an exquisitely slippery subject and Houlbrook admits that “my writing echoes the uncertainties of Lucas’s lives”. But this is far more than a biography. It is a portrait of a period in transition which Houlbrook describes as an “age of disguise”. His book is theoretically aware, meticulously researched and brimming with insights into both the interwar years and this unscrupulous yet remarkable figure for whom identity was as fluid and fleeting as quicksilver.