In this diverting, well-written history of deceitful and counterfeit literature through the ages, Telling Tales, Melissa Katsoulis chronicles a variety of fraudsters and fibsters, and their motives for hoodwinking the public. The earliest known literary hoaxer was the philosopher Dionysus the Renegade, who inserted a number of unflattering acrostics — ‘HERACLES IS IGNORANT OF LETTERS AND IS NOT ASHAMED OF HIS IGNORANCE’ — into his trumpery Sophocles play, Parthenopaeus.

Dionysus had acted in a spirit of mischief. Recent spoofers have been motivated more by the promise of celebrity. In 2001, Michael Gambino published his bestselling memoir, The Honoured Society, which purported to reveal the ‘innermost workings’ of the American Cosa Nostra. In ghost-written journalese the author described a 12-year apprenticeship in pornography, strip clubs and cocaine-dealing, and claimed descent from the feared Gambino family of New York.

Unfortunately Mr Gambino was a fraud. Michael Budaj — his real name — was a Chicago factory-hand of German immigrant origin. All his life he had idolised Cosa Nostra wiseguys, and coveted their camel- hair overcoats and custom-made shoes. Long after Budaj/Gambino’s unmasking, interestingly, ‘insider crime memoirs’ by self-proclaimed Mafia hustlers, hoods and other gangland cuties continued to flood American bookshops. There will always be another dissembler to fill Gambino’s shoes, Katsoulis suggests; and the publishers will make him an offer he can’t refuse.

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