Mcallister and His Double

A respectable clubman spends Christmas evening alone at his club, too grumpy to join his family and too proud to admit loneliness. Then everything goes catastrophically wrong. A runaway cab. A dangerous criminal. A revolver pressed to his cheek. And by morning, McAllister finds himself arrested as Fatty Welch, a notorious thief he closely resembles. His former valet doesn't recognize him. The police don't believe him. Even his own tailor seems convinced he's a criminal. What follows is a wonderfully tangled web of mistaken identity, bureaucratic absurdity, and one man's increasingly desperate attempts to prove he's not who everyone insists he must be. Train writes with sharp satirical edge, skewering the pretensions of social class and the fragility of reputation. A gentleman is only as respectable as his paperwork, it seems.