Have you changed your name recently? Perhaps you are one of the declining number of women to have taken your husband’s surname. In most cases, our names are fixed, though we might escape a childhood moniker and a schoolboy Bob might become an adult Robert. It certainly helps the historian or biographer tracking individuals through databases and registers if we keep the same name. But what is a researcher to do with a man who in a lifetime of fraud and dissimulation used at least forty different names? Such was the challenge Matt Houlbrook set himself when he became enamoured of Netley Evelyn Lucas (if we stick for the moment with the name the man was christened with in 1903), whose career as a confidence trickster and fraudster found its stride in a gentlemen’s outfitters on London’s Kingsway in 1920 and ended in a puff of smoke when he died of carbon monoxide poisoning in 1940.

Lucas was born on a yacht moored off the village of Netley in Southampton Water – that much is certainly true. His mother may have died as a result, while his father, an actor, was found drowned three years later in the River Seine. Lucas was educated at