Drake's Fortune: The Fabulous True Story of the World's Greatest Confidence Artist

by Richard Rayner

Book Overview

His scam was as simple as it was brazen. Before and during the Great Depression, Oscar Hartzell persuaded tens of thousands of Midwesterners to part with millions of dollars to start a legal fund that... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385499493
• ISBN13: 9780385499491
• Release Date: May 2002
• Publisher: Doubleday Books
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.4" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Lively read, great summer reading, airplane reading

The story is clear from the synopsis and other reviews. I'll add that the book is a great read. He's a fine writer, right from the first couple pages you want to keep going. I class this as escapist, interesting, historical, offbeat entertainment. As another reviewer noted, there is relatively little on the "law" of the trial, which is a fairly famous case still occasionally cited (e.g. could he commit fraud by mail from England and be tried in a US court, where the letter arrived?) But that's of little interest except to an attorney, who can look up the case as a supplement to the book. Good reading, and a good offbeat gift book in the nonfiction category. Reyner also wrote two books on California, one light fiction (LA w/o a map) and one on railroad barons & swindles in California history (2008, The Associates).

Fruit of the Archives

This lovely book succeeds for a number of reasons, which I'll gladly explain as follows: Firstly, not just the relationship of character to plot-- which in my opinion is the key ingredient of any successful nonfiction-- but the evolution of the character as the plot; in the case of "Drake's Fortune," the evolution of Oscar Hartzell, madly and finally, into Sir Francis Drake, the Baron of Buckland. The book twists and turns perfectly with Hartzell's deceptions and permutations. Richard Rayner takes us deep inside Hartzell's head in a way rivalled only by Don Delillo's "Libra" and its tortured and confused Oswald. Secondly, Rayner's explanatory digressions-- the history of the con, the history of the 1930s, the psychology of con artists, as well as his own fascinating family and personal (and criminal) history-- are inserted to maximum effect and pacing. It's just a great read. Thirdly, Rayner breaks new and important historiographical ground. Thanks to his work, the Drake Estate and its "donators" will have to be examined by historians of the Depression midwest as a mass social and quasi-religious social movement. This is a great find, and one for which historians should thank Rayner. Like Simon Winchester's "Professor and the Madman," "Drake's Fortune" is based on records found largely in archives-- American and British. These valuable repositories-- the US National Archives and the (UK)Public Records Office-- are, as Rayner notes, where the stories are. They are indeed, and aspiring writers of all stripes-- historians, journalists, screenwriters, and novelists-- should scramble to these facilities posthaste. And finally, this book succeeds because it falls within the tradition of the "New Yorker" magazine's style of seemingly effortless and fine nonfiction writing. A pleasure to read.