A faux Rockefeller fooled author Walter Kirn for years until it became clear Christian Gerhartsreiter was a liar and a killer

Hector Tobar in the Los Angeles Times:

Walter Kirn's new profile of the serial liar and convicted murderer known as “Clark Rockefeller” is no ordinary work of true crime and literary journalism.

“Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade” is the chronicle of Kirn's ill-fated friendship with the con man. And it's surely one of most honest, compelling and strangest books about the relationship between a writer and his subject ever penned by an American scribe.

Kirn is a magazine writer and author of novels such as “Up in the Air” and “Thumbsucker.” But he was an insecure and not especially successful writer when he first met “Clark” in 1998. The faux Rockefeller was a preppy bon vivant who claimed to be estranged from his famous family. A mutual friend asked Kirn to do Clark a favor — deliver a semi-paralyzed dog from Montana, where Kirn was living, to Clark's home in Manhattan.

Unbeknownst to Kirn, “Clark Rockefeller” was the latest in a series of identities adopted by the German immigrant Christian Gerhartsreiter. As Clark, Gerhartsreiter hid his Bavarian roots behind a genteel, patrician accent and stories of his jet-setting lifestyle. Kirn, a son of working-class Midwesterners, was smitten. Like many an ambitious writer, he thought the charismatic and odd Clark might make a good character for a magazine article or even a novel.

More here.