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Der Hochstapler
From an early age, Mark Trace shows a remarkable talent for literary forgery. A gap year in Paris sees his skill exploited by an unscrupulous manuscript dealer. Hurrying home, Mark fetches up in London, working at one of the UK's oldest literary magazines. That's when the trouble really starts. Hemingway and Graham Greene are only the beginning. What starts as a prank soon becomes deadly serious. In this literary thriller David Belbin writes about originality, desire and literary ambition in the voice of a character with the capacity to deceive everyone, including himself.
- GenresFiction
284 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2008
3 people are currently reading
42 people want to read
About the author
David Belbin
67 books21 followersBelbin's work is known for breaking boundaries and dealing responsibly with difficult social issues that affect teenagers. He first attained success with a number of books for Scholastic's Point Crime series.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 1, 2024
I found this novel in a bookshop and was intrigued because of it's title and subject matter - literary forgery, and because one of the authors mentioned was Graham Greene and I remembered that Greene for years, even after his death, had an impostor/doppelganger/double who was going about the world pretending to be him. I knew the novel was not about that kind of pretender but I thought that the novel might deal with the question of identity and authenticity, like Muriel Spark's 'Aiding and Abetting'. Well it doesn't, but to be fair it was more a case of wishful thinking on my part then the author not living up to his or the publisher's boasts.
The novel is about the forging of literary works, not autograph ephemera, but new stories by the likes of Hemingway, Greene and Dahl amongst others, all created by the barely 18 year old hero, Mark Trace, sometime in the late 1980's (nothing specified but no mobiles, laptops or internet but plenty of clunky slow processing computers) who begins his career of literary forgery/pastiche at 14 when he produces a piece in the 'style' Dickens for class that is so good his teacher is convinced it is real and he is a plagiarist.
Unable to convince the teacher is not a plagiarist he does no more until leaving school at 17 with a place at London University and takes a year off and goes to Paris where he meets a charming, rich, louche and mysterious con artist with a beautiful daughter who provides the sentimental education while the father has him recreate stories from Hemingway's lost suitcase disaster of 1922 (when the Hemingway lost almost everything he had written when a suitcase was stolen from a train, including duplicates and carbon copies). This suitcase of material along with the first draft of T. E. Lawrence's 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom' (curiously also on a train) are probably the most famous lost manuscripts of the 20th century. The only 'lost' manuscript more famous would be Hitler's diaries - which coincidentally were 'discovered' - and quickly proved a fake in 1983. Someone producing material from Hemingway's 'lost' suitcase would face a media storm and forensic examination as intense as the 'Hitler Diaries'. The possibility of getting away with such a forgery is negligible, and why bother? Autographed ephemera of the famous to bankers, publishers or simple greeting cards or thank you letters fetch very large amounts and rarely attract the publicity or forensic examination that a rediscovered lost Hemingway story would. The man who forged the Hitler diaries spent years producing exactly that sort of Nazi memorabilia and making a very handsome living - it was hubris brought him down and would surely have brought down the absurd forgeries in this novel.
I haven't even begun to question the ability of the callow boy savant Mark Trace at 18 to write like Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene and Roald Dahl - none of them at 18 could write like they would when they had laboriously learnt the craft of writing. I don't believe it and nor do I accept that buying an old typewriting in a Parisian flea market would have been enough to dispel questions of provenance.
This is a silly novel which I give two stars because the author can write but it doesn't save it from being a waste of time - I don't think a week goes by when I don't discover either writers or novels written in the last hundred years that should be read. No one has the time to waste on stuff like this. Read Hemingway, Greene or Dahl not a book about someone forging their work.
The novel is about the forging of literary works, not autograph ephemera, but new stories by the likes of Hemingway, Greene and Dahl amongst others, all created by the barely 18 year old hero, Mark Trace, sometime in the late 1980's (nothing specified but no mobiles, laptops or internet but plenty of clunky slow processing computers) who begins his career of literary forgery/pastiche at 14 when he produces a piece in the 'style' Dickens for class that is so good his teacher is convinced it is real and he is a plagiarist.
Unable to convince the teacher is not a plagiarist he does no more until leaving school at 17 with a place at London University and takes a year off and goes to Paris where he meets a charming, rich, louche and mysterious con artist with a beautiful daughter who provides the sentimental education while the father has him recreate stories from Hemingway's lost suitcase disaster of 1922 (when the Hemingway lost almost everything he had written when a suitcase was stolen from a train, including duplicates and carbon copies). This suitcase of material along with the first draft of T. E. Lawrence's 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom' (curiously also on a train) are probably the most famous lost manuscripts of the 20th century. The only 'lost' manuscript more famous would be Hitler's diaries - which coincidentally were 'discovered' - and quickly proved a fake in 1983. Someone producing material from Hemingway's 'lost' suitcase would face a media storm and forensic examination as intense as the 'Hitler Diaries'. The possibility of getting away with such a forgery is negligible, and why bother? Autographed ephemera of the famous to bankers, publishers or simple greeting cards or thank you letters fetch very large amounts and rarely attract the publicity or forensic examination that a rediscovered lost Hemingway story would. The man who forged the Hitler diaries spent years producing exactly that sort of Nazi memorabilia and making a very handsome living - it was hubris brought him down and would surely have brought down the absurd forgeries in this novel.
I haven't even begun to question the ability of the callow boy savant Mark Trace at 18 to write like Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene and Roald Dahl - none of them at 18 could write like they would when they had laboriously learnt the craft of writing. I don't believe it and nor do I accept that buying an old typewriting in a Parisian flea market would have been enough to dispel questions of provenance.
This is a silly novel which I give two stars because the author can write but it doesn't save it from being a waste of time - I don't think a week goes by when I don't discover either writers or novels written in the last hundred years that should be read. No one has the time to waste on stuff like this. Read Hemingway, Greene or Dahl not a book about someone forging their work.
July 15, 2009
This book was enjoyable, but had a disappointing ending. Very average.
For having the name of "literary thriller" it had little suspense and on occasions read more like a teenage coming-of-age story than an account of literary fraud on a classic scale.
Another bad point was the rather glaring mistake made at a point when something is revealed, as "Phil Mercer!" is exclaimed, when up until that late point in the book the character had been named PAUL Mercer, not Phil. But I'm easily irked.
The ending was a flat anti-climax and wirtten with such over-emphasized bleakness that it was almost as if the character was making a fuss about nothing.
All in all, not the hardest book to get into but not very rewarding either. It seemed there was more focus on when the main character would lose his virginity and with whom, than there was on an actual plot crescendo.
For having the name of "literary thriller" it had little suspense and on occasions read more like a teenage coming-of-age story than an account of literary fraud on a classic scale.
Another bad point was the rather glaring mistake made at a point when something is revealed, as "Phil Mercer!" is exclaimed, when up until that late point in the book the character had been named PAUL Mercer, not Phil. But I'm easily irked.
The ending was a flat anti-climax and wirtten with such over-emphasized bleakness that it was almost as if the character was making a fuss about nothing.
All in all, not the hardest book to get into but not very rewarding either. It seemed there was more focus on when the main character would lose his virginity and with whom, than there was on an actual plot crescendo.
May 12, 2013
Nette Plauderei über die Liebe zur Literatur und das Erwachsenwerden. Aber es fehlt am Sog, an faszinierenden Figuren, an einer Überraschung, obwohl einige bemüht konstruiert eingebaut wurden, oder einem konsequenten oder wenigstens halbwegs glaubhaften Ende.
September 24, 2013
Un po' moscio???!!!
September 22, 2014
semplice e scorrevole, non è una lettura impegnata nè impegnativa
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews