The Confidence Men

How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History

By: Margalit Fox

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Paperback | 2 June 2022

At a Glance

Paperback
352 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
2.2 x 13 x 19.8

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The astonishing true story of two First World War prisoners who pulled off one of the most ingenious escapes of all time.

Imprisoned in a remote Turkish POW camp during the First World War, two British officers, Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, cunningly join forces. To stave off boredom, Jones makes a handmade Ouija board and holds fake seances for fellow prisoners. One day, an Ottoman official approaches him with a query: could Jones contact the spirits to find a vast treasure rumoured to be buried nearby? Jones, a lawyer, and Hill, a magician, use the Ouija board - and their keen understanding of the psychology of deception-to build a trap for their captors that will lead them to freedom.

The Confidence Men is a nonfiction thriller featuring strategy, mortal danger and even high farce - and chronicles a profound but unlikely friendship.

About the Author

A winner of the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, Margalit Fox trained as a linguist and was a senior writer at The New York Times. As a former member of the newspaper's celebrated Obituary News Department, she wrote the front-page public sendoffs of some of the leading cultural figures of our age. She has written three previous books, Conan Doyle for the Defence, The Riddle of the Labyrinth, and Talking Hands, and lives in Manhattan with her husband, writer and critic George Robinson.

Industry Reviews

'Fox, a former senior obituary writer for The New York Times and the author of three previous books, unspools Jones and Hill's delightfully elaborate scheme in nail-biting episodes that advance like a narrative Rube Goldberg machine, gradually leading from Yozgad to freedom by way of secret codes, a hidden camera, buried clues, fake suicides and a lot of ingenious mumbo jumbo. At moments, The Confidence Men has the high gloss of a story polished through years of telling and retelling' - The New York Times

'Exceptionally entertaining ... [Fox] never loosened her grip on my attention' - Michael Dirda

'The Confidence Men couldn't have come along at a better time. This story of two unlikely con artists - young British officers who use a Ouija board to escape from a Turkish prisoner-of-war camp - is a true delight, guaranteed to lift the spirits of anyone eager to forget today's realities and lose oneself in a beautifully written tale of an exciting and deeply moving real-life caper' - Lynne Olson, author of Madame Fourcade's Secret War

'Margalit Fox is one of the premier narrative storytellers we have today, and The Confidence Men is a wonderfully entertaining brew of history, thrills, and ingenuity, one that highlights the rare occasion when con artistry is employed for the greater public good' - Sarah Weinman, author of The Real Lolita and editor of Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit & Obsession

'A true account of one of the most daring and implausible examples of wartime cunning by British soldiers' - Daily Express

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