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  • The Confidence Men

  • How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History
  • Written by: Margalit Fox
  • Narrated by: Richard Elfyn
  • Length: 9 hrs and 54 mins
  • 4.0 out of 5 stars (4 ratings)

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The Confidence Men

Written by: Margalit Fox
Narrated by: Richard Elfyn
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Publisher's Summary

The Great Escape for the Great War: the astonishing true story of two World War I prisoners who pulled off one of the most ingenious escapes of all time.

Finalist for the Edgar® Award • Named One of the Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post and NPR • “Fox unspools Jones and Hill’s delightfully elaborate scheme in nail-biting episodes that advance like a narrative Rube Goldberg machine.” (The New York Times Book Review)

Imprisoned in a remote Turkish POW camp during World War I, having survived a two-month forced march and a terrifying shootout in the desert, two British officers, Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, join forces to bamboozle their iron-fisted captors. To stave off despair and boredom, Jones takes a handmade Ouija board and fakes elaborate séances for his fellow prisoners. Word gets around, and one day, an Ottoman official approaches Jones with a query: Could Jones contact the spirit world to find a vast treasure rumored to be buried nearby? Jones, a trained lawyer, and Hill, a brilliant magician, use the Ouija board - and their keen understanding of the psychology of deception - to build a trap for their captors that will ultimately lead them to freedom. 

A gripping nonfiction thriller, The Confidence Men is the story of one of the only known con games played for a good cause - and of a profound but unlikely friendship. Had it not been for “the Great War”, Jones, the Oxford-educated son of a British lord, and Hill, a mechanic on an Australian sheep ranch, would never have met. But in pain, loneliness, hunger, and isolation, they formed a powerful emotional and intellectual alliance that saved both of their lives. 

Margalit Fox brings her “nose for interesting facts, the ability to construct a taut narrative arc, and a Dickens-level gift for concisely conveying personality” (Kathryn Schulz, New York) to this tale of psychological strategy that is rife with cunning, danger, and moments of high farce that rival anything in Catch-22.

©2021 Margalit Fox (P)2021 Random House Audio

What the critics say

“Tales of spunky prisoners of war suffering horrifying privation or outfoxing their sadistic or imbecilic captors are a staple of military history and the movies.... Fact or fiction, few of them can match the latest entry in the genre.... Margalit Fox’s The Confidence Men tells the tale of two Allied officers captured by the Turks during World War I who escaped their remote prison camp by pulling an ingenious and elaborate spiritualist con on the camp’s greedy commandant.” (The Wall Street Journal)

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

“Fox (Conan Doyle for the Defense), a former obituary writer for the New York Times, recounts in this marvelous history how two British army officers in WWI orchestrated ‘the most singular prison break ever recorded'.... Fox enriches her account with intriguing deep dives into the psychology of ‘coercive persuasion’, the mechanics of confidence games, and the history of spiritualism in the US and England. Readers will be mesmerized by this rich and rewarding tale.” (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

What listeners say about The Confidence Men

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Enjoyable and Unbelievable

At times, hard to believe! This is a war story unlike any other. Great for a long drive etc. My only criticism is an underemphasis on the background character of the protagonists.

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