HENRI CHARRIÈRE, THE FRENCH convict whose experiences in the penal colony on Devil’s Island furnished the basis for his best-selling novel Papillon, has turned up in Venezuela, 32 years after he was supposed to have died of throat cancer. True, no one has actually seen him, but there he appears on the electoral register: Henry Charriero (the name he adopted in 1945, after finally settling in Venezuela), voter number 1,728,629.

Papillon’s sudden “reappearance” has provoked questions about the reliability of the Venezuelan electoral system, but it has also renewed speculation over exactly what happened to the French convict-writer. Papillon was an instant bestseller in 1969 and was adapted into a film starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman in 1973, but the last years of Charrière’s life remain cloaked in mystery. There were rumours that the great escaper was not dead at all, merely lying low, in South America or Spain. If he is still alive today, Papillon would be 99 years old.

To add to the puzzle, another elderly French convict has come forward, insisting that he is the real Papillon: 104-year-old Charles Brunier, who served time on Devil’s Island and now lives in an old people’s home outside Paris, claims that the events described in Charrière’s autobiography were simply “stolen” from his own life. Like Papillon, Brunier wears a tattoo of a butterfly.

Charrière claimed to have spent 11 years in the “bagne”, the slang term for the French penal colony, but from the start there were doubts about the veracity of his tale — the nine escape attempts, the two years in solitary confinement, the grisly privations, and his adoption by an Indian tribe. Charrière always insisted he was innocent of murdering a Paris pimp, the crime for which he was convicted and sent to French Guiana in 1933, but Paris police records show that he was almost certainly guilty. So far from being a prison hard man and veteran escaper, Charrière appears to have been a model prisoner, never attempting to flee and spending many relatively contented years working in the prison latrines.

Somehow it seems only right that a writer who hovered somewhere between fiction and reality should still be mysteriously suspended between life and death, half-Papillon, half-Charrière. If anyone deserved to live an afterlife as a ghost on an electoral roll, it was the veteran escapologist and master of self-invention. We will probably never know exactly what happened to him, any more than we will know how much of his book is true.

One of the reasons for the success of Papillon was the elegance of the original translation into English by Patrick Richard Russ, better known as Patrick O’Brian, who would go on to achieve his own, even greater fame as the author of the Jack Aubrey novels. Like Charrière, Russ/O’Brian fabricated a new past for himself. In 1945 he abandoned his original identity along with his first wife and two children, and this English son of a doctor re-emerged as a self-styled Irish aristocrat; with the new identity came all sorts of other half-truths and myths. Nikolai Tolstoy, O’Brian’s stepson and biographer, writes that the novelist was “one of the most secretive authors who ever lived”. At the age of 30 he “consciously decided to obliterate his previous existence from memory . . . to suppress or distort almost everything to do with his life before 1945”.

O’Brian, like Charrière, has been heavily criticised for distorting his past, but the urge to secrecy is a common trait among those who make their living by inventing fictional, or semi-fictional, lives. Many authors embellish their own pasts; some make them up entirely, and some, to escape the scrutiny of an inquisitive and inquisitorial reading public, simply try to escape from the world altogether.

The most celebrated literary escaper is, of course, J. D. Salinger, who has published nothing since withdrawing to his fortified compound in New Hampshire in the 1960s. The author of The Catcher in the Rye continues to write, we are told, but will publish nothing. Salinger sees almost no one, but he is in excellent company: here is Harper Lee, who has said and published nothing since To Kill a Mocking Bird in 1960; Thomas Pynchon, jealously guarding his invisibility; Don de Lillo, who once greeted a persistent interviewer who had tracked him down to Greece with the words, scribbled on a piece of paper, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Some have managed to defy identification altogether, simply disappearing into the literary ether, leaving only their words. The real identity of B. Traven, author of The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1927), whose novels have sold more than 25 million copies in 30 languages, has never been established. For many years he was thought to be one Berwick Torsvan, a half-Norwegian, half-English writer who settled in Mexico; some believed Traven was a pseudonym for Jack London, or Ambrose Bierce, or Adolfo Lopez Mateos, a former President of Mexico. He was also rumoured to be Otto Feige, the anarchist son of a German pottery worker, or Ret Marut, a revolutionary who fled Germany after the First World War, or the illegitimate son of the Kaiser.

The writer too shy to be named has become a cliché, and a marketing tool. The Traveller, a first novel by the thumpingly pseudonymous John Twelve Hawks, is shooting up the bestseller lists, in part because the author has declined to be identified.

Yet there is also something deeply admirable, in the age of the ubiquitous author interview, in a writer who refuses to tell all, who deliberately obscures or distorts the past, or heads for the privacy of the hills. Writers like Salinger, Lee, Traven and Charrière are among the very few who managed to escape seeing their work banalised by public scrutiny of their own lives. They went on the literary lam, and got clean away.

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