‘The Talented Mr. Mallory’: literary scammers, pain-for-profit, and selves made of others

In 2019, Dan Mallory, book editor turned author of the enormously successful thriller, The Woman in the Window, was exposed as a pathological dissembler. Faking cancer, an Oxford PhD, a prestigious career, and tragic family deaths, Mallory constructed a distressing history in order to gain authority and influence. Examining the complexities of the fraud in relation to other contemporary fakes, this paper contends that impostors expose the value systems of power, especially those situated within gatekeeping institutions that enable grifters to thrive. It asserts that despite humiliating exposure, or the excoriation of outraged readers, the impostor invariably succeeds, perpetuating an exclusive monoculture in which the same voices, both real and imagined, are heard and received. The Mallory controversy emerges within a succession of impostures fixated on crossing boundaries from privilege to disadvantage and trauma, revealing an identity politics located within the commodification of the marketable ‘other’. The hunger for narratives of ‘authentic’ suffering comes to represent a form of literary virtue signalling which exploits ‘otherness’ to satisfy middle-class stereotypes and prejudices. Imbricated with issues of appropriation and theft, the fake treats suffering as an object to be possessed, yet also functions to uncover a sequence of literary and cultural fault-lines.