Paul Willetts

In the heyday of his sleaze empire, with his pencil moustache, gold jewellery and trademark fur coat, Paul Raymond was for many people the brash personification of nouveau riche vulgarity, posing proudly beside his customised Rolls Royce, a fat cigar protruding from his lips, a curvaceous showgirl on either arm. For other people, Margaret Thatcher among them, he exemplified the entrepreneurial spirit that enabled a poor boy from Depression-era Liverpool to become Britain's richest man. Right up until he died on 2 March 2008, he was a controversial figure around whom scandal swirled. Paul Willetts follows Raymond from his strictly Catholic early life to the isolation, paranoia and extreme wealth of his old age.

The spellbinding tale of virtuosic hustler Edgar Laplante--a Tom Ripley-meets-Jay Gatsby king of Jazz Age con artists, whose spectacular downfall came because he began to be seduced by his own lies.For the devilishly handsome erstwhile vaudeville singer Edgar Laplante, the summer of 1923 was a prelude to one of the twentieth-century's most extraordinary adventures--an adventure that would require all his theatrical flair to deliver what would become the most demanding performance of his life. Aided by buckskins and a feathered headdress, Laplante reinvented himself as Chief White Elk: war hero, sports star, civil rights campaigner, Cherokee nation leader--and total fraud.Under the pretense of recruiting for the military and selling government bonds, Laplante embarks upon a lucrative tour of the United States that attracts enormous crowds, picking up a naive Native American wife along the way to lend a further air of authenticity. Soon Laplante decamps to London to appeal to King George V on behalf of the Cherokee. By 1923 he's absconded to Paris, frequenting its decadent cabarets and rubbing elbows with the likes of James Joyce and Pablo Picasso.As he moves down to the Riviera, he begins to set his sights on an even bigger mark: a prodigiously rich and glamorous Austrian countess. Laplante takes her as his lover and main benefactor. He cons her out of the equivalent of $42 million in today's currency. The countess bankrolls a lavish tour of Italy, where Benito Mussolini's fascist regime treats him like a visiting monarch. In every city, he tosses crisp banknotes from the window of their limousine to the fans who lay siege to his hotel. He's now a worldwide celebrity, and all that adulation (plus a spiraling drug problem) has deluded him into believe that he really is a Cherokee chief. The noose begins to tighten, as the countess's family intercedes... King Con is a sumptuous recreation of this incomparably bizarre story. Never previously told in its entirety, Laplante's tale proves that truth really is stranger than fiction.

Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Room provides the first comprehensive account of what was once hailed by a leading American newspaper as the greatest spy story of World War II. This dramatic yet little-known saga, replete with telephone taps, kidnappings, and police surveillance, centres on the furtive escapades of Tyler Kent, a handsome, womanising 28-year-old Ivy League graduate, who doubles as a US Embassy code clerk and Soviet agent. Against the backdrop of London high society during the so-called Phoney War, Kent’s life intersects with the lives of the book’s two other memorably flamboyant protagonists. One of those is Maxwell Knight, an urbane, endearingly eccentric MI5 spyhunter. The other is Anna Wolkoff, a White Russian fashion designer and Nazi spy whose outfits are worn by the Duchess of Windsor and whose parents are friends of the British royal family. Wolkoff belongs to a fascist secret society called the Right Club, which aims to overthrow the British government. Her romantic entanglement with Tyler Kent gives her access to a secret correspondence between President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, a correspondence that has the potential to transform the outcome of the war.

No writer, not even Hemingway or Rimbaud, led as bizarre and eventful a life as the once celebrated Soho dandy Julian Maclaren-Ross (1912-64). Next to him, the conventional icons of London bohemia, among them Francis Bacon and Jeffrey Bernard, appear models of stability and self-restraint.