A very odd boy

What was Dr Charlotte Bach?" is a much easier question for this hilarious biography to answer. A very curious chap, a grubby little thief, a bogus hypnotherapist, a lunatic academic and a spanking madam are some of the definitions that Francis Wheen comes up with. All of them are correct, but nasty piece of work would have been the most accurate.

Charlotte began spinning her web of deceit from an early age. She - or rather he - was born Karoly Hajdu (pronounced hoydoo) in 1920 in Kispest, a town near Budapest. His father was a tailor, his mother a coalminer's daughter. Their son, "a very odd boy indeed", showed little interest in school: his craving for intellectual recognition only manifested itself in middle age.

His desire for money, though, was there right from the start. He began stealing and telling tall tales in his teens. However, it was not until 1942 that, in search of richer pickings, he forged a birth certificate that gave his name as Karoly Mihaly Balazs Agoston Hajdu, son of the Baron of Szadelo and Balkany.

The Second World War, instead of interrupting his criminal career, made it. Hajdu was drafted into the 4th battalion of the Railway Builders' Regiment, yet later claimed to have served in the German SS. He certainly dressed himself up in every leather queen's favourite uniform.

Wheen believes he may well have shot a 15-year-old boy on guard duty, looted abandoned houses and exploited Jewish families desperate to escape the Nazis. Looking after number one is the only constant in this fake's progress.

"Baron Hajdu" arrived in England in 1948. He styled himself a university lecturer but it was his antics as a dodgy estate agent that first attracted Her Majesty's displeasure. In May 1966, he was found guilty of 13 offences of obtaining credit under false pretences and of carrying on trade as a psychologist under the name Michael B Karoly without disclosing that as Carl Hajdu he was an undischarged bankrupt. He spent three months in Ford open prison and left with a stolen "souvenir" copy of the New Testament.

This short, sharp life is full of such comic detail. Wheen, the deputy editor of Private Eye, is surprisingly tolerant of the Hungarian's rhapsodies about cross-dressing: "No one can deny the effort and bravery involved." Hajdu's part-time passion became a full-blown obsession following the deaths of his wife and son. Perhaps the transvestism was a means of escape from his unbearable self; perhaps it was just another pathetic bid for attention. The photos that "Charlotte" took with an automatic camera are grimly fascinating, the clothes as vile as their surroundings.

The 521-page prolegomenon to the bad doctor's magnum opus, Homo Mutans, Homo Luminens, typed in capitals on orange paper, claimed to prove that "sexual deviation was the mainspring of evolution". Unsurprisingly, the " potpourri of mumbo-jumbo" only found favour with Colin Wilson, author of The Outsider.

Who Was Dr Charlotte Bach? deserves to find favour with everyone. However, most readers will close it with a sigh of good riddance.