Synopses & Reviews
The spellbinding tale of hustler Edgar Laplante — the king of Jazz Age con artists — who becomes the victim of his own dangerous game.
Edgar Laplante was a smalltime grifter, an erstwhile vaudeville performer, and an unabashed charmer. But after years of playing thankless gigs and traveling with medicine shows, he decided to undertake the most demanding and bravura performance of his life. In the fall of 1917, Laplante reinvented himself as Chief White Elk: war hero, sports star, civil rights campaigner, Cherokee nation leader — and total fraud.
Under the pretenses of raising money for struggling Native American reservations, Laplante dressed in buckskins and a feathered headdress and traveled throughout the American West, narrowly escaping exposure and arrest each time he left town. When the heat became too much, he embarked upon a lucrative continent-hopping tour that attracted even more enormous crowds, his cons growing in proportion to the adulation of his audience. As he moved through Europe, he spied his biggest mark on the Riviera: a prodigiously rich Hungarian countess, who was instantly smitten with the con man. The countess bankrolled a lavish trip through Italy that made Laplante a darling of the Mussolini regime and a worldwide celebrity, soaring to unimaginable heights on the wings of his lies. But then, at the pinnacle of his improbable success, Laplante’s overreaching threatened to destroy him…
In King Con, Paul Willetts brings this previously untold story to life in all its surprising absurdity, showing us how our tremendous capacity for belief and our longstanding obsession with celebrity can make fools of us all — and proving that sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
Review
“Amazing, absorbing and phenomenally well-researched, King Con is a compelling story that proves truth is far, far stranger than fiction: a picture of an America so naïve and gullible it’s hard to imagine. Not a page is turned without the reader learning something that astonishes and enthralls.” Paul French, New York Times bestselling author of Midnight in Peking
Review
“In this extensively detailed biography, Willetts traces the brazen and bizarre life of Edgar Laplante, an early 20th century drifter and conman extraordinaire....he keeps the narrative alive with the colorful anecdotes from Laplante’s remarkable life.” Publishers Weekly
Review
“Willetts weaves a fast-paced, intriguing tale. With the rise of identity theft, celebrity worship, and manipulative social media, this sprightly story of a legendary con artist’s outrageous successes becomes a cautionary tale for the digital age.” Kirkus Reviews
Review
“Paul Willetts’s King Con takes readers on a rollicking ride — a tale of false celebrity and ingenious cons by an inventive Jazz Age grifter that resonate across the decades to this particular moment in America with an unsettling relevance. Readers will be amused, entranced, and, I’m certain, left shaken.” Howard Blum, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Goodnight and In the Enemy’s House
About the Author
U.K.-based Paul Willetts, whose previous books have received huge acclaim in his home country, has written for The Independent, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, and The Times Literary Supplement. King Con is Paul’s American debut.
Paul Willetts on PowellsBooks.Blog
The pockets of Chief White Elk’s buckskin outfit were stuffed with Italian banknotes. His favored get-up included moccasins, beaded pants, and a feathered headdress, all of which were guaranteed to render him conspicuous as he crossed the lobby of the Grand Hotel Baglioni on the morning of Monday, September 1, 1924...
Read More»