Fictions of identity

Abstract

Forgery is a specialised form of story‐telling, highly rule‐bound and intricately concerned with issues of identity. So is the English legal system. In the nature of things, the two often run into one another. This paper is a narrative of such an encounter, a story of stories, and the field of identity around which these stories conflicted was that of George Glen Lewis, a black man living in the West Midlands who in 1987 accused the police of forgery.