Jeffrey Archer’s Top 10 Unputdownable Con Artist Books

The original gentleman burglar. E.W. Hornung, who happened to be Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, created A.J. Raffles in 1899 and in doing so invented an entire genre. Raffles is a celebrated cricketer, a darling of London society, and a burglar of extraordinary nerve. He steals not because he must. He steals because he can, and because, like all the best rogues, he finds respectability rather dull.

What I love about Raffles is the code. He has one. He will steal from the rich, but he will not betray a friend. He will break into a country house, but he will keep his word. That moral line, crooked but real, is something I recognised when I was writing Harvey Metcalfe’s victims. My four men have a code too. Not a penny more, not a penny less.

A confession about Raffles. The world has moved on since 1899. When I was a child, you robbed banks. Nobody robs banks nowadays. The con has evolved. Sharper suits, bigger sums, more sophisticated lies. Raffles belongs to a vanished world where a gentleman in an evening jacket could pocket a pearl necklace and slip out before the butler noticed. That is part of his charm. And it is why the books still hold, a century and a quarter after they were written. They are a period piece about craft, and the craft is what endures.

Conan Doyle disapproved of Raffles, feeling that Hornung was glorifying crime. He may have had a point. But readers have adored the character for more than a century, and I confess I am among them.

If you have watched the Netflix series — and judging by the numbers, half the world has — you already know the name. But I would urge you to go back to the source. Leblanc created the original gentleman thief more than a century ago, and the character has never been bettered for sheer audacity.

What makes Lupin irresistible is not merely that he steals. It is how he steals — with wit, elegance, and a sense of theatre that makes you root for him even when you know you shouldn’t. He is the con artist as performer, and every page crackles with the pleasure of watching a master at work.

I have always believed that the best villains are the ones you secretly admire. Leblanc understood this long before the rest of us.

This is the non-fiction Bible of the confidence game, and if you have ever seen The Sting — one of the greatest films ever made — you have David Maurer to thank. The film’s creators drew so heavily on this book that Maurer sued them, and I must say I rather sympathise.

Maurer was a linguistics professor who spent years among real con men, learning their language, their methods, and their remarkable discipline. What emerges is a portrait of the “big con” as a craft — almost an art form — requiring teamwork, timing, and an intimate understanding of human greed.

I read this book after I had been swindled, and I confess it was an uncomfortable education. I recognised rather too many of the techniques.

Highsmith did something in this novel that very few writers have the nerve to attempt: she made the villain the hero. Tom Ripley is a murderer, a forger, and a thief — and you cannot stop reading about him.

The genius of the book is psychological. Ripley does not steal because he is greedy. He steals because he wants to become someone else — someone richer, more cultured, more admired. It is an identity theft in the deepest sense, and Highsmith writes it with a cool, unsettling precision that stays with you for weeks.

If Harvey Metcalfe is the con artist who believes he is entitled, Ripley is the con artist who believes he is invisible. Both are dangerous. Both are unforgettable.

I end with the darkest book on this list. Thompson writes about the underworld of small-time American con artists — the grifters — and there is no glamour here, no gentleman thieves, no witty repartee. Just desperation, greed, and the awful mechanics of people using each other.

It is a corrective. After nineteen books that celebrate the cleverness and style of the con, Thompson reminds us what it actually looks like at the bottom: shabby, cruel, and ultimately self-destructive. If Lupin is the con artist you admire, the Grifters are the con artists you pity.

And that contrast — between the elegance of the fiction and the ugliness of the reality — is, in the end, why I wrote Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less. Because when you have been on the wrong end of a con, you don’t want style. You want justice.

The true story of a teenager who impersonated a pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer — and cashed millions in fraudulent cheques before the FBI caught up with him — is so outrageous that it reads like fiction. Spielberg turned it into a film with Leonardo DiCaprio, and quite right too.

What fascinates me about Abagnale is the sheer nerve. He did not have a team. He did not have technology. He had charm, confidence, and the understanding — which every great con artist shares — that people see what they expect to see. If you dress like a pilot and walk like a pilot, nobody asks for your licence.

I was swindled by a man who understood this principle rather too well.

Sidney Sheldon understood something that too few thriller writers grasped at the time: a woman can be the smartest person in the room. Tracy Whitney is framed, imprisoned, and stripped of everything — and then she becomes the most brilliant con artist in the world.

This is the book that proved the revenge-heist story works just as well with a female lead, and Sheldon’s plotting is relentless. If you have read Not a Penny More and enjoyed the satisfaction of watching the swindled fight back, Tracy Whitney will feel like a kindred spirit.

Bernie Madoff swindled his friends, his relatives, and his investors out of sixty-five billion dollars in the largest Ponzi scheme in history. Diana Henriques of the New York Times wrote the definitive account, drawing on unprecedented access — including Madoff’s first interviews from prison.

What makes this book so chilling is the intimacy of the betrayal. Madoff did not swindle strangers. He swindled the people who trusted him most — people who had dinner at his table, who introduced him to their families, who believed in him precisely because he seemed so trustworthy. The suicides, the shattered charities, the fractured families that followed his arrest are devastating to read.

HBO turned it into a film with Robert De Niro, and rightly so. But the book is better, because Henriques asks the question the film cannot quite answer: how does a man live with himself while destroying the lives of everyone who loves him? I don’t know the answer. But I know the question haunts anyone who has ever been on the wrong end of a con.

Konnikova is a psychologist, and this book explains why we fall for cons — the cognitive biases, the emotional vulnerabilities, the deep human need to trust. It is the only book on this list that treats the con as a science rather than a story, and it is essential reading.

After finishing it, I understood something I had resisted for years: the reason I was swindled in 1974 was not that I was stupid. It was that I am human. Con artists exploit the best parts of our nature — our optimism, our trust, our desire to believe. That is what makes them so dangerous, and so difficult to forgive.

If you want proof that truth is stranger than fiction, read this book. Elizabeth Holmes convinced some of the most powerful people in America that she had invented a machine that could run hundreds of medical tests from a single drop of blood. She hadn’t. The machine didn’t work. And by the time the truth emerged, she had raised nearly a billion dollars.

Carreyrou’s reporting is meticulous and devastating. What makes Bad Blood essential reading for anyone interested in the con is the scale of the deception — and the reminder that the bigger the lie, the more people want to believe it.

I recognise the pattern. I fell for a smaller version of it in 1974.