In the 1930s, a wise and wrinkly ­American Indian called Grey Owl came to ­Britain. He was the bestselling author of an acclaimed autobiography, Grey Owl and the Beaver. A “weathered-looking Apache” in “long hair, skins and moccasins”, he was invited to address “the entire royal household in Buckingham Palace, and spoke movingly about the urgent need to protect the natural world”. Nobody doubted him, despite his blue eyes. It turned out he was really Archibald ­Belaney from Hastings.

Melissa Katsoulis’s account of some of the best literary hoaxes is hugely ­enjoyable: amusing, literate, learned and perceptive. Literary hoaxers, she points out, like con men in any other line, can only sell us what we want. We have always wanted more about Shakespeare, for instance, so no doubt “lost sonnets” will pop up from time to time. In the 18th century there was Chatterton, the “marvellous boy”, whose fakes had a genuine literary merit all of their own, and James Macpherson, who wrote misty Celtic Ossian poetry that bamboozled many, but not the redoubtable Dr Johnson. Macpher-son was evidently an unpleasant and dishonest figure who made a lot of money from his dishonesty and ended up an MP.

What we particularly want nowadays is child-abuse memoirs. But many such accounts have turned out to be not entirely accurate, such as James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003), his harrowing memoir of drug and alcohol addiction that Oprah Winfrey made her Book of the Month. Except that it was all made up. Oprah’s Boob of the Year.

Another contemporary taste is for the mystical wisdom of indigenous peoples. Hence Marlo Morgan’s Mutant Message Down Under (1995), her novelisation of her wanderings with Australian aborigines, and their miraculous healing arts. But when the aborigines themselves finally piped up, it was to say that Morgan was a fraud and her account a fantasy.

The holy grail of publishing would surely be child abuse plus exotic natives: a young Eskimo girl of visionary ecological inclination, perhaps, horribly abused by her wicked, drunken white stepfather. And then in 2000 — bingo. The venerable American publisher Houghton Mifflin brought out Blood Flows Like a River Through My Dreams, a memoir by a ­Navajo called Nasdijj, recounting the agonising last months of his dying son. Subsequent volumes covered Aids, alcoholism and sexual abuse. It couldn’t get any better. Unfortunately, Nasdijj was later outed as Tim, a writer of gay porn from Michigan.

There are also some frivolous hoaxes in Telling Tales. In the 1950s, a mischievous American radio DJ called Jean Shepherd started encouraging his listeners to go into bookshops and ask for a nonexistent volume called I, Libertine, a brilliant historical novel by one Frederick Ewing. Soon, bookshops were promising that it was “on order”, a review was published, Ewing himself was mentioned in a gossip column, and le tout New York was gushing about what a wonderful read it was.

One of the finest recent hoaxes was executed by the physicist Alan Sokal, who, in 1996, published a paper called Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Theory, in a scholarly journal called Social Text. He quoted the right names (Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray), included entire sentences that meant literally ­nothing and inserted numerous basic ­scientific and mathematical errors.

The article’s appearance made a serious point, immensely pleasing for those of us who think that the parlance of postmodernism is merely a way for pretentious ­academics to try and appear impenetrably clever. Sokal proved that they are, in fact, quite dim, not to mention humourless, never once smelling a rat in his analyses of “gender encoding in fluid mechanics”, or “de[con]structive quantum field theory”. As a pin-sharp parody of academic jargon, it has never been equalled. Better still, when the hoax was revealed, the editors of the journal were unconcerned, arguing that it was still a “symptomatic document”.

Katsoulis is a wonderfully wise and witty cicerone through the luxuriant ­jungles of literary fraudulence. Telling Tales is a delight from start to finish, right down to the cheeky cover, a barefaced rip-off of the old Penguin paperback design, stamped Cuckoo Books, and then, in tiny print on the back, offering “­apologies to Sir Allen Lane”.

Telling Tales by Melissa Katsoulis
Constable £8.99 pp328

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