Literary scandals – like actual scandals – come and go. Who now recalls, or indeed cares less about, the hoo-ha surrounding whether or not the professional huckster James Frey made stuff up in his much celebrated 2004 memoir A Million Little Pieces and then had the audacity to lie about it to Oprah Winfrey? Anyone remember JT LeRoy? Binjamin Wilkomirski?

Authorship debates, accusations of plagiarism, obscenity controversies, way-out wacky and appalling author behaviour, rivalries, forgeries – they all tend to be storms in teeny-tiny, super-fragile, already half-cracked literary teacups that soon subside and slip from the gossip columns and the culture pages to become the subject matter merely of obscure academic conferences and dull, scholarly articles. Ezra Pound famously claimed that poetry is news that stays news. Book news is news that never really was.

Nonetheless, in The Book Forger, the academic Joseph Hone revives an old story about Thomas James Wise, giving it a refreshing new twist. The focus is not so much on Wise’s dastardly wrongdoings but on the two doughty fellows, John Carter and Graham Pollard, who uncovered his literary sins.

Hone claims that this was ‘perhaps the most sensational literary scandal of the last 100 years’, which is maybe overstating it. The book tells of the discovery, in 1934, that Wise, a renowned book collector, had faked and sold some Victorian first editions. Hone also styles Carter and Pollard as ‘Poirots of the library, Holmeses of the book world’, which again is a bit rich. Basically, they did some research and published a short book, An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets (1934), revealing Wise’s forgeries. The act of literary sleuthing doth not a pair of literary super-sleuths make. But for all the over-egging, this is certainly a tale worth retelling.

Wise (1859-1937) started out as a lowly clerk in London. He became interested in buying and selling antiquarian books, got involved in the newly formed Shelley Society, and then realised that he could make himself a few bob by producing facsimile editions for wealthy book collectors – which he soon saw he could pass off as the real thing. Fiddle the dates, remove a page, invent a publishing history – and before you can say F for fake, you are quids in: not so much turning sows’ ears into silk purses as turning silk purses into even more expensive silk purses. Wise was a highly skilled conman with an eye for a dupe, who didn’t miss a trick.

Hone, on the other hand, does miss a bit of a trick. Lurking beneath his meticulously researched tale of forgery and detection isa seething story about class and envy in early 20th-century London. A real-life Mr Polly or Kipps, Wise was a hustler from Holloway, full of resentment and loathing, undertaking a doomed act of self-aggrandisement and self-assertion. He managed to pull the wool over the eyes of all the toffs and privileged connoisseurs of Bloomsbury, before eventually being found out by a couple of posh boys, Carter and Pollard, with nothing better to do, post-Oxbridge, than drift, and dabble in antiquarian book-dealing.

Of Hone’s two bibliographical detective heroes, Pollard is by far the most interesting. A member of the Hypocrites at Oxford, he married a communist, became a spy, working for M15, and eventually enjoyed a successful career working for the Board of Trade. Carter, meanwhile, was a ‘debonair young graduate of Eton and King’s’ and the two men met at a gathering in Soho of the self-proclaimed ‘Biblio Boys’, a bunch of booksellers who in the course of their discussions and debates become interested in Wise’s books.

The Book Forger is delightfully and unapologetically bookish, offering glimpsed portraits of significant behind-the-scenes literary figures, from Walter Wilson Greg, perhaps the greatest bibliographical scholar of the 20th century, to the colourful denizens of London’s antiquarian bookshops, including seedy Birrell and Garnett in Bloomsbury and the grand old houses of Maggs and Quaritch.

There are also some nice little novelistic flourishes. The restaurant in Soho where Pollard and Carter planned their takedown of Wise was the kind ‘where lunch could quite easily slide into coffee and coffee into drinks and drinks into dinner and dinner into more drinks’. Take me there. But Hone is perhaps at his best when describing the various developments in bibliographical methods which enabled Pollard and Carter to reveal Wise’s secrets: the chapter on typefaces, printing methods and the study of the kernless ‘f’, for example, is superb. Also, for anyone wishing to set up as a book forger – and frankly, who hasn’t considered it, given the current cost of living crisis? – there’s a useful short guide to traditional methods on page 37.