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We all love a good literary hoax. With literary (as opposed to commercial) fraud, there seems less at stake. No lives are lost, no crime is committed. Better still, it is usually a con aimed at the pretentious arts establishment.
The most recent example was by New York author Lee Israel, who has confessed to creating 150 forged letters attributed to Noël Coward; two of them ended up in last year's critically acclaimed Letters of Noël Coward, edited by Barry Day.
But Israel's accomplishment pales by comparison to other literary scams. The 18th century, bent on rediscovering antiquity, was the great age of literary hoaxes. Thomas Chatterton, Wordsworth's "marvellous boy", invented an opus by a 15th-century poet and monk, Thomas Rowley, while still a teenager. Rowley's compositions were duly applauded by critics and antiquarians. Meanwhile, William Henry Ireland not only wrote several new plays by Shakespeare but also created legal documentation which purported to provide fresh information about the bard's life.
James Macpherson created "lost fragments" by the third century Celtic bard Ossian, which on publication in 1760 were hailed as works of genius. He was acclaimed in Britain - Victoria and Albert were enthusiastic Ossianists - and abroad. Goethe added the whole of Ossian's Songs of Selma to the end of The Sorrows of Werther; Thomas Jefferson read Ossian every day; Napoleon carried him into battle.
It was decades before Ossian was generally recognised as a fake. Later admirers like Blake and Hazlitt decided that it hardly mattered. Similarly, after his death, when the truth emerged, Chatterton's talents were praised. His archaisms seemed brilliant rather than fraudulent.
The tradition has continued into the modern age. One of the great hoaxes of the 20th century was carried out in 1944 when Australian poetry editor Max Harris published The Darkening Ecliptic, a collection of modernist poems by a young Melbourne mechanic called Ern Malley. Harris claimed to have discovered "one of the most remarkable and important poetic figures of this century". In fact, Malley was the invention of two poetry lovers who produced the whole of his life work in one afternoon.
And William Boyd's 1998 gathering of Manhattan culture lovers for a reading by David Bowie of his "life" of forgotten New York artist Nat Tate was one of the great con tricks of the modern era. Again, most readers of Boyd's fabricated biography enjoyed the parodies for their own sake. It was a jeu d'esprit.
Indeed literary fakery is a form of creativity: it can have its own authenticity. As Jorge Luis Borges once remarked, "The translation is more faithful than the original".
