Portrait of a Danish Conman: Otto Stein - Framed Within the Life and Novels of His Creator, Jacob Paludan

"Frantz Leander Hansen has written a brilliant book about Otto Stein" (Martin Zerlang, University of Copenhagen, reviewing the Danish edition in Scandinavian Studies, University of Illinois Press, Vol. 92, No. 2) Jacob Paludan's Danish classic novel J rgen Stein (1933) includes the subordinate character Otto Stein, a man about town in the roaring 1920s and a promising barrister. Involvement in small-time crime leads to large-scale confidence trickery which ends in decline, fall and suicide. This literary portrait of an epoch of deceit and fraud as a cultural phenomenon brings to the fore the economics and criminal psychology of the period. Otto Stein is viewed as an ultra-topical figure of our time, someone whose impact on the modern world is important and felt within the spheres of literature, philosophy, jurisprudence, and criminal investigation of contemporary fraudulent behaviour. Inquiry focuses on the path that leads to his sucide. Literary sources of inspiration that contributed to the moulding of the character of Otto Stein are investigated, especially those of Herman Bang, Thomas Mann and Fjodor Dostjevskij. Relevant are Jacob Paludan's other five novels that were publ